Experiencing life from the inside-out is a bit different than 2 other approaches we will also use in this module:
1. Using mindfulness to address certain tricky situations in life, to make them less difficult.
2. Laying onto life activities a semi-formal frame that turns them into a version of formal meditation. Or, attempting to extend the deliberate, conscious action of mindfulness continuously throughout life.
We can and should practice these things. Why not make life easier and difficult situations turn out better if we can? Happiness is an excellent warm-up for meditation.
And why not continue to generate the focus and concentration that builds up in formal meditation, and generate it bit by bit in life as well? Keeping up momentum during the day is great for your practice and will translate back into formal meditation, with more ease and clarity when you meditate.
But what stopping at these two approaches might do is skip over opportunities to realize what you really are, by putting the focus on the changing situations, actions and reactions and activities of life instead of the one who is here, the one that is life.
Becoming skillful at life, attaining some mastery of life, and fixing things where we are not so great at life, are all good aspirations and great conditions, and so is the aspiration to be present all the time. They are really helpful in meditation.
But they refer to a person who has to live life well, or not, who might screw things up and sometimes does not, etc.
There is something deeper here than that “person.” It’s you. And you are here whether you are remembering to be mindful, or not, all caught up in things or not, living skillfully or unskillfully.
And tremendous power and good fortune in life actually results when we switch allegiance over to who and what we really are, where we are really living our life from. It’s effortless. It’s spontaneous. We just seem to do the right things without trying, because the “person” is not doing them.
Everyday life meditation can lead with the aspiration not to be a person who masters life, but to get clear about seeing the difference between “persony-ness” and “beingness.”
Let’s explore this in the midst of everyday life! We have strategically chosen meditations just for this purpose, but the most important thing is that you start to understand, and then deepen, what it means to have a commitment to your beingness, to discover that in life, and align with that.
It will be tempting to watch yourself do living meditation and use it as a way to contribute to your persony-ness, as evidence in the on-going “trial of you” being staged in the thinking mind.
This is the challenge: can you align your everyday life meditation away from the evaluation of your person? (You can!) Or will your thinking mind be granted the authority to judge your success or failure in that?
Logically, putting it that way, it may seem impossible. But like all Awakening Being meditations, it’s only the thinking mind’s belief and logic that makes it seem that way. What we discover is something else.
