Meditative Practice

By Rhys Jones

While I don't identify as a Buddhist, I did spend a few years investigating the Buddhist literature.  This literature includes much discussion of practice, which is often instruction about how to do the thing that you are doing.  And for the Buddhists, it's often meditation.  Buddhist meditation focuses on mindfulness and sometimes emptiness.  And the instruction is that, when you find your mind wandering, then gently, and without judgment, just bring your consciousness back to the point, which, again, is usually mindfulness or emptiness.  In our weekly guided meditation at Evenstar's, one of the goals is to embody awareness, to be more aware of our consciousness in our body. Mara describes it not as an attempt to transcend the body but to inhabit the body. In any case, this is why meditation is called a "practice," much like a physician's practice.  It is something that you do, it is not a preparation or training for a future event or expertise.

Or is it? Often we “joke” by asking, “a practice for what?” In other words, to what proficiency are you honing your skill? Meditative practice can often be dismissed because the practice is a practice, it is just some thing you do before you get on and do something else.  But it occurred to me last night, as I was having trouble falling asleep (as troubled times beget troubled rest), that the meditative practice of calling one's consciousness back during meditation is indeed practice for one's life up and away from the cushion.  I see that the mind has an omnipresent responsibility to continually call our consciousness back to the body, to embody consciousness, so that it is not just flying around the universe, flitting from one thought to another, and keeping self from its goal. In other words, meditation on the cushion is practice for keeping your consciousness on point when you are not "in meditation."

My Buddhist practice (which is not to say that the above discourse is representative of Buddhist practice) has been informed by David Deida, Naked Buddhism, Chögyam Trungpa's Shambhala, The Sacred Path of the Warrior (which I found profound), Ezra Bayda's Being Zen Bringing Meditation to Life, and Pema Chödrön's When Things Fall Apart (and, of course, Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha which was an inescapable read for a teenager in the 1970s). I don't know why I was drawn to westerners (for the most part), and not the sacred texts of Buddhism, or even the writings of the Dalai Lama, but there it is, my introduction to Buddhism and sacred meditative practice.