Remembering What Is Always There
Recordar lo que siempre está ahí
A question about how to carry the spaciousness discovered in seated meditation into the movement and activity of everyday life.
Remembering What Is Always There
A question about how to carry the spaciousness discovered in seated meditation into the movement and activity 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. But to address what you're asking, I would say we can talk about it as a practice. I was just speaking about the art of not doing, the art of doing nothing. You could say 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 inseparability of 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?
By 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, there's 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, 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 speaking: 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 absence of it when I am quiet, there's also something that's aware of the absence of sound.
What the meditation is pointing to
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 for you, something that keeps you coming back. And that's where your question arises: how do we bring that into daily living, into activity?
I'm saying a lot of words to address the simplicity of a very important question. You could phrase it this way: how do we remember presence when we're not in presence? When we're not in group energy, when we're not in a situation that is inducing presence?
A stepwise progression
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 by yourself.
I'm offering a kind of stepwise progression: how do I guide myself into remembering? When you are curious about this, when tomorrow you get up and feel, "I don't sense that presence anymore, I'm waiting for next week," well, take five minutes. Explore what it is to explore here, on your own. There is nothing magical or secret about this. Something does happen when there is guiding, 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 it is you're remembering from the group, whatever you felt in the meditation, whatever keeps bringing you back, is with you always. So we go 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.
And from there you move to what you describe: washing dishes, dancing. You are discovering that in those 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 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. 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.
This is something you can take with you, 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. 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 and valuable. Or you can find other guided meditations; some are more recommendable than others. And you can explore in movement. There are meditations specifically designed for dancing: physical movement alternating with stillness. Those are very practical as well.
Curiosity, not discipline
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 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. Contraction is the same process that distracts us: "Something's wrong now, I need to get to something better. The way I do it is to meditate." And that's going to be avoiding the moment.
It's not something you achieve and lose
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.
That's why I'm talking about a progression. It's easy to forget. But it's not something 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 learning to remember that which is always there in more and more complex situations. Starting from doing nothing: in a group, with all of our attention here, all of us together, and with a guided meditation to begin, a shift is created 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 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.
What happens is that 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 to say, "Okay, it seems like it's gone away. Let me take five minutes and explore. Let me find it. Let me discover it."
Different doorways back
You might notice that in each meditation there's a kind of theme, but they're all addressing different ways in which we get lost in different parts of our experience and forget. And so there are different ways we can come back. It could be through paying close attention to perception or to 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.