What Is Mindfulness?

Sometimes I think the translation of the word "mindfulness" is incorrect in two ways. Right Mindfulness is a step of the Eightfold Path and is the centerpoint of Buddhist practice. First, it's not a good translation because "mindfulness" is kind of an insipid word. "Be mindful" -- what does that mean? It doesn't have the kind of inspiring quality of spaciousness, courage, or living fully. Perhaps if you pronounced it differently and said, mindfulness, that would be a better understanding of the word and its power. But a more fundamental difficulty in even talking about mindfulness, whatever that means for us, is that the mind and the heart are the same word in Sanskrit or Pali. So perhaps a better word would be "heartfulness" -- live in a heartful way. Forget about this mind stuff all together. You could do without a lot of it, if you haven't noticed.
The Buddha very often said that mindfulness was the heart or the essence of his practice -- to be heedful or aware -- that was the road to liberation and to the deathless, to freedom from even birth and death; that is, freedom from being caught in the cyclic nature of things, stepping outside the cycle of things. What does "mindfulness" mean to us sitting here as a group. We sat for an hour this evening or a little bit less, but for those of you who have attended regularly, we've been sitting here for a year doing something supposedly related to paying attention and being mindful. What does it mean? What are the qualities of it, what are we doing here? We sit, we pay attention to the breath, or our body sensations, or the sounds, or the people walking by, or the various thoughts and images in our mind. To be mindful first means simply to come into the present -- to listen with our senses, with our heart, with our physical body, with our ears, with our eyes, to what is actually here in the present; the body, the heart and the mind. It's that thing I've spoken of many times before, the sign from the casino in Las