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As mindfulness dissolves the bricks, holes are punched in the dam, and compassion and sympathetic joy come flooding forward.

As meditative mindfulness develops, your whole experience of life changes.

Your experience of being alive, the very sensation of being conscious becomes lucid and precise, no longer just an unnoticed background for your preoccupations.

It becomes a thing consistently perceived.

Each passing moment stands out as itself the moments no longer blend together in an unnoticed blur.

Nothing is glossed over or taken for granted, no experiences labeled as merely ordinary.

You refrain from categorizing your experiences into mental pigeonholes.

Descriptions and interpretations are chucked aside, and each moment of time is allowed to speak for itself.

You actually listen to what it has to say, and you listen as if it were being heard for the very first time.

When your meditation becomes really powerful, it also becomes constant.

You consistently observe with bare attention both the breath and every mental phenomenon.

You feel increasingly stable, increasingly moored in the stark and simple experience of moment-to-moment existence.

Once your mind is free from thought, it becomes clearly wakeful and at rest in an utterly simple awareness.

This awareness cannot be described adequately.

Breath ceases to be just breath it is no longer limited to the static and familiar concept you once held.

You no longer see it as a succession of just inhalations and exhalations, an insignificant monotonous experience.

Breath becomes a living, changing process, something alive and fascinating.

It is no longer something that takes place in time it is perceived as the present moment itself.

Time is seen as a concept, not an experienced reality.

This is a simplified, rudimentary awareness that is stripped of all extraneous detail.

It is grounded in a living flow of the present, and it is marked by a pronounced sense of reality.

You know absolutely that this is real, more real than anything you have ever experienced.

Once you have gained this perception with absolute certainty, you have a fresh vantage point, a new criterion against which to gauge all of your experience.

After this perception, you see clearly those moments when you are participating in bare phenomena alone, and those moments when you are disturbing phenomena with mental attitudes.

You watch yourself twisting reality with mental comments, with stale images and personal opinions.

You know what you are doing, when you are doing it.

You become increasingly sensitive to the ways in which you miss the true reality, and you gravitate toward the simple objective perspective that does not add to or subtract from what is.

You become a very perceptive individual.

From this vantage point, all is seen with clarity.

The innumerable activities of mind and body stand out in glaring detail.

You mindfully observe the incessant rise and fall of breath you watch an endless stream of bodily sensations and movements you scan the rapid succession of thoughts and feelings, and you sense the rhythm that echoes from the steady march of time.

In this state of perception, nothing remains the same for two consecutive moments.

Everything is seen to be in constant transformation.

All things are born, all things grow old and die.

You awaken to the unceasing changes of your own life.

You look around and see everything in flux, everything, everything, everything.

It is all rising and falling, intensifying and diminishing, coming into existence and passing away.

You perceive the universe as a great flowing river of experience.

Your most cherished possessions are slipping away, and so is your very life.

You stand there transfixed, staring at this incessant activity, and your response is wondrous joy.

Its all moving, dancing, and full of life.

As you continue to observe these changes and you see how it all fits together, you become aware of the intimate connectedness of all mental, sensory, and affective phenomena.

You watch one thought leading to another, you see destruction giving rise to emotional reactions and feelings giving rise to more thoughts.

Actions, thoughts, feelings, desiresyou see all of them intimately linked together in a delicate fabric of cause and effect.

You watch pleasurable experiences arise and fall, and you see that they never last you watch pain come uninvited and you watch yourself anxiously struggling to throw it off you see yourself fail.

It all happens over and over while you stand back quietly and just watch it all work.

You see that your life is marked by disappointment and frustration, and you clearly see the source.

These reactions arise out of your own inability to get what you want, your fear of losing what you have already gained, and your habit of never being satisfied with what you have.

These are no longer theoretical conceptsyou have seen these things for yourself, and you know that they are real.

You perceive your own fear, your own basic insecurity in the face of life and death.

It is a profound tension that goes all the way down to the root of thought and makes all of life a struggle.

You watch yourself anxiously groping about, fearfully grasping after solid, trustworthy ground.

You see yourself endlessly grasping for something, anything, to hold onto in the midst of all these shifting sands, and you see that there is nothing to hold onto, nothing that doesnt change.

You see the pain of loss and grief, you watch yourself being forced to adjust to painful developments day after day in your own ordinary existence.

