Introduction
- Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely, the path that is your life.
- If what happens now does influence what happens next, then doesn’t it make sense to look around a bit from time to time so that you are more in touch with what is happening now so that you can take with clarity the path that you are actually on and the direction in which you are going?
- If you do so, maybe you will be in a better position to chart a course for yourself that is truer to your inner being — a soul path, a path with heart, your path with a capital P. The days, months, and years quickly go by unnoticed, unused, and unappreciated.
Part One
What is Mindfulness?
- Meditation helps us wake up from this sleep of automaticity and unconsciousness, thereby making it possible for us to live our lives with access to the full spectrum of our conscious and unconscious possibilities.
- Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.
- If we are not fully present for many of those moments, we may not only miss what is most valuable in our lives but also fail to realize the richness and the depth of our possibilities for growth and transformation.
- It is a way to take charge of the direction and quality of our own lives.
Stopping
- But meditation is not just about sitting, either. It is about stopping and being present, that is all.
- A good way to stop all the doing is to shift into the “being mode” for a moment. Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?
- The stopping actually makes the going more vivid, richer, and more textured.
This Is It
- Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.
- Non-doing simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way. Meditation is synonymous with the practice of non-doing.
You Can’t Stop the Waves, but You Can Learn to Surf
- Meditation is neither shutting things out nor taking them off. It is seeing things clearly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.
- The spirit of mindfulness practice: “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”
Patience
- Scratch the surface of impatience, and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly, is anger. It’s the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it.
Voluntary Simplicity
- Voluntary simplicity: intentionally doing only one thing at a time and making sure I am here for it (e.g., taking a walk, spending a few moments with the dog in which I am really with the dog).
- Voluntary simplicity means going to fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, and acquiring less so I can have more.
Vision
- Ask yourself: What is my vision, my map for where I am and where I am going? Does this vision reflect my true values and intentions? Am I remembering to embody those values? Do I practice my intentions? How am I now in my job, in my family, in my relationships, with myself? How do I want to be? How might I live my vision, and my values? How do I relate to suffering, both my own and others?
Practice as a Path
- In Buddhism, meditation practice is usually spoken of as a path — the path of mindfulness, the path of right understanding, the path of the wheel of truth.
- It is useful at times to admit to yourself that you don’t know your way and to be open to help from unexpected places.
Part Two
Sitting Meditation
- Sitting meditation involves sitting in an upright, dignified posture.
- Start with your breathing, feeling it as it moves in and out.
What to Do with Your Hands
- Try sitting with your hand’s palms down on your knees. This posture speaks of not looking for anything more, but simply digesting what is.
- If you then turn both palms up, being mindful as you do it, you may note a change in energy in the body. Sitting this way embodies receptivity, an openness to what is above, to the energy of the heavens.
Coming Out of Meditation
- If you can detect the very first impulse to quit, breathe with it for a few moments, and ask yourself, “Who has had enough?”
- Try looking into what is behind the impulse. Is it fatigue, boredom, pain, impatience; or is it just time to stop?
- Whatever the case, rather than automatically leaping up or moving on, try lingering with whatever arises out of this inquiry, breathing with it for a few moments or even longer.
How Long to Practice?
- We went with forty – five minutes as the basic required practice time at home every day.
- The sincerity of your effort matters far more than elapsed time since we are really talking about stepping out of minutes and hours and into moments, which are truly dimensionless and therefore infinite. So, if you have some motivation to practice even a little, that is what is important.
No Right Way
- TRY: Being aware of all the times in meditation when the thought comes up: “Am I doing this right?” “Is this what I should be feeling?” “Is this what is ‘supposed’ to happen?”
- Instead of trying to answer these questions, just look more deeply into the present moment. Expand your awareness in this very moment. Trust that in this moment, “This is it,” whatever and wherever “this” is.
The Mountain Meditation
- Think of yourself as a mountain. Invoking qualities of elevation, massiveness, majesty, unmovingness, and rootedness, helps bring these qualities directly into posture and attitude.
- Bring the mountain into your own body and the mountain become one. Your head becomes the lofty peak; your shoulders and arms the sides of the mountain; your buttocks and legs the solid base.
- Our thoughts and feelings, emotional storms and crises, the things that happen to us are much like the weather on the mountain. We tend to take it personally, but its strongest characteristic is impersonal. The weather of our own lives is not to be ignored or denied. It is to be encountered, honored, felt, known for what it is, and held in high awareness since it can kill us.
