Bringing Stillness Into Movement
Llevar la quietud al movimiento
A question about how to carry the spaciousness discovered in seated meditation into the activity and complexity of everyday life.
Bringing Stillness Into Movement
A question about how to carry the spaciousness discovered in seated meditation into the activity and complexity of everyday life.
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. 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 asking, I would say we can talk about it as a practice. The practice is to do nothing while you do nothing. We sit still, and we practice doing nothing while we're doing nothing.
Tasting something different
While you're here, sitting together, 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 life, 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.
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. Lack of sound makes us aware of sound.
Silence and sound as metaphor
So there's a movement, a change. And that's why I was 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, 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, metaphorically, noise, 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 lack of it when I am quiet, there is also something that is aware of the absence of sound.
In the meditation here, what I'm pointing to is a kind of communion. 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 something is working. Something is happening for you at a deep place, something resonating, something that feels good in some way. That's what brings you back. And that's where your question lives: how do we bring that into daily living, into activity?
Remembering presence
The question is really: how do we remember presence when we're not in presence, when we're not in group energy or in some situation that is inducing presence?
I would say a first step is to give yourself time to do something like this on your own. Take five minutes on other days of the week, in the morning, or ten minutes, and give yourself that time to explore this independently.
When you are curious about this, when tomorrow you get up and feel, "I don't feel that sense of presence anymore, I'm waiting for next week," well, take five minutes. Explore on your own what you explore here, because there is nothing magical or secret about it. Something happens when there's guiding, yes, but what you experience here is in you always.
If you trust me enough to explore that on your own, you only need to trust me enough to do the experiment in your own time. Whatever you are remembering from the group, whatever you felt in the meditation, whatever is bringing you back, is with you always.
From stillness to movement
So we move from a guided situation in stillness, where we practice discovering what is already present, to trying it 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 is always with you, but we get distracted. We get taken into thinking, thinking, thinking.
From there, you move to what you're describing: washing dishes, dancing. You're discovering that these activities feel 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 this space opens up. But it's only happening here. So what you're saying is to explore it in different situations?
It never actually leaves
I'm saying it seems like it's only happening here. It seems like it goes away, but that's because your attention goes elsewhere. Then it seems like something's gone or lost. But what you're describing is always with you, because it is what you are.
Take that not as a belief, but as a recommendation. When it seems like it's gone away, a few hours after the group or the next day, give yourself a few minutes and see if you can explore it on your own. What I'm describing is 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 and pointing to is that in which states happen. It doesn't matter if your mind is busy or if there's discomfort in the body, stories, pain, frustration, boredom. There can be the discovery that this space (we're calling it space now) is 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 everyday life, my eyes are open.
A progression of remembering
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 veil it.
The progression is learning 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 comes together, with a guided meditation to begin, a shift occurs in the way you are paying attention to the moment. When a group of people come together with intention and pay attention to the present moment, there is a group shift and an individual shift. This is very scientific as well. You can put somebody in an fMRI machine and you will see the changes in the activity of the brain.
After the group ends, you'll get distracted, and that which is always there, this spaciousness, this presence, will start to seem like it went away. What I'm saying is: trust me that it can't go away. Don't take it as a belief, but take it as a recommendation. When it seems like it's gone, say to yourself, "Okay, it seems like it's gone. 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 that in which it's all appearing. You can use the recordings of the meditations. That's very practical, very valuable. Or any other meditation you find, though some are more recommendable than others.
Then you can explore in movement. There are actual meditations designed for dancing: physical movement and then stillness. Those are very practical as well.
Curiosity, not discipline
The more you do this, the more it deepens. And it's important to do this from a place of curiosity and a certain kind of enjoyment, even if it's uncomfortable and there's resistance. There should be a certain interest and love for it, a curiosity about it, not just another discipline. If it comes from an authoritarian place ("this is what I need to do"), it will come from contraction. Contraction is the same process that distracts us: "Something's wrong, I need to get to something better, the way I do it is to meditate." That approach ends up avoiding the moment.
You might notice that each meditation has a kind of theme. They all work by addressing different ways in which we get lost in different parts of our experience and forget. So there are different ways in which we can come back. It could be through paying attention to perception or thinking, or it can be much more from a heartful place, connecting with desire, or seeing how we are attracted to and, in a sense, addicted to pain and suffering.