I just received this in an email from an old friend:
“Interesting that you are into awareness. I have been dabbling with the mindfulness meditation program from John Kabat-Zinn. When I get busy I tend to cut my meditation time which I know is the exact wrong thing to do.”
Here’s my reply:
Interesting! Check yesterday’s BLOG entry on “Little Things Mean A Lot.”
It’s great when I can do a 20 minute practice each day. Fr. Thomas Keating advised me to try two 20 minute sessions: one first thing in the morning (which I often do) and the second late afternoon (which I do less often). The second one in his terms allows some “psychic unloading” of the day’s events before they pile up too much. That’s great advice and it works wonderfully. It’s also the regime of a semi-pro meditator. (Keating being a 90+ yr old Trappist is clearly a pro, definitely an all-star and probably a hall of fame meditator.)
Once you have developed some skill in awareness/mindfulness, that is you’ve practiced enough to focus, identify when you’ve lost focus, be gentle with yourself, drop evaluation and judgement, etc, I think you can view it as a skill you can call upon when you need it. Kind of like typing.
So when my life gets busy and my beloved 20 minute sessions haven’t happened for a few weeks, I can just seize whatever meditation opportunities present themselves. No matter how brief.
In my former high pressure business life, I used to yearn for a more peaceable way to live. It seemed very remote. If only, … Suddenly, being an engineer, I thought of awareness/mindfulness, as a counterweight on a very long lever. The burdens of every day life were real close to the fulcrum, an inch, say. But meditation was 10 feet from the fulcrum. A gram of meditation could lift a ton of cares and worries.
Here’s the way I crystalized it when I was feeling overburdened and cornered by my job.
1) There isn’t an hour in the day when I can’t find a minute to focus on awareness.
2) There isn’t a day in the week, when I can’t find an hour to practice awareness.
3) There isn’t a month in the year, when I can’t find a day to practice awareness.
4) There isn’t a year in my life when I can’t find a week to practice awareness.
To me, this was freedom.
I really enjoyed your writing, and look forward to more.
I was in a fairly bizarrre yoga workshop yesterday, but the gem for me was the clarification of the concept of giving up something of pleasure to LEARN something about yourself; it came closer to NO VIOLENCE than the surreptitious “SHOULD’ that lurks in my tendencies. xo s
This is from Alice Murray:
I am meditating 20 minutes once a day. I do this as soon as I get up in the morning along with the day’s readings. I have learned to just sit and not judge my meditation otherwise I think I might stop doing it. But I do have the desire to continue and cannot seem to add another 20 minutes later in the day as Fr. Keating recommends. I don’t beat myself up on that.
Our meditation group is currently reading “The Wisdom Jesus” by the Episcopalian priest Cynthia Bourgeault. Her book has blown our minds and we are slowly getting through it as it is so rich.