Awakening

Sitting And Doing Meditation - By Joan Borysenk

Mindful Sitting

Sit in your seat with great dignity, back straight and eyes closed. Become aware of your breathing--how breath comes in and fills your belly and how breath moves out into space. Keep about 25% of your attention on breathing and the other 75% on the feeling of spacious mindfulness. You may become aware of sounds, sensations, thoughts. Just let them all come and go, passing across the spacious sky of your mind like clouds.

Sogyal Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist lama, compares the thoughts that arise in meditation to waves that rise from the ocean. It is the ocean's nature to rise. We cannot stop it, but as Rinpoche says, we can "leave the risings in the risings."

Mindful Doing We can extend the practice of mindful awareness and spaciousness beyond the period of sitting meditation into the rest of life.

Thich Nhat Hanh has written a beautiful book called the Miracle of Mindfulness. With true simplicity and beauty he reminds us that we can wake up in the ordinary activities of life by bringing our full attention to eating, washing the dishes, smelling the roses, walking, making love.

Choose a piece of fruit and eat it mindfully. Be aware of its look, smell and feel. Notice the way that your mouth fills with saliva in anticipation of its flavor. Be aware of each bite moving down your throat into your stomach. Enjoyment and gratitude are natural outcomes of mindfulness.

Choose any activity like washing the dishes or taking a shower and commit to doing it as mindfully as possible. For some people taking a shower mindfully, aware of their breathing and all the pleasant sensations, is an excellent morning meditation.



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How are you sabotaging your potential for change?

We unconsciously use defence mechanisms to shield us from situations we perceive to be scary or painful. A part of you may want to grow and change, but another part may be resisting because change always moves you into new territory in your thinking and emotions.

If you find you are getting anxious, fearful, angry, frustrated, dismissive or unmotivated, then defence mechanisms are at work. Watch for them and know them to be signs of fear that wants to hold you back. Then courageously move through them.

posted by ramakrishnan @ 1:50 AM