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Make everything a mindfulness practice
This is a great Zen phrase, “A day of no work is a day of no eating.” Everything becomes the meditation practice. Being in touch with what’s deepest and most fundamental about this very brief moment in time, we call a life span, in which we get to play, and learn, and love, and bring the next generation into the world, and take care of our elders. So it’s all, in some sense, one seamless whole. You can’t do work without doing life, and you can’t do life without doing work. It’s not like, “Oh, I do Zen. And that looks like this.” No. When you have to plow the field, you plow the field. That’s as much Zen as anything else. When your children are having a hard time, you open, and are there for them as best you can be. And recognizing the poignancy and the pain that sometimes like you can’t fix things. Mindfulness is not about fixing. It’s about healing and transformation.
And that’s the kind of ongoing unfolding, like a flower unfurling, flourishing of the human being. And you can’t force that, that flowering, that unfolding, it requires a certain kind of trust, in the present moment, to allow things to be as they are. So my working definition of healing is coming to terms with things as they are. And a lot of the time, we don’t like how they are, it’s terrifying. If you get a diagnosis of one kind or another, a life-threatening disease, or a lifestyle that’s never going to be recoverable, how am I to be in a relationship to that? And there are wise ways to do it that actually you can meet people who have diseases that you couldn’t conceive of yourself having, who are probably a million times happier than you are. Because they’ve found a way to be in wise relationship. Stephen Hawking is a kind of public example, but we see it every day in the Stress Reduction Clinic. Every day, ordinary people, who when they come to mindfulness are capable of coming to terms with the actuality of what they can do and what they can’t do. And maybe they can’t do what they used to be able to do, but they certainly don’t know what the limits of the possible are.
Open your heart
In all Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are the same word. And if you don’t hear heartfulness, when you’re hearing the word mindfulness, you’re really not understanding it. It’s not some cold-clinical, thought-based mentalism, or quietism. It’s love in relationship with clarity and no I-driven agenda that’s caught in attachment. It doesn’t mean you’re not who you are. You are who you are and you’re not somebody else. The question is, can you be all of who you are? If you do this for decades, slowly I think you come to realize that it’s more like the meditation practice is doing you more than you are doing the meditation practice. Or you could say it slightly differently, life is doing you. And of course, that’s true because as far as I know, you didn’t ask to be born. This pure gravy, it’s just a total gift. Even with all the pain and suffering and the trauma, and I recognized the profundity of that, and the rending quality. And still, it’s a gift and you’re a gift and … Silence in some sense at that point becomes wakefulness. It’s radiant, it’s luminous. And it’s already you.