The art of everyday living: mindful sitting, standing, walking, working – attending to, and caring for, ordinary moments and activities….
Mindful meditation in its many forms has been practiced for at least 2,500 years within Buddhism and probably for much longer within other cultures in different parts of the world. The Buddha made use of this ancient practice as a way of examining his own experience, a way of finding out about the world and about himself – by simply paying attention to what arises, to what IS.
The word, Buddha, comes from a Pali word, Budh, which means to awake, know, perceive. So the Buddha was someone who was awakened, who could see things clearly and as they are. One of the meanings of the word, Dharma, is “reality as it is, things as they are”. The Buddha, through the practice of mindful meditation, woke up to the Dharma, he experienced very deeply the passing nature of all phenomena – he realised how everything changes and passes away. He encountered the impermanence that is a basic condition of existence, and he set out to understand what this means, how it affects all beings and how we can learn to live in harmony with impermanence, rather than to fight against it. For if we try to resist the flow of experience, to cling on to what changes and passes away, we are out of step with the universe and feel dissatisfied, anxious, fearful and disconnected – we experience a sense of suffering and unease (dukkha) caused by our misunderstanding of how the universe IS. Mindful meditation is a way to develop understanding and to regain harmony, ease and re-connection with how things are and who we are.
Everything we experience, we experience only once. Every thought, feeling, sight, sound, taste, touch….. every hope, fear, anticipation and regret… only once…. good and bad, peace and pain, joy and sorrow…. only once. Every experience, every moment, every phenomena, is unique and of itself.
And as things appear, they are already disappearing. As experiences arise they are fading away…. Beginnings are also endings. As the moment is born, it dies into another birth. There is a poignancy to each moment, to each vibrant experience.
Experiences, like all phenomena, come and go, and we cannot stem the flow. It is futile to try to hang on to them, or get them to be repeated, or bring them back. And yet, we grasp, cling and try to attach ourselves to what is already passing away, and this adds an unnecessary level of suffering to the pain we feel when we experience loss and grief. Our attachments become a burden, a set of habits and misunderstandings that we carry about with us, weighing us down and obscuring the beauty and clarity of the passing world.
Through mindful attention to the transient stream of experience, just as it is, we realise how precious, wonderful and miraculous is even the most ordinary and mundane moment. Cleaning our teeth is a sacred act. Chewing gum trodden into the pavement is an extraordinary sight. The smell of a lemon or a lover’s skin or the sight of a raindrop are once in a lifetime events. Even the aches in our bones or joints, painful as they are, are a vivid realisation of passing life, something to be cherished even as we do exercises or take a paracetamol, that are in their turn small wonders. Everyday life is extraordinary when we see it for what it is in all its passing glory. And everyday mind is Buddha Mind when we pay attention and let go.
The highest we can aspire to is the ordinary, the everyday, the humdrum – the art of daily living. And the art of daily living involves, amongst other things, attending, without clinging, to the stream of everyday experiences. In mindful meditation we practice paying attention to all experiences, equally. This means attending to the bad as well as the good, the pain as well as the delight, the agitation as well as the peace. In meditation we observe without judgment or commentary and we don’t turn away or reject or react against aspects of our experience that might be difficult or troubling. We face these things and try to see them clearly within the stream of causality that make up our everyday experience. As the Zen teacher, Kodo Sawaki, points out: ‘Everyday life has rainy days, windy days, and stormy days. You can’t always be happy. It’s the same with zazen / mindful meditation.’ His student, Kosho Uchiyama, adds that mindful meditation is at heart ‘the practice of continuous awareness in the midst of delusion, without attachment to delusion or enlightenment.’
Mindfulness is not an escape from daily life, an attempt to withdraw into a false sense of peace, security, comfort (or enlightenment). It can be challenging and difficult, as well as joyful and peace-making. Rather than turning away from life’s problems and pains, we turn towards them in order to see them for what they are – as passing phenomena without enduring substance. Seeing a ‘problem’ for what it is can often reduce or even dissolve the problem. The problem shrinks and loses its power over us simply because we see it in context and no longer cling to it – for, sometimes, maybe often, we do cling to things (by reacting, rejecting, dwelling on or obsessing about them) and this causes, or adds, to our feelings of pain, harm and distress.
ISSA (1763-1827):
simply trust
do not the petals flutter down,
just like that
Reworking BASHO (1644-1694)
the chestnut next to
my house is on
fire with blossoms
but most men walk by
without noticing
RYOKAN (1758-1831) variations
everything we build will
eventually fall down
so, build well and let
go
JD
we search far & wide
for wisdom and peace,
for a heaven that is always
out of reach
yet when we let go of
our searching, we find
heaven and peace are
right here, right where
we are
*
drinking tea, cleaning teeth,
going to sleep, waking up –
everyday mind, everyday miracles
what more do we need?
*
we wash our plates
knowing there is no end
always another plate
to be cleaned