Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

presence. Their nature is elemental, rock. Rock-hard.
Rock-solid. Mountains are the place of visions, where
one can touch the panoramic scale of the natural
world and its intersection with life's fragile but
tenacious rootings. Mountains have played key roles
in our history and prehistory. To traditional peoples,
mountains were and still are mother, father, guardian,
protector, ally.
In meditation practice, it can be helpful sometimes to
"borrow" these wonderful archetypal qualities of
mountains and use them to bolster our intentionality
and resolve to hold the moment with an elemental
purity and simplicity. The mountain image held in the
mind's eye and in the body can freshen our memory
of why we are sitting in the first place, and of what it
truly means, each time we take our seat, to dwell in
the realm of non-doing. Mountains are
quintessentially emblematic of abiding presence and
stillness.
The mountain meditation can be practiced in the
following way, or modified to resonate with your
personal vision of the mountain and its meaning. It
can be done in any posture, but I find it most powerful
when I am sitting cross-legged on the floor, so that
my body looks and feels most mountain-like, inside
and out. Being in the mountains or in sight of a