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.
______________________
UPCOMING EVENTS