Being Mindful in a Busy World

Remember to relax. Since meditation ultimately is relaxation, my one word of advice is: Relax. Let go. Release your grasping. Can we just surrender to life moment by moment? Surrender to what is instead of arguing that our point of view is the correct one?

Remember to send loving-kindness to yourself and to the world. Once while on retreat, I had a vivid dream that Death was in my single bed with me. I struggled briefly to escape his clutches, realized it was useless, turned to face him, and knew that all I could do was love Death. He was too old and too jaded to care about one more person.

Go outdoors and lie down on the grass or among the trees or in the snow. Let this earthly body sink into Mother Earth, the senses alive to the birth and death of each sensation of sound, of the feel of a slight breeze, of the sight of leaf and flower or branch and snowflake. Each moment of consciousness arising and passing away, just as it always has.

The Buddha was a genius and laid out an internally consistent path, so deep and even so counter-intuitive that I never could have discovered it on my own. For decades, I confused wisdom with knowledge. Any advice I could give would be received as knowledge. “Oh yeah. I know that. Uh-huh. Okay,” the hearer responds. Knowledge comes and goes and is worth a game of trivial pursuits, but knowledge, too, disappears.

We try to prop up our egos with stories and beliefs and knowledge. History reassures us that time goes on, that we have a place. Philosophy assuages our fear that life is meaningless. Yet when we look closely we find concepts crumbing away in our hands.

Eventually everything turns to ash. The body-ash and smoke. Thoughts are gone with the wind. Knowledge and philosophy will continue to be argued about for millennia with nobody proving or disproving anything. After all, “it” can only be experienced, and the experience cannot be put into words.

My last advice is Love, and that is better done with the heart than with a pen.