How important is this to your practice?Every-minute Meditation.
Rev. Daizui MacPhillamy
Most students of Buddhism know that the practice of
meditation is not something which is limited to the times
each day we spend in formal seated meditation. But to bring
the mind of meditation out of the meditation hall and into
our everyday world of work and daily living is not always an
easy thing to do. I would like to share with you a method for
helping to do this. It is a practice common to many schools
of Buddhism and is known variously as “mindfulness training”,
“working meditation”, or “every-minute meditation”.
The method can be summarized in five steps:
1. Do one thing at a time.
2. Pay attention to what you are doing.
3. When your mind wanders to something else,
bring it back.
4. Repeat step number three a few hundred thousand
times.
5. But, if your mind keeps wandering to the same
thing over and over, stop for a minute; maybe it is
trying to tell you something important.
That is all there is to it. It is incredibly simple and
requires nothing more than the willingness to do it with
some persistence, yet, at least for me, it has been second only
to formal seated meditation as the most important method of
practice in my training. [continued...]
In Gassho,
Sara H
