Mind Full to Mindful

by Om Swami

  Make this little stone your trigger of mindfulness, so you look at that stone whenever you are very happy and to calm yourself down, for this is not going to last. Remind yourself that it is all temporary. Today I am feeling happy because of this great news, I got a promotion at work or somebody has fed me hot chapattis, and so on. Calm down: it’s not going to last. Tomorrow, I’ll be eating stale food and my new boss will be giving me hell. I just have to rejoice in the moment, but not get too excited about it. I have to have that sense of wonder, that sense of awe. This doesn’t mean I have to be passionate or very excited about it. It is what it is.

  When you are down, take out that stone, look at that stoneit and count your blessings. Remind yourself that you have so much to be happy about, so much to be grateful for. And that stone becomes your trigger of mindfulness. Touch it every day. Look at it every night before going to bed.

  When Meera fell in love with Krishna, she would walk around holding a little idol of Krishna, her Giridhar Gopal. That was her trigger of mindfulness. Amidst all the adversities and challenges she faced, she knew that the one in her hand, this Krishna, was all that mattered to her. For this Krishna, this Gopal, she would face any challenge and bear any resistance.

  All religions have symbols, whether that be a mark on the forehead, an insignia, a turban, a prayer cap, a certain garb or whatever. These are triggers of mindfulness so you don’t forget what you are supposed to do and how you are supposed to act; what it is that you stand for in your life and where you belong. All these symbols are reminders.

  If you choose not to do this, for any reason, maybe you could keep another reminder. Most of you have a phone. Stick a little piece of paper on the back of your phone that says, ‘Be grateful, be mindful’. When you are holding your phone that will become your reminder.

  These methods I have shared are more contemporary ways of being mindful for those of us who struggle to find the time or appropriate conditions to gaze at walls.

  Besides, you could do wall gazing on a stone. That becomes your method of being mindful. Remember, while gazing don’t analyze the stone. Simply be quiet and look at it. Keep your back straight and sit in any comfortable posture. It’s important not to analyze the stone.

  Tiny changes are all that is required to attain perfection. On a race track in the Olympics, a fraction of a second determines whether you will be jumping for joy with a gold medal or feeling bad that you were not in the first three places. To attain perfection, it’s not the big things but always the minute ones that make a difference. At least, that’s been my experience.

  The most important thing to remember about meditation is that if you get used to doing it the wrong way, it becomes increasingly harder to correct those mistakes later on. So it’s better to start right and champion it correctly so you can derive the benefits. That would lead to greater stillness of the mind, which would help you attain better stillness of the body. They are interconnected. You can’t be in a still body unless you have a still mind and vice versa. If you can’t have a still mind, you will sit down to pray and your mind would be elsewhere. You would try to sleep and your mind would be elsewhere. While eating, you would be thinking about something else. Zen is simply about being present in the present moment.

  The Zen Tea Ritual (Chado)

  The first thing most people do in the morning is no longer praying to God or looking at the sunrise or taking in some fresh air. Instead, with the eagerness of a teenager on a first date (multiplied by ten), they jump to their phones to see messages and social media updates. As if it’s the oxygen mask dropped from a plane flying at a high altitude. Zooming in, zooming out, people start checking pictures or messages or videos, lying in their beds, or they take their devices to the wash room. I don’t know how this lifestyle has come about, but for me, it’s hard to imagine a worse start to the day.

  Think about this: a beautiful night has ended; you have got up well rested. Instead of beginning a calm morning with a sense of fulfilment and gratitude, you immediately rush … maybe you have fifteen emails and some text messages and missed phone calls and so on. You are going to experience a rushed feeling and restlessness throughout the day.

  You can tell people that you don’t respond to your messages right away, and it’s perfectly fine to do so; that you would respond in two days’ time, in three days’ time, or even up to a week. I used to practise this even when I was managing my own business. The enormous, almost compulsive pressure most people feel to constantly reply to messages night and day is detrimental to their emotional health. Just have an offline time, maybe half an hour, an hour, two hours – whatever you can do – when you are not contactable.

  I read a beautiful quote once. It said, ‘I live by myself. But I always make two cups of tea in the evening. I don’t feel lonely then.’8 Something as simple and normal as the act of drinking tea could easily be one’s sacred ritual.

  That leads me to the quiet and mindful Zen tea ritual: chado. Many of us drink tea. Some also drink coffee, or maybe alcohol. When we eat or drink, though, we usually just gulp the food or drink down. When we drink our tea, we may start responding to a message, speaking over the phone or watching TV – or maybe even reading a book, which is a far lesser crime against mindfulness than others.

  The Zen tea ritual is practiced in almost all the Zen monasteries, worldwide. The idea is that you drink your tea mindfully, preparing it with joy and serenity, taking in the aroma, the taste and then savouring it, sip by sip. You drink so deliberately and so naturally, that you experience the tea touching your tongue and then your palate, then going down your esophagus and into your belly.

  I am sure everybody has felt this sensation at some point. If you are thirsty in the morning and you wait a couple of hours and then drink chilled juice, for example, you feel it going inside your body. You can have that same experience, every time, regardless of whether you are parched or your thirst has already been satisfied.

