Bringing Practice Into Daily Life
Llevar la práctica a la vida cotidiana
A question about how to carry the spacious awareness discovered in group meditation into everyday activities like washing dishes or dancing.
Bringing Practice Into Daily Life
A question about how to carry the spacious awareness discovered in group meditation into everyday activities like washing dishes or dancing.
I have a question about how we apply our meditation here, this silence, to everyday life. How do we transition that awareness into daily living? I was talking to someone about how different things could be meditative, like washing dishes or dancing. People tend to think meditation is sitting in silence. But maybe it's not meditative when I'm washing dishes. I don't know.
That's a really good question. There are a million ways to talk about meditation, and none of them are meditation.
To address what you're discussing, I would say we can talk about it as a practice. The practice is to do nothing while you do nothing. We sit, we sit still, and we practice doing nothing while we're doing nothing.
What you're going to notice in the time here, when we're sitting together, is that some things can start to shift and change. You might have little tastes of something that seems a little different from what you know in daily living. And so from that, I imagine you're asking: how do we bring that into daily living, into movement, into the life that's not what you taste here?
The person I was talking to was saying that meditation is silence. But my reply was: life is not silent.
The relationship between silence and sound
Life is both. It's silence and sound at the same time. There can't be sound without the silence that is aware of the sound. What is sound? How do you recognize sound?
Being aware of the sound.
Yes, but what is sound? If there was always sound, would you be able to be aware of sound?
Contrast. The lack of sound makes us aware of sound.
So there's a movement, a change. And that's why I'm saying this conversation about silence and sound is a metaphor for everything. It's a metaphor for moving and experiencing, for thinking and not thinking, for dancing and not dancing. Life, we could say, is everything.
What happens is that we get stuck on one side. We focus on our thinking, and that is sound, metaphorically. It's noise, it's activity. But for you to notice your thoughts, there has to be something that is not thought. For you to experience sound, there has to be something that is not sound.
At the level of actual sound, the sound of my voice and the absence of it when I'm quiet, there's also something that's aware of the absence of sound.
What the group practice points toward
In the meditation here, what I'm pointing to is, in a sense, an inducing. If it happens, you will start to recognize something different from what you're accustomed to. If you're accustomed to being very involved in your thinking, then a break of thirty minutes or an hour in a guided meditation will allow you to start sensing something a little different.
Because you keep coming back, I'm assuming it's working. Something is happening for you at a deep place, something is resonating, and there's some quality of goodness in it that keeps you returning. That's where your question comes from: how do we bring that into life, into daily living, into activity?
The question is simple and very important. You could phrase it as: how do we remember presence when we're not in presence? When we're not in group energy, when we're not in some situation that is inducing presence?
A stepwise progression
I would say a first step is to give yourself time where you can do something like this on your own. For example, take five or ten minutes on other days of the week, in the morning, and give yourself that time to explore this by yourself.
When you're curious about this, when you get up tomorrow and feel, "I don't feel that sense of presence anymore, I'm waiting for next week," well, take five minutes. Explore what it is to explore here, on your own. There is something that happens when there's guiding, but what you experience here is in you always. If you trust enough to explore that on your own, you only need to trust enough to do the experiment in your own time.
Whatever you're remembering from the group, whatever you felt in the meditation, whatever is bringing you back, is with you always.
So we go from a guided situation in stillness, where we practice discovering what is already present. Then you can try outside the group on your own. Give yourself a bit of time to discover, to explore what is present, to bring that flavor with you. It's always with you, but we get distracted. We get taken into thinking, thinking, thinking.
From there, we move to what you're describing: washing dishes, dancing. You're discovering that in these activities you find something meditative. That's now in movement. Usually we practice hobbies because they bring us into some form of flow or well-being: creativity, art, skiing, dancing.
I feel like this remembering is situational. I'm sitting here, I close my eyes, I hear my surroundings, and slowly it's like this space opens up. But it's only happening here. So what you're saying is to explore it in different situations?
It seems to go away, but it can't
It seems like it's only happening here. And then it seems like it goes away. But that's because your attention goes elsewhere, and then it seems like something is gone or lost. What you're describing is always with you, because it is what you are.
Take this not as a belief, but as a recommendation. When it seems like it's gone away, take five minutes and explore it. Find it. Discover it. It's what I keep saying: discovering something that's already there. It's not about creating a state, because states happen inside of what we are. What I'm guiding you toward and pointing to here is that where states happen. So it doesn't matter if your mind is busy, if there's discomfort in the body, if there's stories, pain, frustration, or boredom. There can be the discovery of this space, we're calling it space now, that's there already.
I understand this can be very hard to conceive of, especially if it's new for you.
Especially if I can't close my eyes. I feel like I need to close my eyes to be in that state. But if I want to transition that into my everyday life, my eyes are open.
Yes, that's why I'm talking about a progression. It's easy to forget. It's not something that you achieve and then lose. It's something we start to remember, start to sink into, and then we distract ourselves and we veil it.
The progression is how to remember that which is always there in more and more complex situations. Starting from doing nothing in a group, where all of our attention is here together, with a guided meditation to begin, a shift happens in the way you are paying attention to the moment. When there is an intention and a guiding toward that, when a group of people come together and pay attention to the present moment, there is both a group shift and an individual shift. This is very scientific as well. You can put somebody in an fMRI machine and see the changes in the activity of the brain.
What happens is that after the group ends, you'll get distracted, and that spaciousness, this presence, will start to seem like it went away. What I'm saying is: trust that it can't go away. Don't take it as a belief, but take it as a recommendation to say, "Okay, it seems like it's gone away. Let me take five minutes and explore it, find it, discover it."
Practical steps
You can take five minutes and close your eyes. Pay attention to sensations, to sounds, to your body, to your mind, and just keep looking at where it's all appearing. You can use the recordings of the meditations. That's very practical and valuable. Or you can find other guided meditations; some are more suitable than others. And then you can explore in movement. There are actual meditations designed for dancing: physical movement and then stillness. Those are very practical as well.
The importance of curiosity
The more you do this, the more important it is that you do it from a place of curiosity and a certain kind of enjoyment, even if it's uncomfortable, even if there's resistance. There should be a certain kind of interest and love for it, a curiosity about it. Not just another discipline. If it's coming from an authoritarian place ("this is what I need to do"), it's going to come from contraction. And contraction is the same process that distracts us. It's "something's wrong, I need to get to something better, the way I do it is to meditate," and then the meditation itself becomes a way of avoiding the moment.
You might notice that each meditation has a theme. They're all addressing different parts or different ways in which we get lost in our experience and forget. So there are different ways in which we can come back. It could be very much through paying attention to perception and thinking, or it can be from a more heartful place, connecting with desire, and also seeing how we are attracted to and in a sense addicted to pain and suffering.