There are four bases of recollection or mindfulness:¹ breath, experience, mental state, mental object or phenomena. Besides recollection, they are practised using wisdom, effort, and require ethics as a foundation.

Is is essential what type of effort is used to practice recollection.
An effort can be cruel, ignoring pain or allowing it to deepen underneath harsh judgements to oneself. This effort can be painful with slow or even couterproductive progress.

To ensure right effort in practicing recollection, there is the practice of light contact meditation. The practice simply entails developing light contacts with the breath or the other bases of recollection. If one can make single light contact with the breath, that is one round of practice. One can then develop more contacts, eventually turning it into a stream of light contacts.

If there is a stream of light contacts, those contacts are the births of new worlds of the six sense bases. So over time, the world, which is this interface of six consciousness related to six senses, will necessarily reflect the quality of those contacts. Put differently: being mindful of how the bases of mindfulness are contacted, one can see the origin of the world one will soon be surrounded in.²

1. Mindfulness is from the pali word Sati. Sati means memory. While mindfulness is a good word, it doesn´t capture that it is about regaining something that has been lost underneath ignorance. ↩︎
2. Check out The Miracle of Contact from Most Ven. K. Nananande. ↩︎