  The Zen tea ritual begins with gratitude, to express how deeply thankful I am, that I have the opportunity to sit in a peaceful place and have a cup of tea. When we start Zen meditation, Zazen, we normally bow. Not with full prostration: we just bow down on our own seats before we sit and then we turn around and bow to the people in front of us.

  Everyone forms circles and has a cup.

  Now before you devour this tea, look at me, please. Just very briefly. You don’t have to turn. You can just gently twist. So one of you is going to pour three cups and the other one, the other three cups. Do this very mindfully. As you mix the spices or prepare the tea … when you pour, feel the pot lighten as the tea fills the cup.

  We say, ‘The whole afternoon, I did not sleep,’ or ‘Today was bad.’ We classify thousands of moments in one unit, and are then unable to segregate them. The whole day becomes bad. When you are aware of each passing moment, you enjoy life more, and you are infused with it.

  Observe and enjoy every aspect of the tea ritual. Serve each other... Take the cup close to your nose and inhale the aroma deeply, as if you are smelling wine, so just smell the aroma. Just inhale it deeply and take the first sip as if you are drinking nectar. Make it a sacred ritual. Enjoy it, one sip at a time, and you can smile throughout.

  The more you drink it mindfully, the more you can be in the present moment. Take your time. You are not a school-going child, dressed in your uniform, quickly finishing your milk so you can rush off to catch your bus. You have the right to enjoy your tea how you like.

  The lifestyle of many people, especially those who live in big cities, is such that there is no time to do anything. Everything is done in a great rush, and we often come up with the excuse that we have no time. But if you take just five minutes and drink your tea mindfully, it would definitely lift your mood.

  Even if you drink masala chai, or whatever, it would uplift you, because mindfulness of a few minutes does that. You just need to take a cup of tea and drink it mindfully, without any worry, concern, reminding yourself,
I don’t have to listen to the news for five minutes, I don’t have to read the newspaper; nobody is bothered whether I know the stories. I don’t have to take a phone call. People can wait for five minutes. And I don’t have to respond to an email or read a message this very instant – the other person is not going to curse me.

  All of that can wait.

  There was a man who was very fond of alcohol, and he had too much to drink one night at a pub. He was carrying a bottle of liquor back home and on the way, he stumbled, fell down, and hurt himself badly. He staggered to his feet, and noticed that his leg was wet.

  ‘Oh my God!’ he shouted and lifted his trouser to see. ‘Thank God! It’s only blood, my bottle is intact!’

  You should be this much in love with the little things you do in your life; to have that joy, that bliss (hopefully not with beer). You can give twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes to other things. You can give that to people you care about and to people who care about you. You can give that to the world and so on and so forth. But five minutes in each day, give to yourself. If you can make that fifteen, even better – and half an hour is better still. If you make it more than that, you may have arguments at home, and people will say you’ve gone nuts and you are wasting your time sitting around doing nothing. Keep it reasonable, but keep it regular – that’s the key.

  Nobody can get to your soul, your consciousness, your manas (psyche) or your mind unless you allow then. We say that other people are the cause of our sadness, but in reality, nobody can actually give you grief. Only we allow ourselves to become the recipients of such emotions or actions. When you drink your tea, drink it with complete feeling. Drink it as if it is your last cup. Hopefully it won’t be, but drink it with this mindset. Make this a ritual in your life.

  Equally Zen-like is another action which I feel could benefit many people, but I don’t know how you might feel about it: have an offline time every day. Turn your phone off or put it on flight mode or disconnect the data for half an hour. You don’t need to know most of the constant chatter you get on social media, anyway. It is not helping you grow, mentally, intellectually or spiritually. It is largely pointless, and is incessant.

  These days, we are even reading books on devices, and it’s hard to read a book without getting distracted. In the middle of your reading, you will go back to see if someone has emailed, messaged or called you. This is extremely unproductive. Multitasking is one big sham. It’s far better, in my view, to do just one thing properly than have scattered energies trying to do multiple things.

  This reminds me of a man who would go to the pub at the end of every week, and order three glasses of beer. One day, the bartender asked him, ‘Why do you order three beers at once?’

  ‘We are three brothers in different parts of the world,’ he replied, chugging his beer. ‘I drink one for each of us.’

  A few months later, he came to the pub as usual, but only ordered two beers.

  ‘Is everything okay? You’re now drinking only two beers,’ the bartender said in a sympathetic tone.‘What has happened to the third brother?’

  ‘Oh no, everything is fine… I quit drinking. These two are for my brothers.’

  I read this quote once: ‘What do I do, God? Anything I like is either illegal, immoral or unhealthy!’ If you are drinking caffeine, that is okay; you are not committing a crime. Take it easy.

  My point is this: Have a ritual, something that you hold sacred to your heart, that you can do mindfully and from which you receive some energy. That’s the tea ritual. But it could just be sitting down and playing a musical instrument too.

  Don’t rate, berate or calibrate your life … celebrate it.

