Living Meditation: Reflect Every Hour to Truly Discover Life

More than 500 years ago, a Chinese Zen master told his students, "in walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble."

It is called "mindfulness."

Mindfulness is what many meditators seek when they sit stiffly cross-legged or serenely in the full lotus position. The famous Vietnamese Buddhist, Thich Nhat Hanh writes, "if you want to know your own mind, there is only one way: to observe and recognize everything about it. This must be done at all times, during your day-to-day life no less than during the hour of meditation."

People meditate for many reasons - to relax, to quiet their mind, gain a sense of control pray or gain awareness of themselves.

Lisa Harrawood, in Boulder from North Carolina for a meditation workshop, originally began to meditate hoping it would make her feel happy and peaceful.

"Now I realize I meditate not to feel better but to feel more," she says. "I meditate to observe my voices, not quiet them."

Jerry Wilson, a Boulder man new to meditating, said he meditates to slow down.

"My mind gets so tightly would, I needed something natural to unwind with," he says.

Some people, like Tricia Keen, a meditation teacher who has been practicing Zen meditation for over 15 years, start with one a agenda.

"Originally I sat (meditated) to make my life better, to improve myself," Keen said.

Just as there are many reasons people meditate, there are many places to meditate besides at have. In Boulder, a person looking to meditate with others can do so every day of the week. There are classes in Zen, Hindu, Christian, Tibetan and non-denominational meditation. You can sit on a cushion, a chair, or, if you're really flexible, try one of the traditional eastern lotus legged positions. You can meditate with music, with a mantra, in silence or with bells.

But Steven Harrison isn't doing any of those things, at least not anymore. Harrison, a Boulder resident and author of "Doing Nothing" and "Being One," writes "the only meditation that does produce more mind clutter than it eliminates is one we are already doing - living."

Harrison's latest book, "Getting to Where You Are: The Life of Meditation" is basically about what the old Chinese masters believed: if you walk, just walk.

Harrison has walked the path of a meditator and obviously thought about meditation a great deal. His conclusion is that the whole spiritual journey has "become a burden in the lives of seekers, a pressure along with all the other pressures of life."

He suggests that "meditation is about letting go of what isn't and being what is," and writes that he wants to free meditators from the techniques and dogmas of meditation teachings.

However, Harrison's writing is sparse and brief. He engages the intellect but not the heart. He does not share his own journey, but asked us to trust his beliefs.

Perhaps he is practicing the art of non-attachment. Harrison, in his age-old, newly-found wisdom, does ask some excellent questions such as, "does time exist outside the web of conceptualization," and "are we aware or do we just believe we are aware."

He writes that words we use, such as "awareness," describe but do not explain a state of consciousness. "What if our existence is simply the arising of thought in a field of awareness," he asks.

Harrison contends that teachers, gurus, experts and healers who tell about what to expect from meditation and how it works are doing people a disservice.

"We are not taught how to experience but what to experience and where to experience it," he writes.

He adds that enlightenment is impossible to attain, even by sitting on a cushion for the next millennium. He criticizes "teachers" who tell their followers enlightenment is possible if they just do everything right.

It is a myth, he writes, which tells us we need to be somewhere other than where we are. And that is where we disconnect from what he calls the actuality of our lives.

Defining "actuality" takes several chapters. "Actuality is the remainder; the bare, fundamenal, uninterrupted quality that we naturally apprehend when the interpreter, the 'me' is silent," Harrison writes. "In actuality, there is no observer. In actuality, there is only the phenomenon."

Heady stuff.

Practitioners like Keen, who have meditated for more that a decade, aren't so far from Harrison. "Who we really are is the awareness," says Keen. "And I don't mean that small self-conscious awareness, but something more like meta-awareness - seeing without judgement, without it being personal, with infinite compassion and acceptance. It is a divine experience."

Harrawood, the workshop attendee, has a similar experience. "You cannot quiet the mind. You can only learn to observe and hear the voices and realize that just because it is coming from inside your head, does not make it true."

Both a different ways of saying the same thing, or different ways of experiencing and actually living in mindfulness. Keen and Harrawood have discovered that meditation is not just something to do for an hour each day, but rather the mindful experience of life.

Harrison doesn't "practice" actuality meditation, he lives it.

As a long-time student of the nature of consciousness, Harrison has the background and the insight to examine meditation in our culture. With a dry wit and an inquisitive mind, he challenges readers to rid themselves of the mind clutter that besets technique-oriented practices.

Thich Nhat Hanh translated the Buddhist writing, Vimalakirtinirdesa Sutra, which says that the student meditates on detachment but "goes on realizing good things in the world. He meditates on the truth of Impermanence but does not abandon his work to serve and save."

Many years later, Harrison sends a similar message.

"Our inquiry is not intended to bring about some understanding that excludes us from participation in the life around us," he writes. "It is the discovery of life itself in the actuality of each moment."

So meditate or don't meditate - just don't wobble.

Boulder Planet
October 1999