Mindfulness doesn't
involve doing anything at all. In fact,
it is a non-doing a radical non-doing.
And right inside any moment of non-doing lies peace, insight,
creativity, and new possibilities in the face of old habits of mind and old
habits of living.
Our wholeness
manifests in everyday life as wakefulness, as pure awareness.
Life will never be
more rich in some other moment than it is in this one.
Mindfulness is an
ongoing inhabiting of the nowscape. It is a wakefulness that lies beyond being
continually caught in liking and disliking, wanting and rejecting, and in
destructive and unexamined emotional habits and thought patterns.
It is never the
object of attention that is primary. It is always the attending itself.
In standing
meditation, it is helpful to take our cues from trees because trees really know
how to stand in one place for a very long time, at least relative to our brief
lives. Yet they manage to be in the
timeless present the whole time.
If you remember
non-judgmental awareness in the present moment as an option and learn to trust
it, if you learn to inhabit the spaciousness of your own awareness or at least
visit from time to time, then not only are you "doing it right" but
there is actually no doing involved and never was, and nobody to do it. Mindfulness is not about doing, and never
was. It is about being -- and being
awake, being the knowing, including the knowing of not knowing.
When all is said and
done, it is always life that is the supreme teacher and the curriculum and the
practice.
