mindfulness/awareness meditation

Examining Experience with a Method: Mindfulness/Awareness
(Part I: The Departing Groud; chapter 2: What Do We Mean 'Human Experiece'? VARELA, F.; THOMPSON, E.; ROSH, E. The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press, 1993.)

This book begins and ends with the conviction that the new sciences of mind need to enlarge their horizon to encompass both lived human experience and possibilities for transformation inherent in human experience. (VARELA, THOMPSON, ROSCH, 1993, Introduction)

“Breathing is one of the most simple, basic, ever-present bodily activities. Yet beginning meditators are generally astonished at how difficult it is to be mindful of even so uncomplex an object. Meditators discover that mind and body are not coordinated. The body is sitting, but the mind is seized constantly by thoughts, feelings, inner conversations, daydreams, fantasies, sleepiness, opinions, theories, judgments about thoughts and feelings, judgments about judgments – a never-ending torrent of disconnected mental events that the meditators do not even realize are occurring except at those brief instants when they remember what they are doing. Even when they may discover that they are only thinking about the breath rather than being mindful of the breath.” (VARELA, THOMPSON, ROSCH, 1993, p.25)

“The meditators now discovers that the abstract attitude which Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty ascribe to science and philosophy is actually the attitude of everyday life when one is not mindful. This abstract attitude is the spacesuit, the padding of habits and preconceptions, the armor with which one habitually distances oneself from one’s experience.” (VARELA, THOMPSON, ROSCH, 1993, p.25)

Broken habits:
“From the point of view of mindfulness/awareness meditation, humans are not trapped forever in the abstract attitude. The dissociation of mind from body, of awareness from experience, is the result of habit, and this habits can be broken.” (VARELA, THOMPSON, ROSCH, 1993, p.25)