the essence of mindfulness practice
What a marvel, what a special thing it is to be conscious, to be aware, and to know that we’re aware- this is the essence of mindfulness practice.
The other day I read this haiku by the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa. It stopped my distracted mind in its tracks.
What a strange thing!
To be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.
What a marvel, what a special thing it is to be conscious, to be aware, and to know that we’re aware. We’re not here for that long, really, and I keep thinking I need to use my time well.
the essence of mindfulness practice
But simply being aware is not enough, it’s the knowing of being aware that’s so special. This is the essence of our mindfulness practice.
When we settle into this twin marvel of being aware and knowing we are aware we also discover another set of twin marvels: profound peace and freedom.
seetling into being aware
Settling into being aware doesn’t depend on anything being a certain way. We can settle into being aware of a grumpy mood, a stubbed toe or a fragrant cup of green tea.
The settling part of settling into being aware suggests our distracted mind is sitting in the back seat, for the moment anyway.
stepping out of our thought stream
We see how our sometimes ridiculous, repetitive thought stream continually constructs our view of who we are, who others are in our world- often through unexamined judgments, defenses, ambitions, and the whole nine yards of our conditioned reactivity.
I particularly love the response the late Indian sage Nisargadatta gave when asked about the distraction of thoughts in meditation:
The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.
The thinking mind constructs views of right and wrong, good and bad, self and other. This is the abyss. When we let thoughts come and go without clinging, we make use of them to rest in the heart that Nisargadatta mentions.
This heart knows the thoughts are only clouds passing through the empty expanse of the sky.
The settled mind of knowing you are aware is the heart of mindfulness
We simply pay attention in a way that doesn’t get sucked into whatever storms may arise in the mind, and let them pass, and rest in the settled mind of knowing you are aware.
As we familiarize ourselves with this heart of awareness, we see that whatever blocks the heart is mostly self-constructed- and insubstantial.
The twelfth-century Sufi philosopher El-Ghazali observed:
If you can lose it in a shipwreck, it isn’t yours.
al-Ghazali
As we rest for a moment, purely and simply present, awake and aware, with no agenda at all, we radically step out of our habitual comfort zones of control, manipulation, into a space of natural open awareness.
We can’t lose this in any shipwreck.
I love the line by the poet Rilke:
Ultimately, it is upon your vulnerability that you depend.
the tender heart
We open little by little into the warmth and tenderness of our own essential vulnerability, our own heart of awareness.
It’s the birthplace of the renewable resources of courage, love, empathy, and compassion we all need so much these days.
