Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

some of the deeper wrinkles of our habitual
unconsciousness.
Curiously, just as much if not more mindless behavior
can creep into our most momentous closures and life
transitions, including our own aging and our own
dying. Here, too, mindfulness can have healing
effects. We may be so defended against feeling the
full impact of our emotional pain - whether it be grief,
sadness, shame, disappointment, anger, or for that
matter, even joy or satisfaction - that we
unconsciously escape into a cloud of numbness in
which we do not permit ourselves to feel anything at
all or know what we are feeling. Like a fog,
unawareness blankets precisely those moments that
might be the most profound occasions to see
impermanence at work, to be in touch with the
universal and impersonal aspects of being and
becoming that underlie our personalized emotional
investments, to touch the mystery of being small,
fragile, and temporary, and to come to peace with the
absolute inevitability of change.
In the Zen tradition, group sitting meditations are
sometimes ended with a loud wooden clacker which
is whacked together forcefully. No romantic lingering
with the sound of a soft bell to ease the end of a
sitting. The message here is to cut - time to move on