When we practice meditation, we are practicing reacquainting ourselves with our natural awareness. We remind ourselves what our consciousness is really like before the thinking mind jumps in with complaining and judging all the other things it does. And that awareness doesn’t end when the meditation ends—it is always there. But we get busy and stressed and the discursive mind narrows us down again, so we lose our connection to that much bigger awareness of the present moment.
So the invitation is to pause during the day and tap back into what we experience in meditation—even if just for a few seconds. This is the power of taking one deep breath, or really noticing what it is like to wash your hands. Doing that allows you to glimpse again how thoughts and emotions, when they are unobserved, collapse that awareness down into a more limiting--and limited--experience of the world. And that glimpse can then remind you that whatever is happening in this present moment, you don’t have to remain limited in the next one.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
