bit of the contemplation these days. kind of nice to have it without it feeling like a fooking ton of bricks.
we’re talking elsewhere about our meditation and practice patterns. i’m pretty sure the fellow who started the topic just wanted to see who could actually post theirs… he has this ‘thing’ about being convinced that most of us spend too much time posting and not enough practicing. i find that amusing. for many reasons, most of which you may deduce if you’re at all familiar with buddhism or my own brand of ‘three fingers pointing back at you’ humor.
i actually debated posting to the topic. wound up doing so because i actually do have a practice and i actually do meditate regularly and perhaps something would be helpful to mention. meh. maybe.
i’ll repost here in a moment, but mostly just setting these thoughts out ahead of it to remind myself of context and such.
getting warmed up to the notion that there really isn’t a damn thing that needs to change. it’s all just as it should be… including me. including all the things i think are ‘bad’ of me. including everything.
there’s really some comfort up in that thought once you settle into it.
anyway… the post…
Back to the now. That’s a great way of putting it. Most of my focused meditation runs either to getting in the moment or unraveling some “ridiculous train of thought”… but it’s all meditation, really. I’ve been working lately on remembering that… it is ALL meditation. Being right here, right now, no matter what I’m doing.
Typing this post, for example. Really thinking about what I’m saying, feeling the keyboard under my fingertips. The way I’m breathing. How what is here makes it onto the “page” of this post.
For the most part, when I’m doing focused meditation (meditation as such), I’m either working on the four thoughts or staying with the breath or a bit of a hybrid thing I call tonglen for the world. Probably bore the shite out of folks trying to describe it, so I won’t.
I don’t spend much time on prostrations… mostly because I can’t do them without being in pain but also because, frankly, I’m well enough aware of my lowliness and don’t need the reminder. I figure when I can do them without immediately feeling like I’m hopeless, I’ll get back to them.
I mediate on silly things that probably won’t make much sense to anyone else. Sunrise. The wind and how it moves the trees. Moonlight and how it doesn’t much care what it touches, it just shines. How the dogs play. The music of the kids screaming, laughing, and playing on the trampoline in the next yard. The sounds of nighttime and how everything that makes up ‘night time’ makes its own sound and doesn’t even realize they’re part of a rather marvelous symphony… and how peaceful just being really is.
I meditate on ugliness in the world and all the things that cause it. Crying meditation, I call it, because most times I can’t really think on it very much without doing so.
I have this meditation for lost friends and people who have moved out of the frame of my life and folks who hurt me… most of it deals with making them all the same… drawing lines between traits until I forget which were friends and which are gone and which I didn’t like… they all feel the same.
Last but not least, there’s the gratitude/humility meditation… a very long list of people… everyone I have ever known, met, spoken to… so far as I can remember (considerable but certain to be lacking names here and there, mind and memory being as it is). This is the one I usually do at night, before I sleep. I take the list and remember each person and something beautiful I learned from them… something hard I learned from them… and something I would never have known had I not met them…. and I say each thing to myself and then thank them, wherever they are, for being a part of my life and contributing to my learning.
I almost never have a formal time set aside for meditation, all of this is pretty much constant every day, sometimes I swap them up just to keep from being bored… and sometimes I make myself put up with the boredom just to remind myself that getting attached to the process isn’t the point.
later in the thread, someone mentioned that i left out laughter. salient, that. i didn’t so much leave it out as i was thinking about practice (as in effort) as opposed to the things that seem effortless. i laugh a lot. usually alone, and almost always longer than anyone else. heh. i don’t even care. but they also mentioned how much is ‘wrong with the world’ which sparked another thought about how i’ve changed over the years…
I don’t spend a lot of time (hardly any, really) thinking about the future. And I’m learning how to let go of thinking quite so much about the past. In a lot of ways all this helps me get to and remain in th’now.
I spent a good many years being very angry and frustrated with all the many things ‘wrong with the world’ until I woke up one day and realized I’d be wasting the rest of my life if I let myself focus on ‘what’s wrong with the world’ rather than getting busy on ‘what wrong with myself’ so I can eventually make it to the point where I can realize for more than an instant that there is NOTHING ‘wrong with myself’ or ‘wrong with the world’.
Constantly a fight, that. =/
getting up on the idea that i’m always talking to myself (and most overtly when i think i’m telling someone about themselves… hah!) has been quite interesting and helpful here.