Mindfulness allows us to know our experience, which gives us some room. We don’t get swept away by the wanting mind or the aversive mind. Experience can come and go, as it will. T.S. Eliot puts it this way: “There are three conditions which often look alike yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment from self and from things and from persons; and growing between them, indifference, which resembles the others as death resembles life.” What Eliot calls “detachment” emphasizes the knowing, rather than our narratives. This is the inner change: we’re not indifferent to our lives—we care—but caring takes on a larger sense than our ego’s immediate needs.
Phillip Moffitt
Spirit Rock Residential Teacher
Phillip Moffitt is a Buddhist meditation teacher and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also the founder and president of Life Balance Institute where he trains leaders and professionals in how to skillfully make major transitions in their lives.