  Kinhin and Sleep Meditation

  If you have never meditated while walking, I urge you to definitely give it a try. You will instantly feel a sense of calmness descending on you as your mind will go quiet and it will begin to focus on the present moment of observing your gait.

  Kinhin is walking meditation. Zen gives you flexibility: You can do sitting, standing or walking meditation. You may do chado, the Zen tea ritual, or you could simply sit quietly.

  Someone asked me the other day if she could meditate lying down. Surely, you can. Having said that, the primary issue with meditating lying down is that you fall asleep quite easily. (Maybe that’s a good thing, especially if you have insomnia.) Therefore, to slip into the lap of nidra, sleep, you could most certainly meditate while lying down. In fact, everybody would benefit by meditating while they are trying to sleep. The principles of meditation remain the same: you listen to your breathing; inhalation, exhalation. It’s a good way to fall asleep, and the quality of your sleep would also improve.

  Personally, I can’t just fall asleep either, be it for a siesta or at night. This started in the Himalayas when immense sensations of extraordinary intensity began manifesting in my body and most notably in my forehead. I haven’t been able to rid myself of these sensations in all these years. Falling asleep is a four-step process for me. The first thing I do is lie down on my back. I feel constant, profound sensations in my head. These sensations build up to such proportions that I have no words to explain what happens at that time. After a while, I lie down on my left side for fifteen minutes, and then on my right for another fifteen minutes. Then I lie down on my tummy to have those sensations subside. This balances the subtle energies for me and I’m able to slip into light sleep then. Restful but light.

  It takes me one hour to fall a sleep, and in that one hour I am pretty much meditating, even though I don’t want to. I don’t want to practice meditation as an act anymore because the sensations continue to build. I don’t lose my consciousness but it’s something like that. Before that one-hour process for sleeping, I need one hour to wind down. If I have had any interaction with anybody at all – even if it is a discourse, or somebody seeing me over dinner – I need to be on my own for an hour after that before I can do sleep meditation.

  To sum up, I need two hours’ preparation – call this one of the side effects of intense meditation, because it is not desirable, and I don’t want it to be this way. There is something that is just flowing through my whole body all the time. I constantly feel these waves of bliss exuding from the top of my head. And just as it doesn’t matter how much you like getting drunk, you don’t want to remain drunk all the time – it’s too tiring – I am constantly in that bliss, such that everything is a bit of a challenge for me in this world: to hold a normal conversation, to talk to people and so on.

  Only when I joke and laugh a bit, do I get a bit of momentary relief. Those sensations disappear for a few seconds, and then come back again. That’s why I call humour divine – it gives me relief that nothing else can. The sensations disappear when I fall asleep, and as soon as I wake, they are just as powerful in the first three to five seconds. Even now as I write this, I’m experiencing these sensations.

  Anyhow, as I stated earlier, Kinhin is walking meditation. Think of it as mindful walking. For most of us, walking is an automatic act as there is no thinking required. The core idea of Zen is to infuse all our actions with a sense of awareness so nothing remains automatic anymore, so that we are conscious of every little thing in our lives. If you can retain your meditative state while walking, you are practically meditating all the time. When you do Kinhin, you will realize that though how we take walking for granted, it is a beautiful act. You will also understand how mindfulness can play a role in the simple act of walking as much as any other activity.

  When you get used to walking mindfully, it becomes natural for you. Generally, when we go for a stroll, we think about other things, and we are just walking because we are used to it. The effects of mindful walking trickle down to all the other areas of your life. Your sitting meditation becomes better, your mind gets calmer, you become more mindful when eating, bathing and so on.

  The way to practice Kinhin is to take one step at a time, and in that step, pay attention to your movements and shifting of weight
. Let’s say I place my right step first. In that step, I am going to place my centre of awareness on the shifting of body weight. When I lift my right foot, the weight shifts onto my left … Here I am lifting my foot and I am going very slowly… Now, my weight is distributed between both legs, and I am going forward. Walk extremely slowly. You may check Kinhin videos on YouTube (I’m confident there will be plenty). It’s not rocket science. Just remember to walk extremely slowly and see how your weight is shifting.

  Practices like Zazen, wall gazing, Kinhin or any other will only take you so far. It’s imperative to understand the core philosophy of Zen and what better way than to turn to the words of Buddha himself found in a core Zen text: Prajna Paramita Sutra also known as the Heart Sutra.

  Your thoughts, your feelings, your consciousness, O Shariputra, have no tangible basis. They are empty. Impermanent. Transient.9

  The Nature of All Things

  Prajna Paramita Sutra – I

  After Buddha’s first discourse of Zen, there is only one other discourse he ever gave on the philosophy of it. It’s one of the shortest Buddhist texts. Though there is a longer version of this text too, scholars have considered only the shorter version authentic. Known as Prajna Paramita Hrydyam or Prajna Paramita Sutra, or sometimes just Hridya Sutra or Heart Sutra. In this brief but remarkable text, Buddha imparted wisdom to his most promising and one of his closest disciples: Shariputra. Without further ado, let me walk you through this beautiful text, the essence of all Buddhist teachings. I am sharing with you the actual text with the literal translation which is followed by my own thoughts or exposition.