2. Staying Present

Staying Present

• If we can capture more of the moments of our lives, by being fully present and paying attention to what is being experienced, then we can more truly wake up to the fullness of our lives. The passing moments, may seem fleeting and often not very important, but they are our lives! We could say that it is only possible to live our lives in the present moment – everything else is just thought or activities of the mind.
  
  
• We notice how the automatic pilot mode frequently pulls us out of present moment awareness and into the realm of thought. This is usually triggered from a reactive response of dissatisfaction, wanting to fix or grasp something, or wanting something to change. We tend to react in one of three following ways:

1. We experience boredom, because something does not interest us or is not seen as useful to us, and we zone out of the present moment, probably to somewhere in our heads that we find more interesting!
2. We decide that we like an experience or sensation and that is it useful to us. We try to fix and grasp it or stop it from ending. Usually this also ends up in the realm of thought, and we wonder how we may get to keep or to have more of it.
3. We decide that we do not like an experience or sensation and that it is not useful to us. We try to make it go away, push it out of our awareness or think about how we will stop ourselves having such an experience again in the future.

• When we get caught by one of these reactive responses, we have stopped being present and stopped engaging fully with our lives. By seeing life through the veil of our thoughts, our judgments, and our preferences (liking, disliking, boredom), we miss those awe inspiring moments, those heightened moments of waking up! Even the apparent ordinary moments of everyday life can be filled with wonder – seeing a small flower growing through a crack in a wall; hearing the passing of wild geese overhead as they begin their long migration; feeling the drops of Spring rain falling on our face as we walk.
  
  
• The tradition of Haiku poetry and Zen art from China and Japan is embedded in mindfulness practice. The training of the artist was one of learning to see and to hear deeply through the practice and discipline of meditation and paying attention. The artist who would be painting bamboo, could spend years observing bamboo, sitting with it, watching it move in the breezes, exploring it in all seasons, until there was a full understanding of bamboo, a becoming one with bamboo. Then the artist would be ready to take up the brushes. These artists would become skilled in recording those fleeting moments when our breath is taken away, capturing the profound within the ordinary and those crystalline moments of heightened experience. We will find the perspective of the artist ever present in the poems – the witnessing is captured within the witnessed. They are poems of awakening as much as they are poems about mountains or spring blossoms. They capture essential truths of interconnectedness and change.

The birds have vanished into the sky

And now the last clouds drain away

We sit together, the mountain and me

Until only the mountain remains

LI PO