The usual thing is to live overwhelmed by our straining thoughts , emotions and reactions , which have their origin in our daily confrontation with our wishes , frustrations , rivalries , fears , success or antagonisms…
Our ego is the star and victim of that state and holds us trapped in actitudes determined by circumstances that affect us and lead us into confussion , suffering or unstable state of euforia…
The idea is to breakaway from that chaos and train the mind to perceive things as they really are and not the way our ego pretends them to be .
The way to accomplish it is to detach from the sphere ego-experiences and observe things from a serene and calmed perspective .
The instrument is meditation on breath .
Our reactions to daily confrontation with routine experiences , may present us to the observer as an individual very distant from the real hidden essence that underlays in human true nature and which a zen budhist would recognize as the budha .
We will begin training our meditation attitude in a corner of our house , under a bridge , by the riverside …wherever suits us better , keeping in mind that our meditation attitude must be with us throughout our daily experiences .
Let us sit in full balance deeply conscious of what we are about to perform .Sitting in a lotto flower position is of course the best choice to help a unified mind but is not a must . Real buddhism would be a joke if it was so .
Final success of meditation and therefore the liberation of the buddha inside each of us does not depend of how orthodox our sitting is , but on our capacity to trascend our ego dependence routine .
Keeping a shadow light around the place , will also help specially while we are learning .
Some aspects of the meditation below , depend on the type of buddhist school that you live in .I happen to be an old chan of the Hui Neng’s era ( the 6th chinese patriarch founder of the chan as a zen rin-zai pre school ) .
I sit upright to help attention without disturbing balance or causing unnecessary tensions . In front of a regular flat wall . We then breath a few times while we focus in the process about to begin , till we feel that our lungs are in perfect equilibrium and our breath happens smoothly and regularly without tensions .
We should then observe the breath as a phenomena not depending on us while we fix aour eyes on the wall in front .
We observe with our mind the air inflowing and air outflowing at the inner tip of our nose …inhaling , exhaling…witout loosing our eyes attention at a fitcious point on the wall .
We are observing breathing with our mind .There is a body there …inhaling…exhaling…inhaling…exhaling…our eyes a fixed on the fictious point of the wall …
We are observing the breath of a body there …that body is part of the environment…in perfect equilibrium with the environment…the boundaries underlining the body from the environment are not longer perceived…if those boundaries ever existed…
There is no satisfaction on anything being achieved , there is no pursuing of anything …events are simply perceived as they happen … our mind is just observing …body ,environment ,breathing of that body…while we keep our eyes on the fictious wall point…we could penetrate it but we are not promoting anything…we ajust observing…noices at the distance have entered the environment we are observing… but we are not distracted …they are just part of the whole…undesired thaughts initially entering our observation are not longer incoming…everything is balanced…calmness and attention are in equilibrium…
The mind has learned the path…it relaxes attention… gradually and the session is fading .
Brahmason
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