~ Mindfulness in Everyday Life ~
Mindfulness is the quality of being aware and awake to the present moment. It is the continuous practice of touching life deeply in every moment. To be mindful is to be truly alive, present, and at one with those around you and with what you are doing.
To me, an essential component of mindfulness is to integrate it into our everyday lives. Bringing together the sacred and the secular, the mundane with the miraculous. It’s less about transcending this world and becoming enlightened and more about going down into the messiness and discomfort of life and accepting it just as it is.
In the western dominant culture, it’s common to separate our spirituality from other aspects of our lives. Many people go to church on Sundays and then don’t think much about their spirituality for the other six days of the week. Even some westernized forms of meditation teach that all you need to do to become enlightened is to sit on a cushion and meditate for a certain amount of time every day.
But in most Eastern faith traditions, including Buddhism, there is no clear separation. Life is all of one piece, not chopped up into isolated fragments. Sharon Salzberg, a Buddhist meditation teacher says: “In the West, there isn’t a seamless understanding of what spiritual life is. It’s more specialized, like, “I’m going to meditate on a cushion and something great is going to happen.”
But the classical Eastern understanding is that a spiritual life is how we live everyday. It’s how we relate to our children, how we relate to our parents, how we earn a living, how we speak to one another, how truthful we are. That’s something that hasn’t translated completely into our culture.”
Burmese teacher Sayadaw U Tejaniya, who is known for his pithy comments simply says: “Your work is to keep mindfulness continuous.” He also says “Life is practice and practice is life.” In other words, we can aspire to be mindful continuously from the moment we wake up in the morning until the moment we fall asleep at night.
And this is for one very simple reason: We’re probably not going to make a lot of progress on the spiritual path if we restrict our mindfulness practice to the cushion. Even if we meditate for hours every day, we are still not going to advance much because we have removed ourselves from life – and that’s where the practice gets translated into reality.
We can do the practices and reflect on the teachings all we want, but unless we apply them to real situations and to the unpredictable and uncertain nature of real life, we won’t know if we have truly and deeply grasped them.
When I started meditating many years ago, my sitting practice gradually became more-or-less regular and I had some insights, but when I started trying to be more mindful during the day, I could see my habits, my emotional reactivity, and my beliefs and assumptions much more clearly. It’s as if practice off the cushion shone a brighter light on everything in my mind – the wholesome and the unwholesome. Actually, mostly the unwholesome and it was a rude but revelatory shock. And it’s also something I am still working on.
To practice mindfulness in everyday life, all you have to do is to remember to be aware of what is happening in the present moment externally and internally in your mind. We can be mindful of waking up, brushing our teeth, eating, washing the dishes, driving, being on the computer, watching TV, and so on. It’s really that simple.
I’ll end with another quote from Sharon Salzberg:
“Mindfulness is easy, we just need to remember to do it.”
Thank you.
To me, an essential component of mindfulness is to integrate it into our everyday lives. Bringing together the sacred and the secular, the mundane with the miraculous. It’s less about transcending this world and becoming enlightened and more about going down into the messiness and discomfort of life and accepting it just as it is.
In the western dominant culture, it’s common to separate our spirituality from other aspects of our lives. Many people go to church on Sundays and then don’t think much about their spirituality for the other six days of the week. Even some westernized forms of meditation teach that all you need to do to become enlightened is to sit on a cushion and meditate for a certain amount of time every day.
But in most Eastern faith traditions, including Buddhism, there is no clear separation. Life is all of one piece, not chopped up into isolated fragments. Sharon Salzberg, a Buddhist meditation teacher says: “In the West, there isn’t a seamless understanding of what spiritual life is. It’s more specialized, like, “I’m going to meditate on a cushion and something great is going to happen.”
But the classical Eastern understanding is that a spiritual life is how we live everyday. It’s how we relate to our children, how we relate to our parents, how we earn a living, how we speak to one another, how truthful we are. That’s something that hasn’t translated completely into our culture.”
Burmese teacher Sayadaw U Tejaniya, who is known for his pithy comments simply says: “Your work is to keep mindfulness continuous.” He also says “Life is practice and practice is life.” In other words, we can aspire to be mindful continuously from the moment we wake up in the morning until the moment we fall asleep at night.
And this is for one very simple reason: We’re probably not going to make a lot of progress on the spiritual path if we restrict our mindfulness practice to the cushion. Even if we meditate for hours every day, we are still not going to advance much because we have removed ourselves from life – and that’s where the practice gets translated into reality.
We can do the practices and reflect on the teachings all we want, but unless we apply them to real situations and to the unpredictable and uncertain nature of real life, we won’t know if we have truly and deeply grasped them.
When I started meditating many years ago, my sitting practice gradually became more-or-less regular and I had some insights, but when I started trying to be more mindful during the day, I could see my habits, my emotional reactivity, and my beliefs and assumptions much more clearly. It’s as if practice off the cushion shone a brighter light on everything in my mind – the wholesome and the unwholesome. Actually, mostly the unwholesome and it was a rude but revelatory shock. And it’s also something I am still working on.
To practice mindfulness in everyday life, all you have to do is to remember to be aware of what is happening in the present moment externally and internally in your mind. We can be mindful of waking up, brushing our teeth, eating, washing the dishes, driving, being on the computer, watching TV, and so on. It’s really that simple.
I’ll end with another quote from Sharon Salzberg:
“Mindfulness is easy, we just need to remember to do it.”
Thank you.