Correct Perspective for Mindfulness

Question

I am wondering whether anyone can give me information on the correct way to practice non-judgmental mindfulness. The way I understand it, different attitudes towards experience can imply:

1. Attachment: Participating in an experience or indulging in a desire or fantasy through action. Or, even, clinging to and believing thoroughly a thought or idea, i.e. in a non-relative way.
2. Aversion: The opposite, which is aversion towards an experience, shunning it, denying it, avoiding it by removing oneself from it. Denying realities and ideas, considering them as entirely wrong or false, or undesirable.
3. Equanimity: Finally, having equanimity, holding experiences in oneself without acting upon them or avoiding them, and considering the relativity of ideas and emotions, etc.

I believe the third point is mindfulness, but when I practice meditation very little seems to arise. I am caught in the breath. Outside of meditation, even, I often act out of anger without time to think, or fail to experience different emotions and affects.

Is it possible I am meditating wrongly, in a way that inhibits non-judgmental awareness of inner experience, and instead prevents these experiences from arising? I.e should these experiences (lust or anger, emotions, etc) at least arise?

Answer 1

Here are some good resources on how to mindfulness

https://static.sirimangalo.org/howto/HTM.pdf

http://seeingthroughthenet.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Seeing-Through-Rev-0_3.pdf

https://pathpress.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/notes-on-meditation-by-bhikkhu-ninoslav-nyanamoli.pdf

Answer 2

Lust or anger, emotions will definitely arise. Through meditation, you manage them, not to suppress them.

The more you suppress, the more persistent they will be.

Answer 3

If mindfulness is practised, lust & anger will not arise.

Cittanupassana (3rd tetrad of satipatthana) does not refer to the arising of lust & anger from sense experience but refers to a very deep state of non-thinking samadhi when the energies of subtle underlying tendencies come to the surface.

Very few Buddhists have ever reached the level of cittanupassana in meditation. The 'cittanupassana' particularly taught in Western vipassana is not really cittanupassana.