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.

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.