mindfulness

Some little sharing I had with my meditation group the other day:

It seems on the surface there are two schools of ideas regarding the way of meditation: One says to go into a state of absolute nothingness, without a specter of thought or image, spending as little effort as possible, into the state of total detachment from anything and everything; the other, called "mindfulness", on the other hand, is to focus as intentionally as you can, on every little thing you are doing at the moment.

My meditation practice has been mostly on the former: Every morning I spend 30 minutes sitting in silence "trying-without-trying" to be calm and letting go and into the state of effortless flow of equanimity...

My mindfulness--or "living in the moment"--practice, on the other hand, has been pretty lacking, even though conceptually I understand the importance of it, I realize more and more that I am not doing it much.

For example, my wife has been criticizing me that I eat too fast, and I've been ignoring that criticism thinking that's just a matter of opinion (I think she eats too slowly), until I realize the reason why I eat that fast is because I am using my mouth like a food processor, my brain busily dictating it to mingle potato with meat, salty food with bland one, so to speak, in the most efficient way possible, to finish up the job fast, instead of slowly and truly savoring the taste of food or enjoying the process of eating.

And I read an article yesterday about how the Japanese people have long ingrained the mindfulness practice in their culture: From the train conductors announcing out loud every maintenance move they are taking (and statistics show this does dramatically reduce the rate of mistakes happening) to the ritualistic respect they pay to their tea ceremony, flower arrangement, cherry-blossom viewing, etc... 

I think these two practices are two sides of a coin, not contradictory to each other. Maybe I'll call the practice of mindfulness "meditation in action", and the other "meditation in segregation", since it requires segregated time and environment to do so. And probably because of such conspicuous efforts we make, it becomes the "formal" one, or the one we focus on. 

But the reality is 99% of our day is spent in action--eating, walking, talking, working, thinking, etc.--whether we like it or not. So maybe the practice of mindfulness meditation should be at least as important as the segregated, formal one, shouldn't it? At least that's what I am telling myself now.

Just a little "mindful" sharing with you