COMING BACK TO LIFE – ALREADY IN PROGRESS
I want to talk about a very practical application of our meditation practice. Aside from spiritual development or enlightenment, meditation can be seen as a means to secure health and healing in our daily life. The view is not to fix anything but to support ourselves in a very physical way that creates the space for healing.
We could sit in meditation without understanding what it is we’re doing. We could be vague about our process, not actually paying attention, and still gain the benefit of pausing a bit and making a daily connection ourselves. This might unknowingly create space in the torrent of our lives. It’s important not to let perfectionism impede the flow. However, when we are able to make a deeper connection to the experience, we can deepen the benefits of the process. The more we are able to connect to the breath the deeper our meditation will be, and the more benefit we will receive. Commitment = result.
Yet, we need not be focused entirely on the breath the entire time, as that wouldn’t speak to a practical connection to our life. We simply don’t operate that way. We move forward by guiding ourselves back. The point is commitment, not perfection. The point of breath-based meditation is to use the breath as a reference to train the mind to be comfortable resting in the present. Instead of locking ourselves in place, we return again and again to that reference point. We would be accepting the fact that our mind drifts, wanders and fixates. But we would be developing an awareness that allows us to guide back to the center lane. Who knows why, in the midst of delusion, we wake up and see that we are not present? That is the point our life changes. We wake up and simply bring ourselves back to the center of our practice, the breathing body. This is how we navigate naturally in our life. When we find ourselves drifting to the shoulder, we bring ourselves back to the road without recrimination or discussion. Our mind has a natural process of returning to the middle way in life that we can develop in our meditation practice. Naturally returning to the present is an inherent process of the mind that we can further develop with meditation.
While practicing, we RECOGNIZE when we are not present and then build the strength to RETURN to the present. This simple 2-step process is transferable to all aspects of our lives. We begin to notice when we’re off or moving away from our stated intention. Then we can simply return without internal discussion as simply as if we were walking in the streets on a nice day. If you’re like me, you get excited and a beautiful day in the city and you might hit one or two of your errands and that gets the juices flowing and the dopamine rising. If I’m not careful, I could end up at the end of the day exhausted, having eaten more calories and spent more dollars than I should have. Somewhere along the line, I got completely eclipsed and went off course. But thanks to meditation training my mind knows it can return from compulsion. Being able to notice the moment, bite the bullet, and return to the present is an incredibly important process in terms of building our strength of mind and actualizing our intention.
And we can return wherever on the wheel we wake up. Maybe it’s walking faster than we need, and so we recognize we can slow down to incorporate mindfulness in the process. Or maybe it’s after we’ve spent dollars we don’t have or had that slice we don’t need. No matter how far we’ve gone off the path of stated intention, we can simply return. I know we want to chastise ourselves. We love that kind of self-abuse, don’t we. But there are folks we can pay to beat us up. When it comes to waking up in life, the less drama we create for ourselves the better. ENCOURAGING is key. SUPPORT RATHER THAN RECRIMINATION. Whenever we wake-up, we return. It’s that simple and in time as we create the neural pathways to wake up, it gets easier. Far from being a problem, each time we RECOGNIZE we are off that mark, we have an opportunity to RETURN to our life.
The interesting thing about life is that it is happening, despite what we think should be happening. There are all the things our mind tells us, and then there is what is actually going on. The point of our practice is not to become scholars of the breath, but to use the breath as a way of bringing our awareness back to what is happening. Each time we return to the breathy, we are returning to a life already in progress.
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UPCOMING EVENTS
When I was a child, it was common for fathers to keep long hours at work or travel away from home. The dad’s were swimming upstream to compete in a society making its long slide away from the warmth of the family to the insatiable urges of the marketplace. We had come through the war, and before that the great depression. After that societal trauma we ended up on the winning side and didn’t look back. There seemed no limit to prosperity, as long as we were willing to work hard enough.
scarcity of an immigrant journey, the great depression, and the feeling that we had to scramble madly to compete with the world we saw on TV, lodged in our bellies and arteries. The more we had, the more we seemed to need. Food was a panacea. It brought family together, it was what we did when we celebrated, and it was how we grieved. As an adult, I was conditioned to believe that more was the answer to everything. There is so much love in this picture. But, as there was an underlying fear, there was a lack of awareness. I became addicted to anything that would give me energy, calm me down, or quiet the screaming inside. I never learned to see myself as enough. And the trumpeting of more, more, more helped to drown out my feelings. This over consumption is naturally not sustainable.
But why does the joy I am encouraged to feel during the holidays make me lonely, tired, and stressed out? The warmth of Christmas often competes for my brain space with sadness and worry. Appreciation for what I actually do have becomes upstaged by things I imagine I don’t have.
there seem to be a number of “me’s” that we employ – and believe – depending on our circumstance. There is the me that I find at work, the me that I feel when relaxing, the me that meditates and the me that can’t sit still.
The Buddhist path is said to be vast and profound. Profound refers to the notion that the teachings reach below surface standard cognition penetrating to the depths of our being into our human experience. Vast refers to the many manifestations that the Buddhist journey takes and the many methods it employs to illuminate profound understanding.
From the moment we first cried out for our bottle to the time we sidled up next to someone at the bar hoping to have them buy us a drink, we’ve learned to manipulate our world. More specifically, we’ve learned to manipulate our feelings in order to manipulate others into the impression that we can get what we want. The fact that we frequently don’t know what we want doesn’t seem to deter us.
Learning to work with anxiety is an important practice for anyone trying to maintain mindful balance in their lives. How often are we thrown off-course in life due to reacting unmindfully when prompted by our fear. Something feels wrong, and before we can look into what that may be, we spring forward as if to escape the discomfort. I can’t count the times I have made missteps in my life by lurching blindly.
The unreliable narrator is a technique used by writers to tell their story from a point of view that is changing, altered, or diminished in some respect. This creates a sense of un-ease in the reader. However, despite its temporal unreliability, this technique often reads as organic as it feels closer to how our minds actually work. One mistake uncreative the writer makes is to try and force the organic flow of reality into a two-dimensional, linear narrative. There is a sense of comfort in aligning the forces of our life inside the lines, but it is simply not the way our mind naturally flows. Nor, is it how the reality around us actually works.