Oakville Zen Meditation
Being mindful cultivating relationships and joy.
I started meditating in my early twenties, to address drugs, anxiety, and depression, I am now in my early seventies and still going, except for several hiatus’s I have been reading, studying, and practicing the Tao, Zen philosophy and of course meditation.
Most people seek meditation as a way of dealing with troublesome situations, feelings, and thoughts and of course suffering.
We practice mindfulness in our daily habits, even if just for moments. We are reminded to be mindfully aware when showering, eating, meal preparation, to notice our pets, nature, stillness, and silence.
Goals of this practice are to achieve egolessness, to live in the moment, to practice nonjudgement, to be compassionate, not to be attached to expectations, speak only the truth and love without expecting love.
My question is why we don’t use the principles of our practice when choosing our friends, people who we want to be in relationship with, to share and grow in an open honest egolessness life.
I believe that cultivating mindful relationships would be very powerful support in our respective mindful meditation practices.
We can not keep abandoning the true nature of ourselves and our practice for the comfort of others and expect to live in alignment with our awakened inner purpose of living mindfully.
It is my opinion that we can not live in our society and expect to be sustained by only practicing mindfulness exercises on daily activities, and meditating, we need like minded people to be in relationship, to teach, to learn from, to share life with, in other words to create our sangha.
I have participated, as most of have, in ‘formal relationships’ like workshops, meditation groups, classes and retreats, what I am talking about is a more intimate, vulnerable, open and honest relationships that choose to be in mindfully, committed to egolessness, and growth without attachments or expectations.
Most spiritual leaders, Senseis, gurus, teachers are by and large in relationship with their practice not necessarily encouraging or teaching the value of developing meaningful relationships that support and encourage our mindful practice.
Society encourages the type of relationships that we adhere to, society measures our relationships on exclusion rather than inclusion but when we do such radical actions like meditating and practicing mindfulness, we must be very radical in growing relationships that are truly non judgemental, without expectations, and that are honest and purely loving.
This was not meant to be a traditional Dharma talk/lesson, it was to address the questions I have concerning relationships, do we consciously with intention choose, cultivate, and build our friendships and relationships always keeping in the forefront to nurture our mindful practice as we will nurture theirs.
Instead of Questions open, answers close, so I hope that this talk stimulates a lot of questions, especially addressing how we cultivate mindful relationships, should we cultivate these relationships, and could they be more important than other areas of mindful practice
