Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

harshness, volume, automaticity on the one hand, or
softness, gentleness, sensitivity on the other - as well
as its content.
Each region of the physical body has its counterpart
in an emotional body or map which carries a deeper
meaning for us, often completely below our level of
awareness. In order to continue growing, we need to
continuously activate, listen to, and learn from our
emotional body. Lying-down meditations can help a
lot with this as long as when you get up you are
willing to risk the stands that your insights might
require. In the old days, our cultures, mythologies,
and rituals helped in the process of activating our
emotional body and honoring its vitality and its
impermanence. Usually this was done in same-sex
initiation practices organized by the community of
elders, whose job it was to educate the adolescents
about what it meant to be a full adult within the tribe
or culture. The importance of the development of the
emotional body is hardly recognized today. We are
pretty much left to our own devices to come to full
adulthood, whether man or woman. Our elders may
have become so denatured themselves from a lack of
such nurturance that there is no longer a collective
knowledge of how to guide the awakening emotional
vitality and authenticity of our young people, our
children. Mindfulness may contribute to a