“Zenfully Quool Quotes”
Currently featuring “The Art of Living”
By Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh
You may like to apply the practice of mindful walking
wherever you go,
in the city or in a park, going to work or going shopping,
at the airport or by the bank of a river.
Nobody needs to know you are practicing walking meditation.
You walk naturally and at ease.
I suggest you choose a short distance that you walk every day,
perhaps from the parking lot to the office or
from your home to the bus stop.
It doesn’t take a long time to master walking meditation.
We can feel the benefit right away.
A single step is enough to touch peace and freedom.
Walking meditation is linked to the practice of mindful breathing.
When you walk,
you coordinate your breathing and your steps.
Relax your body and let go of any thinking about
the past and the future,
and bring your mind back to the present moment.
Feel the contact with the ground.
As you breathe in,
notice the number of steps you are making while breathing in.
As you breathe out,
notice the number of steps that you are making while breathing out.
Allow your breathing to be natural, and simply pay attention to
how many steps you take as you breathe in and out.
After a while,
you notice there is a rhythm, a coordination,
between your breathing and your steps.
It’s like music.
Concentrating a hundred percent on our breath liberates us.
We become a free person in just a few seconds,
free to transform the habits of our ancestors.
When you practice mindful walking,
you walk with your body and your mind together.
You should really be there, fully present in every step.
“I am here. I am really here.”
You might like to try slow walking.
If you’re alone, you can be as slow as you want.
When you breathe in, just take one step.
And when you breathe out, just take one step.
While breathing in, you might like to say,
“I have arrived.”
While breathing out, you can say,
“I am home.”
It means,
I have arrived in the present moment, in the here and the now.
This is not a declaration; it’s a realization.
You have to really arrive.
Every step helps you to stop running—
not only your body but also the running of your mind.
With walking meditation,
you recognize your habit of running
so you can gradually transform it.
You need to invest one hundred percent of your body and mind
in walking meditation so you can truly arrive.
This is a challenge.
If you cannot arrive now, when will you arrive?
So stay there.
Continue to breathe until you feel that you have completely arrived,
that you are totally present. Then you can make another step and
imprint the seal of arrival on the ground.
Smile a smile of victory and rejoice!
The entire cosmos is witness to your arrival.
If you can make one step like this,
you can make two or three.
What’s essential is that you succeed in making the first step.
“I have arrived; I am home” means “I don’t want to run anymore.”
I’ve been running all my life and I’ve arrived nowhere.
Now I want to stop.
My destination is the here and now,
the only time and place where true life is possible.
This is slow walking meditation—
a way to truly train yourself in really stopping, calming, and arriving.
Once you’ve mastered the art of walking slowly,
you’ll be able to practice walking meditation at any speed.
Walking mindfully doesn’t necessarily mean walking slowly.
It means walking with peace and freedom.
Each step taken in mindfulness nourishes and heals you.
You simply go home to your breathing and your body.
With every breath, with every step,
you allow your body and your feelings to relax.
You walk naturally,
in peace and freedom, fully present in every step,
aware of your body and everything all around you.
With every step you have sovereignty, you have freedom,
you are your true self.
~
You don’t need to get to your destination in order to arrive.
You arrive at every step.
You realize that you are alive
and that your body is a masterpiece of the cosmos.
As you touch peace and freedom in every step,
you are touching nirvana, your cosmic body, your God body.
Don’t think that nirvana is something far away.
You can touch nirvana at every step.
When we practice walking meditation we touch the ultimate,
the Kingdom of God, with our feet, our mind, and our whole body.
Zenfully Quool Quotes Quommentary
by rog
For those that are determined to take the necessary steps along a journey
towards the higher states of human consciousness through ‘Insight’ meditation…
one must attain and maintain a depth of ‘one-pointed awareness’
that follows them from the deep meditations, off the cushion,
and flow with through the days.
Walking meditation is a way to mindfully maintain that
non-distractive meditation perspective, even while moving and walking.
Although it’s best to arrange and arrange a lengthy part of your life
to the Fruition of this endeavor…
Thus,
Planning your walking meditation in some form of seclusion in nature is best.
But,
If you are so inspired…
You should walk and move with this perceptive at all times.
During your long sit…
Be curious of what lie just beyond the next breath…
Yet,
Stay intimately aware with each breath…
The seemingly same breaths… will become more & more…
Subtle…
Until air flow is so slow, it’s barely perceived…
Yet,
The breath goes in… slowly…
And, out… slowly.
The body becomes comfortable… sort of ‘disembodied’…
It looses more and more sense of being there,
as the sensations seem to fade …
Or become less and less… relevant.
Early in meditations, stray thoughts seemed… natural.
Once your ‘Practice’ matures…
The feeling when a stray thought tries to arise…
Almost feels like a burden, compared to just…
Being…
So the inspiration to let it go, before it burdens one further arises.
The meditations start to evolve from the strong ‘effort’ of focused concentration…
To the effortless phase.
With no other motivation to achieve,
other than just a curiosity of what will be experienced next,
as the depth… deepens.
The ‘cosmic raft’ floated away countless breaths ago…
The first ‘break throughs’ rocked your world many months ago.
Now,
Just a subtle curiosity provides the intention to explore
what the next level of clarity will reveal.
The world goes on…
The stories the idiots create… goes on…
But “you”…
“you’re” not there.
As the days pass, new news will be unavoidable.
If you must, allow yourself to become informed.
Process that senseless news the willfully ignorant stupid people have created
and now has manifested into a festering shit ball of stupid.
Rage if you have to…
But keep it on the outside.
Once you’re done…
Be done.
Breath it all out.
Breath in mindful loving kindness.
Love comes in… Love breaths out.
Make each movement and breath
an extension of that Peace.
Allow the idiots to be as they are.
Allow yourself to be the higher Self that you naturally are.
Look forward to your next long and deep meditation session.
Be curious of what the new depth will reveal.
On the Path towards Enlightenment…
It’s not the destination… a place in the future …
It’s the here & now…
Savior each breath along the Journey.
