Peanut Butter, Rainbow, Wine, Triangle Pose, Blah Blah Blah and Rock and Roll

So if practice is important when it comes to appreciating life or living with its challenges, then how exactly do we practice? In sitting meditation we relate with the sensation of the breath and work skillfully with thoughts, so that is one way to develop or nurture our capacity for mindfulness. Yet we have six sense gates, if not more depending on how you count them, that we can use. In meditation it is often the feeling of the breath at the tip of the nose, depending on the technique, that helps us find a sensation that is grounded in the present. That sensation is a sensation like many others. In yoga, sensation shows up in my trikonasana pose as feet on the floor, muscles stretching, breath and so many other things. Some of the sensations feel pleasurable, some are not, yet they are all now if I can just breath them in and feel them with out too many labels or judgements. So there are a lot of things available to us through the sense gates. We can listen to music such as the Tragically Hip, or Mozart if you like. The sound is experienced in its freshness when we really enjoy music. When we taste food we can also slow down and really taste it. Peanut butter is really inexpressible if you sink into the experience. The aroma of wine or any other scent is a direct experience before we think of it with descriptions and try to impress others with our analysis. When we see a rainbow we can just see it. Any form that appears to our eyes can be appreciated nakedly and directly. And then there is thought. We can also look directly at the thinking mind, see the thought that is happening right now and by seeing it as thought we are freed from the illusion that our thoughts represent a solid reality. Our mind may be going "blah blah blah" yet just look at the present thought, that "blah" and see it. This way there in nothing within our experience that need escape mindfulness.

Now in a Can

Now In a Can

After having a fresh experience of the present moment I sometimes find myself feeling more free and relaxed. However, even as I try to write about it, sometimes the label gets used so much that we forget how fresh it can be. We can go from experiencing the world and our lives in a fresh open way with a mind that is attuned to the present moment, to a mind that labels our experience as "now" and leaves it at that. That is kind of like putting it in a can. Canned now is not really fresh. It's packaged in a label or concept. How do we go about avoiding putting our experience into a can? Well I think it has to do with having some kind of contemplative practice. Meditation practice is the most immediate way to keep the experience of nowness fresh. We need some time and space to see through the speed of concepts and labels and just be with what is. So if your now feels like it's a packaged product with a brand name label on it, then that might be a sign that a little bit of practice would help.

Does this sound like an advertisement? Now in a can, it's not so fresh.

Where Did My Temple Go?

When practicing being aware and developing a sense of continuous awareness, your temple becomes wherever you are in the moment. Right now my temple is my office at work. It's the end of the workday and I am about to meet up with my kids and their mom for supper before their Christmas concert as school. If I needed a temple to meditate or pray in to be mindful right now as I type then I would be in trouble. If a temple is required then there would be no way to feel the keyboard, to notice these thoughts that I type, or my breath as I sit here. 

It's not that I have anything against temples. Sometimes our introduction to mindfulness is through so called "sacred environments" when we witness a monk lighting incense or a priest performing a ritual. We may have visited Thailand and seen meditators in a state of peace and acting with grace and mindfulness. These environments and experiences can be important inspiration and learning experiences for us. The problems arises when we feel that we are at a disadvantage because we are not in that environment now, or that it was such a long time ago since we had such a "special" place to pray or meditate in. Our experience of mindfulness could become a memory like "oh yeah, I did that in Thailand, I got that going on." when all that is really going on is an internal discouragement. If I ever find myself thinking that I am at a disadvantage for mindfulness practice because of my environment I try to remember that the temple for this practice is everywhere. It is wherever you are right now.

Glass House in an Intersection

One of my teachers, Acharya Lama Tenpa Gyaltsen, once described the attitude we take to mindfulness with the analogy of a glass house. He said sometimes it is as if we think of mindfulness like a glass house in the intersection of a busy street. Can you imagine if your house were made of glass and it were in a busy intersection? Well we wouldn't feel safe in our abode and certainly with everything coming at us, our glass house would be destroyed. So I find that an interesting analogy. I do think that when we first try to practice being aware and mindful in ordinary daily life experience we feel so easily distracted the it seems impossible to maintain our mindfulness. We could be mindful of driving the car one moment, taking in the environment, and in the next moment our cell phone buzzes and our mind jumps to what could be happening next. Our mindfulness is lost and we are no longer in the present. Luckily, however, the present moment is not that fragile. We can easily get lost in frantic thought in what seems like the fraction of a second, yet what we could remember is that the present moment is never lost. Even when we get distracted, our mindfulness is not destroyed. In reality the present moment is more like a diamond. It is harder than diamond. So we could take more of an attitude of confidence towards mindfulness and the present moment. Appreciate and enjoy whatever arises moment by moment and if you get distracted, or thrown into a state of anxiety by a call you might be getting on the phone, then don't worry. These experiences do not need to harm our mindfulness. There present moment is still there waiting for you and awareness is also always available. We could remind ourselves that mindfulness is actually resilient and something innate to use as human beings. It takes some effort to come back to now, yes, but it is not like a glass house that is so easily damaged. No-one and no-thing can destroy the present moment!

Welcome to Wake Up Now! - A Mindfulness Blog

Hi,

Welcome to Wake Up Now! I would like to start this blog with a couple of pithy definitions of mindfulness so that we have some idea of what the general subject is.

Mindfulness has been defined a number of ways. The most direct way to start practicing mindfulness is through sitting meditation, where you become more aware and of or familiar with your experience of the breath or any other sensory object. Once you are familiar with the simple and direct experience of one thing, like the breath, then you can nurture that awareness and familiarity with other daily life experiences. My teacher, The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, defines mindfulness as "the continuity of awareness". First we have glimpses of awareness of something, and then that can become more continuous, which is called mindfulness.

Mindfulness is also referred to as not forgetting in that we “do not forget what we have heard and contemplated.”* So there is a bit of effort involved sometimes. The opposite of experiencing things directly is to be somewhere else in our minds, such as dwelling in thoughts of the past and future. So mindfulness can also be thought of as the "remembering" to be present. Once we remember we can relax and continue in that state of awareness, which would be further mindfulness.

So I think that is enough theory. I hope not to get bogged down by too many definitions and so on, so the next few posts will be more experiential. For example, this morning I was mindful of how crabby I was. I was driving the kids to school and I was just crabby. I practiced mindfulness by just being aware and letting myself be crabby. I tried not to be too hard on myself by trying to change it or label it and by relaxing into it, I was OK. It was Monday morning after all.

Mike

*Thrangu, Khenchen. Essentials of Mahamudra: Looking Directly at the Mind. Wisdom Publications: Boston, 2004.