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Bringing Meditation to Everyday Life

Now that your meditation has become satisfying and you have committed to a regular practice, how do you begin to bring these benefits into your normal life?

I am assuming that most of us don’t have the luxury of staying on retreat or in monasteries meditating full time.

It’s a fine to enjoy the benefits of meditation while meditating, but to have an impact on our lives we need to find a way to bring our meditation to life.

I believe this is our biggest challenge yet; keeping up with our mind during the day, while at work for example, is very difficult, but it must be done if we are to break free of the habitual tendencies that hinder our progress on the path.

We need to be extremely patient with ourselves as we begin this endeavor; the distractions that occur, sometimes at lightning speed, during a normal workday are bound to be overwhelming.

The good news; if we have been meditating and have found the ability to focus, we know what we need to do.

Keep ‘coming back’.

Even if it’s just for a very brief period of time to breathe deeply a few times before we re-engage our work tasks, we need to be diligent about ‘coming back’.

As with meditation, this practice will be much more difficult at first and then gradually you will find more and more presence as you go through your day.

This practice is very rewarding in many ways: initially you will experience the benefit of added patience for co-workers, greater focus on whatever task you are performing, better work performance in general.

As you proceed you will begin to notice how your mind behaves when you aren’t looking, the traps that catch you during the day that you weren’t even aware of.

As you begin noticing these things more and more you might feel an intense desire to fix yourself. Try to avoid the reconstruction process it can be painfully unsuccessful and add enormous anxiety to your life. Instead, simply notice and let it go.

Sounds too simple right?

As we continually notice how our mind is trapping us and how we react externally, the noose begins to loosen automatically, our neurosis looses its grip. This happens because we start to see that our response is unsatisfactory, and we keep seeing how unsatisfactory it is, over and over. This basic awareness helps our mind to find a new more effective way to react without our heavy handed intervention.

Have you ever noticed that anytime you really work hard to try and change something about your personality and you think that you’ve finally succeeded how a new replacement behavior seems to pop up? This happens because your mind will satisfy itself one way or the other. The behavior is a result of the minds attempt to satisfy some need.

When our behavior and the failed result connection becomes evident to the mind it necessarily looks for more effective methods of dealing with circumstances without becoming agitated or moving the behavior to a new hiding spot.

Patience and tolerance will help as you integrate your meditation into your daily life, begin now and begin to truly live….Ambud

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