Mindfulness is a way of being and relating to our experience. It is necessary for recognizing and navigating our reactive tendencies, enabling us to live our lives as vividly as possible, while deeply caring for ourselves, others and the world. These are core aspirations of secular and traditional Buddhists alike. Mindfulness can be practiced informally in each moment of our lives, not only during formal meditation practice. While interacting with family, friends or co-workers, eating breakfast or washing the dishes, we all have ample opportunities to practice during the day.  

Informal practice is pertinent because it is during our daily life activities that reactivity really matters. In addition, off-the-cushion practice allows us to greatly extend the time we have to practice. Active meditations, like walking meditation, may well have a less intense feel than our formal practice, but, for most of us, we have much more time for it at our disposal.

Interestingly, the daily activities that are most amenable to informal practices are routines that do not take up all our attention capacity and hence make us prone to mind wandering and distraction. A famous 2010 study by Matt Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert showed that we are distracted nearly half of our waking lives. Importantly, Killingsworth and Gilbert also found that when we are distracted we tend to be less happy. Concluding the study, they wrote: “A human mind is a wandering mind and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.” This is another reason why informal practice is helpful. 

To support each other in extending mindfulness into our daily lives, we recently established the Daily Life Practice group as a new forum where we can share our experiences and insights obtained from practicing during daily life. From the first meetings that we held, it was abundantly clear that each of us had forged, and are still developing, our own approaches to off-the-cushion practice. This was very inspiring to us. 

There are many topics that we already have briefly touched on and a number of others that have been proposed for future discussion:

• How do we remember to be mindful during the day?
• Can we build the habit of being mindful during particular activities?
• What is our experience with practicing mindfulness of feeling tones or mindfulness of thinking during daily activities?
• How can we cultivate equanimity during the day?
• What really motivates us to do any of these practices in the first place?

Obviously, there remain many more avenues to explore. We also plan to design a dedicated page on the Secular Buddhist Network website with Resources for Daily Life Practice. 

If you are interested, even if you have not been that much involved in daily life practice to date, please come and check us out. Fill out the form on this page and we will put you on the mailing list. We are looking forward to your input and support. For the time being, we are meeting on the first and third Tuesday of the month for approximately one hour, starting at 1pm US Eastern Time, to allow participation from as many locations as possible. The meetings start with a 5-minute silent meditation, followed by a 10-minute small break-out group, depending on the number of participants, and subsequently 40 minutes of full group discussion.