This is an excellent and easy meditation. I use it on my morning walks. I just take in what I am passing through. Words drift off because my senses are just perceiving and I am experiencing. I feel the cool air on my skin, the sun upon my face, and listen to bird song as I walk. It is such a respite, a gentle way when the day of abstract concerns will meet me later. It is one of the forms that I love when I go backcountry camping. Even when walking with a companion, much time is spent in silence just experiencing the world in a much more direct and uninterpreted way.
This way resets me, and makes the world all new again.
21 May 2015 at 13:51
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I have become aware that there are multiple forms of meditation, with several goals and different - contrasting - effects.
One thing I do, or which sometimes happens-to-me, is something I haven't seen specifically described - perhaps because its effects are modest. It is a state of heightened present-moment, here and now, dynamic receptivity.
The first time I noticed it was when I was at college, walking on a path across a field, when I became aware that a warm wind was blowing between my fingers in a pleasant way, and I began to focus on the sensations that were happening to me - the feelings on my skin, the appearance of the path and the grass nearby, sounds of birds and traffic - and quite suddenly my consciousness snapped-into awareness of the here and now of what was happening to me: a state of Present Receptivity.
It didn't last long, because almost immediately I started 'thinking-about' the sensation, which distanced me from this sensory contact; but it was a valuable experience because I knew myself to be orientated and placed - also it dispelled that angsty worry which tends to grind-away for much of life.
Since then, I have always been able to induce the feeling whenever I remember to do it - which is not very often! But one time is in the morning or evening when I step outside to stand and look at the sky.
For just a moment or two, life is not just sweeping-by - but slows to the point that I become aware of myself, floating in the stream of time.
"Present Receptivity - a neglected form of meditation"
1 Comment -
This is an excellent and easy meditation. I use it on my morning walks. I just take in what I am passing through. Words drift off because my senses are just perceiving and I am experiencing. I feel the cool air on my skin, the sun upon my face, and listen to bird song as I walk. It is such a respite, a gentle way when the day of abstract concerns will meet me later. It is one of the forms that I love when I go backcountry camping. Even when walking with a companion, much time is spent in silence just experiencing the world in a much more direct and uninterpreted way.
This way resets me, and makes the world all new again.
21 May 2015 at 13:51