Going Nowhere Meditation
One gift of continual practice is that stopping and starting, beginning and ending our practice is no longer relevant.
All practice involves awareness and presence. As we know, these aspects of True Nature are fundamental to experience. Attending to and cultivating awareness and presence is practice. What difference does it make if we attend and cultivate when we sit or move, in silence or in chaos, at morning or at night?
I used to think I needed to quiet my mind to meditate and practice – ha! Presence and awareness are just as much a part of both. When I meditate in this chair with the window open, what difference is it to me if a truck goes by, or people walk by talking, or birds sing or it is the middle of the night and dead calm? Practice is being with awareness and presence.
And, it’s not like there is only 10% presence in cacophony. There is 100% presence in any situation or circumstances. Practice is not to go from 10% presence to 100% presence because there is nowhere to go, it’s all 100%, but I may not experience pure presence as I am there to some degree. What I can do is bring 100% of me to whatever degree of presence I am experiencing and forget about changing anything.
If our mind is chattering, why not tend to the presence in that experience? If our mind wanders, instead of leaving that experience and starting over, why not simply tend to the presence in the wandering?
So as we learn to value not arriving, we arrive, for true arriving is a matter of not leaving, not departing. Usually, we are always leaving ourselves, always departing; and we think we are going someplace. When we try to go someplace, all we end up doing is separating from our true nature. We are always trying to find our true nature by going away from it. So inquiry takes us to the point where we simply recognize how we are leaving—and the ideas and beliefs that make us feel that we should leave. When it truly reveals its fundamental ground, inquiry teaches us not to go anywhere—because there is nowhere to go. – A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry
Think of continual practice as a river. As we move through our day, the river flows. When we sit, we are like a pool in the river. The water is presence, the state of dynamism doesn’t decrease water being 100% water.
On this planet, water flows according to topography and gravity. Water doesn’t care about obstacles, why should we? If we encounter an obstacle, why not be like water behind a damn – let our awareness of presence build in the immediacy of being with the obstacle. Eventually, we may discover the obstacle is merely presence, or the obstacle will no longer be able to hold back the presence or we will simply reach a point where we overflow the obstacle.
Why concern ourselves with outcomes when we can simply be with presence and allow nature to take its course?