"Mindfulness and Meditation allow us to open our hearts, relax our bodies, and clear our minds enough to experience the vast, mysterious, sacred reality of life directly. With Practice we come to know for ourselves that eternity is available in each moment.

Your MMM Courtesy Wake Up Call:
Musings on Life and Practice
by a Longtime Student of Meditation

Friday, January 31, 2025

In It for the Long Haul

"As the mind becomes a little more quiet the sacredness of everything 
within and without becomes clear to us.”
-- Zen Teacher Norman Fischer
 
 “Be still.  Stillness reveals the secrets of eternity.
When there is silence one finds the anchor of the universe within oneself.”
― Lao Tzu

In the midst of the scurry of the past couple of weeks, I was especially aware of how precious each morning's meditation was to me.  
 
Sitting here now, mindful of my breath and body, relaxing into the space that surrounds these sensations, I come to rest in this moment's open awareness.  
 
In my mind's eye,  I can see light at the end of the tunnel.  I am 78 years old, after all.  In the long haul of human of human life, I'm probably somewhere in the final lap.
 
Taking another full, conscious breath, continuing to relax and open, the tunnel and the light dissolve into the clear, luminous brilliance that is beyond endings and beginnings. I'm at peace at hOMe Sweet OM.  Home is where the Heart is.
 
Sitting here at this aging MacBook Pro, my heart glows in gratitude for Practice.  
 
Touching Stillness, even for a few brief moments, is like feeling the warm glow of a fireplace, snuggling at home on a snowy evening peering through the window at the moon.  Paradoxically, it's also like sipping clear, crisp spring water on a steamy summer day.  In Stillness, a Presence emerges.  In a silent whisper, it sings of the Ineffable, that infinite space where the fundamentally mysterious and completely ordinary meet to form the fabric of Life itself.  

Simply Sitting Still
 
Although I use a variety of meditation techniques, have an active prayer life, and practice a set of daily spiritual rituals, the foundation of my personal practice for decades has been shikantazaI simple sit still with what Zen teacher Norman Fischer calls "the basic feeling of being alive."  Seated erect, my attention is allowed to rest in the moment to moment experience of my breath and body, I relax into the embrace in the expansive spaciousness of what contemporary spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle calls the Eternal Now.
 
Of course, this is often easier said than done.  It takes Practice.

Conditioned as we are in this society, our attention is usually drawn into the thoughts and images and memories and daydreams cascading through our mind.  Rather than sitting still, observing the experience of the present moment with a relaxed open gaze, we find ourselves lost in thoughts and images of the future or the past.  (My "go to patterns" often have included rewriting scenes from past arguments to put myself in a better light -- or fretting about fear-based worst case scenarios of future events. Oy ve. LOL )
 
This happens, again and again and again.  

Yet, the moment we simply notice this, a moment of Practice emerges.  If that noticing is clear, open, calm, and non-judgmental, we have engaged Mindfulness, a qualitatively different mode of consciousness.  Mindfulness becomes the Gateless Gate to Pure Awareness.  As Practice deepens, there are times that Reality Asserts Itself.  In a flash, we are Present in a qualitatively different way -- and we know it.  Ultimately, we come home to our True Nature.  We realize that that we are all inseparable from the Universe, embraced by a mysterious, boundless, Love.  This Sacred Unity is the source and the destination of all that exists and could ever be.
 
At times, it is just that simple.  Yet, simple doesn't necessarily mean easy.

Throughout our lives, we have developed complexes of thoughts and emotions that have a great deal of power over us.  They arise, unbidden, to dominate our attention.  Without Practice, we are unconsciously propelled into each moment by our past, again and again. 
 
We are, literally, creatures of habit. Much of who we are at any one moment, the way we "see" and react to our experience, is primarily a result of our conditioning.  Most of the time, we don't choose to think what we are thinking or to feel what we are feeling.  It just bubbles up from our subconscious.  Without Practice, without a conscious commitment to put in the time and effort to discover who we really are, we are held in bondage by our past.  Without Practice, moment to moment, we are just a bad habit.  We are likely to continue to create a future that contains the same old, same old, suffering that characterizes much of the human condition.   
 
Thankfully, there is Practice.

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Space: The Final Frontier

"When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment,
our understanding of what is going on deepens, 
and we begin to be filled with acceptance, joy, peace and love.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“Delight in itself is the approach of sanity. Delight is to open our eyes 
to the reality of the situation rather than siding with this or that point of view.”
― Chögyam Trungpa, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation


When I growing up, being called a "space cadet" was not a good thing.  Unless you were an astronaut-in-training at NASA (or, perhaps, a Trekkie), the term was a put-down.  The folks who didn't pay a lot of attention to the seemingly endless concerns and activities of high school and college life, just weren't cool. 

Although I didn't realize it at the time, some of these space cadets were actually marching, perhaps even dancing, to the beat of a different drummer.  In doing so, they had a leg up on the rest of us.

Why?

Our legs were fully engaged spinning the hamster wheel of an invisible, but very captivating, mind cage.  Scrambling to conform to the rat race of the "real world," we couldn't afford to just space out.

Compelled by our thoughts and feelings about doing it right, going for the gold, being all we can be, etc., most of us were continually trying to get with the program presented to us in a culture steeped in capitalism, scientific materialism, racism, and all the other "ism's" that serve to oppress the human spirit.

From the time we woke up until the time we fell asleep, we were being conditioned by the world around us to disregard the spiritual dimension of life.

Sadly, most of us internalized the values and norms the mainstream society long before we had the experience or the skills to realize what was happening.   We didn't see that our society's "conventional reality" was a house built on the ever-shifting sands of what the Buddhist call the eight worldly concerns.   Rather than taking the time to "consider the lilies" as Jesus had counseled and explore the spiritual dimension of our lives, we became increasingly fixated on the material and psychological "needs" presented to us by the mass culture.

The space cadet seemed not to take such things that seriously.  It seemed that he or she could frequently let go, relax -- and journey elsewhere.  

Aboard the Starship Enterprise

These days, I will gladly accept the title of space cadet.  I've found that space, what some folks call "inner space," is the final frontier.  In fact, as we voyage in the present moment to the precise edge of this ever-unfolding frontier, we see there is actually no such thing as elsewhere.  We come to see that inner and outer space are merely concepts, two sides of the same coin.  And that coin is flipping eternally though a boundless and infinite universe of awareness.  In this realm there is no winning or losing.  The coin never lands.

Once I got a taste of the boundless and infinitely forgiving space at the heart of reality, I knew that I was all in.  Although I've had some crash landings and have encountered some space monsters along the way,  I'm grateful to have signed on for the voyage.  Most every morning, I choose to step off the hamster wheel for at least an hour -- and go into free fall.  I simply sit still for about an an hour.

Some people call what I do meditation. 
(READ MORE)