Our meditation practice is not separate from the experience and actions of living our life. And living fully is the meditation practice. So living and meditating are one thing: living meditation. If there is separation of any kind, it is not yet correct practice. Living Meditation is interconnected living. And interconnected living relies on Open and Clear Awareness.
This meditation practice has two aspects: sitting meditation and the meditation of living daily life, with all its activities, situations and events. So meditation becomes life; Life becomes meditation.
Our sitting meditation is based primarily on the Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi (1091-1157), but with a bit of Dzogchen influence. We call this meditation, “Ocean of Awareness Reflection” (OAR).
The living daily life meditation is the practice of bringing our open awareness into all activities of life.
Living meditation is full and open awareness of the present moment. It is completely inclusive, but not attached to experience. This awareness has no center and no edges. It is vast and intimate at the same time. It is a presence without any agenda. A relaxed awareness that has enough concentration to maintain it.
When we live from this perspective and in this way, we are open to everything, life is full and spacious, and we can embrace all of it as it appears, changes, flows. We see that there is beauty in all of it, because any part is also the whole. Nothing is excluded. We see that everything that happens must happen exactly that way because there are precisely the right conditions for it to manifest. Our Living Meditation practice takes care of us so that we are more and more comfortable in this unpredictable flow of life.
When we practice and live in this way, we transform and heal ourselves, our fellow practitioners and all other life. Our life is deep and complete. Living Meditation is interconnected living. Our practice manifests as a luminous spaciousness that arises from our true nature of mind:
“No matter how we feel, we abide in the nature of mind;
No matter how we live, we stay in the nature of mind;
No matter how we move, we move in the nature of mind.
In luminous spaciousness, coming and going are impossible – No movement in the victors’ dimension!” Longchenpa
(As quoted from the book, Spaciousness, a translation of the Great Dzogchen Master, Longchenpa, Keith Dowman.)