"The world is its own magic."
practicing present moment awareness
Mediation provides a platform for practicing present moment awareness. Reality is the constant unfolding of the present moment. The past and the future are non-existent but our human life requires us to consider them for our survival. The consideration of our past and future is so attractive to our minds, though, that we lose touch with the reality of the present moment that is actually unfolding before all our senses. We use meditation both for understanding ourselves as we relate to the present and as a kind of training platform for maintaining our awareness.
In meditation, we favor concentration over thought. Our minds are comfortable with producing thoughts but require some effort of concentration to bring our awareness to the present. We use our breath or body as an anchor of sorts for our attention. During meditation, we notice the thoughts that arise in our mind but refrain from entertaining them. We refrain from problem solving, planning, fantasizing, or blaming. But we do this with kindness and compassion for ourselves.
It’s inevitable, in meditation, that thoughts will arise and carry us away. When we notice that happening, with kindness and compassion, we bring our attention back to the present moment—our breath, our physical body, sounds, etc. We do this over and over again in the course of meditation, and with experience, we begin to experience longer periods of abiding in the present where our insight into the nature of reality deepens.
mindfulness and impermanence
Practicing mindfulness, we learn to watch our thoughts. We exercise the observing mind and see the thinking mind as an unceasing creator of thought forms, none of which have any real permanency.
This realization of impermanence can be attributed to all our senses. There is actually nothing we see, hear, taste, smell, or touch that has any real permanence.
Through our senses, we encounter the present moment. Our consciousness interprets what the senses encounter and tells us a story–sometimes making the impermanent seem permanent. Our imaginations are especially tuned to telling intricate stories and building great mansions of understanding. But we often forget that the background of everything is change and impermanence. By bringing our focus and concentration on the present moment, we can cultivate a greater appreciation for the nature of reality and not be fooled by our imaginations, our own thinking mind.
“
Good and bad
Happy and sad
All thoughts vanish into emptiness
Like the imprint of a bird in the sky
“
–Chogyam Trungpa
notes on practice
Mindfulness is about experiencing ourselves in the present moment. To just experience ourselves in the present moment takes concentration. One way to help anchor us in the present moment is to follow our breath. You cannot breathe tomorrow, you cannot breathe yesterday, you can only breathe today moment by moment. so in our practice we concentrate on our breath to help us realize the present moment. We can also use our other senses to help anchor us in the present moment: hearing the sounds around us and the feeling of touching the floor or the chair with our bodies, but what is important is to not think about these things (our breath our touch or what we hear) but just to experience them.
We will be distracted by our thinking and that is okay. When our thoughts distract us we should observe them like we observe a leaf floating in a stream or a bird winging across the sky. The distracting thought may be interesting or pleasant or not so pleasant but it is only a thought and our job is to return our attention to our experience of the present moment, without judgement, by focusing on our breath or perhaps a feeling in our body.
Our concentration will not always be good but we need to put in some effort. We should try to go beyond language. Using words to guide our meditation is helpful in the form of loving kindness meditations and gathas, but eventually we must let go of words altogether and just experience what is happening with good concentration on the very moment we are in.
To practice mindfulness is to bring ourselves peace. But peace is not always easy. We need to apply some effort. To experience the peace of our true existence through mindfulness we will eventually need to go beyond language and just experience the present and observe with good effort of concentration.