Mindfulness in law and the importance of practice.

• Author: Rogers, Scott
• Position: Special Issue on the Benefits of Mindfulness

This special issue of The Florida Bar Journal includes three articles that address important perspectives on the benefits of mindfulness to attorneys and judges and the meaningful role it can play across society. It also includes a collection of firsthand accounts, contributed by attorneys and judges who practice mindfulness, on the practical benefits of mindfulness, along with tips for bringing it into the busy work day. In this article, I aim to bridge the larger perspectives of mindfulness with first-hand accounts by offering you a roadmap for your own personal practice--a journey that many lawyers and judges find to be deeply fulfilling and of great value to their lives, personally and professionally.

To help illuminate this path, I proffer five stages experienced by many in the legal profession who have established a mindfulness practice. These five stages consist of ignorance, confusion, familiarity, embrace, and practice. Importantly, there is nothing I can offer that will advance your progress on the mindfulness path--for it is a path only you can take, and its benefits are realized through actual practice--the hard work of going nowhere, doing nothing, and allowing everything to be as it is; seemingly the antithesis of our life's work in the legal profession. And yet, the practice of mindfulness may very well enrich and deepen your ability to "be" just as you are, without needing more to be happy and fulfilled, all without diminishing (and perhaps even enhancing) your aspirations and capacity to achieve, persevere, and make a difference. We lawyers are, after all, human beings, and what could matter more than being present, moment-by-moment, so as not to miss the beauty and awe of this one extraordinary life.

The First Stage: Ignorance

As the 21st century approached, most members of the legal profession had no idea what mindfulness was, having never heard the term and, at best, connected it to the colloquial "mindful." Reminiscent of a parent or teacher's admonition to be heedful, the phrase likely left many not only misinformed, but disinclined. Though mindfulness has been around for more than 2,500 years, its traction with the lay public was slow to develop. For the better part of the 20th century mindfulness was taught and practiced largely within retreat and meditation centers. Not surprisingly, mindfulness was far from the mainstream phenomenon it is today. While there are still those who have not heard of mindfulness, their numbers are diminishing, and many attorneys have benefitted from the widespread dissemination of mindfulness in countless books, magazines, articles, websites, seminars, workshops, and conferences, (1) and find themselves somewhere in the second stage--confusion.

The Second Stage: Confusion

With the term mindfulness making its way into the public discourse, a common misconception that lingers to this day is that mindfulness is a type of meditation that involves chanting, sitting cross-legged, and is in the pursuit of relaxation and escape from life's stressful moments. One reason for this confusion is that, indeed, meditation can involve chanting, sitting cross-legged, and be in the service of relaxation and escaping life's more stressful moments. This, however, would be a narrow understanding that confuses mindfulness with a larger body of meditation practices while simultaneously underestimating one of its core...