I just found a really easy and straightforward practice that you can do to develop more mindfulness.
Mindfulness is awareness. Awareness
which can be tuned in to our life at any time. When we practice
being mindful, we are actually filling our mind with what is really
going on right now. For instance we can be mindful of an ant walking
across our kitchen floor. We can get on our knees and really look at
this small being. We may have all sorts of judgements about the ant
being on our kitchen floor; we may hate that ant because it
represents the “chaos” of nature infiltrating our well controlled
environment. We may see that ant and jump to the conclusion that we
must regain control of our life and to do so requires that we kill it
because that ant will bring his colleagues into our house and surely
cause our world to collapse. But if we don't really believe the
ultimate truthfulness of our conclusions and judgements about that ant, and we just
look without wanting anything to be different, then we are moving
toward the pure awareness which underlies our judgmental awareness.
This underlying awareness is the source of all beauty and it is our
connection to our real life. The one that's happening while we are
busy keeping everything under our control. If we see the ant as a
unique experience just like the whirling plastic bag in the movie
American Beauty, then we will see the sacredness of that ant.
Meditating is a great way to condition
your mind so that it can see the underlying beauty of life, but it
has its pitfalls. One such pitfall is that its easy to feel as
though we are failing whenever we find ourselves thinking. We may
not realize that the noticing of a thought is the gap between
thoughts and when we notice that we are thinking, (before we scold
ourselves for thinking), we are falling into the state of
mindfulness. The ego hates this state so it wants to fill the gap
with self admonishment, or even just the label “thinking” which
implies that we were doing something that we shouldn't have.
Noticing can be just pure awareness if we also notice the thoughts
that come up after we noticed the first thought. When you lay your head on your soft
pillow at the end of a long day, do you say, “pillow” ? Probably
not, you probably just experience the bliss at least for a few
moments anyway. This is the gap.
So, I have a mindfulness practice to
offer, and I have to say it seems to be a good one for developing mindfulness
because you can tell right away when your awareness has drifted away.
Here's how you do it.
The next time your dish strainer or
dishwasher is full, instead of putting the dishes away as fast as you
can, try putting them away without making any noise, or as little
noise as possible. In order to do this, you have to really pay
attention to every little movement and you have to go slow. If you
find yourself getting annoyed and frustrated then you can stop and
feel that feeling state out of curiosity. You can contemplate what it is that is so annoying about the practice as well. As you practice this, you
will see that in order to take each spoon out of the silverware cage,
you have to have an almost intense amount of awareness. Just picking
up and putting a spoon down on the table without noise requires that
you are really paying attention to what you are doing. Just like
looking at the ant with intense curiosity, you can notice every
little nuance of spoon and you can notice how that spoon is resting
on the fork underneath it. When you aren't paying attention then the
spoon, fork, bowl will make a noise. It may make a noise anyway, but
its not about getting it right, its about moving your awareness into
the state of mindfulness. Whenever I do this practice, I have a great
time because its kind of like a game as well as a great doorway into
mindfulness. If its not fun then maybe you are taking the whole
practice too seriously. There is no prize for getting it right,
except that you will be living more fully and have access to the true
beauty and wisdom of this world.