The Lake Meditation
- Practice using the lake image in your meditation, picture a lake. The lake you invoke may be deep or shallow, blue, or green, muddy, or clear.
- With no wind, the surface of the lake is flat. Mirrorlike, it reflects trees, rocks, sky, and clouds, and holds everything in itself momentarily. Wind stirs up waves on the lake, from ripples to chop. Clear reflections disappear.
- Experience the moments of complete stillness when both reflection and water are completely clear, and other moments when the surface is disturbed, choppy, stirred up, reflections and depth lost for a time.
Walking Meditation
- Walking is just as good as sitting.
- You can focus on the footfall as a whole; isolated segments of the motion such as shifting, moving, placing, shifting; or on the whole body moving. You can couple an awareness of walking with an awareness of breathing.
- You are not walking to get anyplace. Usually, it is just back and forth in a lane, or round and round in a loop. Literally having no place to go makes it easier to be where you are. The challenge is, can you be fully with this step, with this breath?
- Good places are your living room, fields, or a clearing in the woods; isolated beaches are good, too.
- If you find yourself rushing or becoming impatient, slowing the pace can help take the edge off your rushing and remind you that you are here now and that when you get there, you will be there.
Lying-Down Meditation
- When your body is lying down, you can really let the whole of it go much more easily than you can in any other posture. This is a profound letting go at the level of your muscles and the motor neurons which govern them. The mind quickly follows if you give it permission to stay open and wakeful.
- Just being low down in a room tends to clear the mind. Maybe it’s because being on the floor is so foreign to us that it breaks up our habitual neurological patterning and invites us to enter into this moment through a sudden opening in what we might call the body door.
Not Practicing Is Practicing
- Forgetting or neglecting to be mindful can teach you a lot more than just being mindful all the time.
Loving Kindness Meditation
- Start by centering yourself in your posture and in your breathing. Then, from your heart or from your belly, invite feelings or images of kindness and love to radiate until they fill your whole being.
- You can also take the practice further. Having established a radiant center in your being, you can let loving kindness radiate outwardly and direct it wherever you like. You might first direct it toward the members of your immediate family. If you have children, hold them in your mind’s eye and in your heart, visualizing their essential selves, wishing them well, that they not suffer needlessly, that they come to know their true way in the world, that they may experience love and acceptance in life. And then including, as you go along, a partner, spouse, siblings, parents ….
Part Three
Early Morning
- The peacefulness, the darkness, the dawn, the stillness — all contribute to making early morning a special time for mindfulness practice.
Going Upstairs
- Also, try being present for things like taking a shower, or eating. When you are in the shower, are you really in the shower? Do you feel the water on your skin, or are you someplace else, lost in thought, missing the shower altogether?
What Is My Job on the Planet with a Capital J?
- “What is my job on the planet with a capital J?”, or “What do I care about so much that I would pay to do it?”
- It may not mean that you will change what you do, but it may mean that you may want to change how you see it or hold it, and perhaps how you do
Cat-Food Lessons
- Observe the ways in which your feelings are creations of your mind’s view of things, and that maybe that view is not complete.
Parenting as Practice
- Parenting is a mirror that forces you to look at yourself. If you can learn from what you observe, you just may have a chance to keep growing yourself.
- TRY: If you are a parent or grandparent, try seeing the children as your teachers. Observe them in silence sometimes. Listen more carefully to them. Read their body language. Assess their self – esteem by watching how they carry themselves, what they draw, what they see, how they behave. What are their needs at this moment? At this time in their day? At this stage in their lives?
- Ask yourself, “How can I help them right now?” Then follow what your heart tells you. And remember, advice is probably the last thing that will be useful in most situations, unless it is just the right moment for it, and you are very sensitive to the timing and how you frame things. Just being centered yourself, fully present and open and available, is a great gift for them. And mindful hugging doesn’t hurt, either.
Parenting Two
- The best way to impart wisdom, meditation, or anything else to your children, especially when they are young, is to live it yourself, embody what you most want to impart, and keep your mouth shut.
- If you are devoted to your own meditation practice, they will come to know it and see it, and accept it as a matter of fact, as part of life, a normal activity.
Afterword
- Perhaps people recognize in the title the calling to wake up to our experience while we have the chance, and how easy it is to sleepwalk through and therefore miss much of our life, telling ourselves nice stories of who we are and where we are going, along the way to some deluded fantasy we may never reach and might never recover from were we to arrive.