You witness the tensions and conflicts inherent in the very process of everyday living, and you see how superficial most of your concerns really are.

You watch the progress of pain, sickness, old age, and death.

You learn to marvel that all these horrible things are not fearful at all.

Through this intensive study of the negative aspects of your existence, you become deeply acquainted with dukkha, the unsatisfactory nature of all existence.

You begin to perceive dukkha at all levels of our human life, from the obvious down to the most subtle.

You see the way suffering inevitably follows in the wake of clinging, as soon as you grasp anything, pain inevitably follows.

Once you become fully acquainted with the whole dynamic of desire, you become sensitized to it.

You see where it rises, when it rises, and how it affects you.

You watch it operate over and over, manifesting through every sense channel, taking control of the mind and making consciousness its slave.

In the midst of every pleasant experience, you watch your own craving and clinging take place.

In the midst of unpleasant experiences, you watch a very powerful resistance take hold.

You do not block these phenomena, you just watch them you see them as the very stuff of human thought.

You search for that thing you call me, but what you find is a physical body and how you have identified your sense of yourself with that bag of skin and bones.

You search further, and you find all manner of mental phenomena, such as emotions, thought patterns, and opinions, and see how you identify the sense of yourself with each of them.

You watch yourself becoming possessive, protective, and defensive over these pitiful things, and you see how crazy that is.

You rummage furiously among these various items, constantly searching for yourselfphysical matter, bodily sensations, feelings, and emotionsit all keeps whirling round and round as you root through it, peering into every nook and cranny, endlessly hunting for me.

In all that collection of mental hardware in this endless stream of ever-shifting experience, all you can find is innumerable impersonal processes that have been caused and conditioned by previous processes.

There is no static self to be found it is all process.

You find thoughts but no thinker, you find emotions and desires, but nobody doing them.

You begin to look upon yourself as if you were a newspaper photograph.

When viewed with the naked eyes, the photograph you see is a definite image.

When viewed through a magnifying glass, it all breaks down into an intricate configuration of dots.

Similarly, under the penetrating gaze of mindfulness, the feeling of a self, an or being anything, loses its solidity and dissolves.

You vividly experience the impermanence of life, the suffering nature of human existence, and the truth of no-self.

You experience these things so graphically that you suddenly awake to the utter futility of craving, grasping, and resistance.

In the clarity and purity of this profound moment, our consciousness is transformed.

All that is left is an infinity of interrelated nonpersonal phenomena, which are conditioned and ever-changing.

Craving is extinguished and a great burden is lifted.

There remains only peace, and blessed nibbana, the uncreated, is realized.

The Power of Loving Friendliness of mindfulness discussed in this book, if you choose to take advantage of them, can surely transform your every experience.

In the afterword to the this new edition, Id like to take some time to emphasize the importance of another aspect of the Buddhas path that goes hand in hand with mindfulness metta, or loving friendliness.

Without loving friendliness, our practice of mindfulness will never successfully break through our craving and rigid sense of self.

Mindfulness, in turn, is a necessary basis for developing loving friendliness.

The two are always developed together.

In the decade since this volume first appeared, much has happened in the world to increase peoples feelings of insecurity and fear.

In this troubled climate, the importance of cultivating a deep sense of loving friendliness is especially crucial for our well-being, and it is the best hope for the future of the world.

The concern for others embodied in loving friendliness is at the heart of the promise of the Buddhayou can see it everywhere in his teachings and in the way he lived his life.

Each of us is born with the capacity for loving friendliness.

Yet only in a calm mind, a mind free from anger, greed, and jealousy, can the seeds of loving friendliness develop only from the fertile ground of a peaceful mind can loving friendliness flower.

We must nurture the seeds of loving friendliness in ourselves and in others, help them take root and mature.

One day was in Gatwick airport near London waiting for a flight.

had quite a bit of time, but for me having time on my hands is not a problem.

In fact, it is a pleasure, since it means more opportunity for meditation So there was, sitting cross-legged on one of the airport benches with my eyes closed, while all around me people were coming and going, rushing to and from their flights.

With every breath, with every pulse, with every heartbeat, try to allow my entire being to become permeated with the glow of loving friendliness.

In that busy airport, absorbed in feelings of metta, was paying no attention to the hustle and bustle around me, but soon had the sensation that someone was sitting quite close to me on the bench.

This little one, with bright blue eyes and a head covered in downy blond curls, had put her arms around me and was hugging me.