Many meditaion teachers tell their students to cling to the feelings of peace and tranquility they feel after meditating as they go about their daily activities. There is some merit to this, of course, but clinging to a feeling, even a deeply satisfying one, tends to limit one’s ability to experience the plenitude of experience.
In Buddhist meditation, they speak about ‘mindfulness.’ Basically, mindfulness (or mindfullness, if you like) is the practice of learning to do whatever you’re doing with full consciousness. That’s what the Zen Buddhists mean when they say, ‘When sitting (meditating), sit – when eating, eat.’
If you learn to apply this to your daily life, you eventually learn to live in the moment even while experiencing the most stressful situations. Interestingly, many extreme athletes have had these moments of complete awareness when they have pushed their limits and are facing life-threatening situations.
Snowboarding is an extreme sport. In order to tackle near-vertical slopes, the snowboarder must be so skilled that he acts on instinct. A Giro Ski Helmet is going to be of little use to him when he’s plummeting down a mountainside at sixty miles an hour.
A snowboarder had a Zen experience when, while snowboarding down a near vertical slope, he inadvertently started an avalanche. Suddenly his already perilous situation became one of life and death. It seems that the survival instinct took over, because he felt no fear or panic, but only a heightened sense of awareness. ‘I didn’t do anything. It was as if all I was doing was watching what was happening. I was so calm, I even looked down at my brown boots and wondered why I had chosen to buy that color!’
Obviously, he came out of his ordeal intact. In fact, he did outrun the avalanche and when he reached safety, he remained in that vividly aware state of mind for some time. He only snapped out of it when he glanced at his digital sport watch and realized with a shock that his entire experience had only lasted a short time. It seemed to have lasted hours!
This feeling of extreme detachment can be achieved, but not through meditation alone. Mindfulness is something that is cultivated slowly. The best advice to meditators is to not cling too tightly to that nice ‘blissed out’ feeling after meditation. Enlightenment is much bigger than that.
