Moments of mindfulness
I've found recently that throughout my day (often on days where I have practiced zazen in the morning) moments of mindfulness will come to me out of the blue. A sound, smell, thought, etc. will prompt a fleeting moment of clarity, but in the context of work or an environment where I am required to complete tasks, these moments are quickly washed away by the busyness of whatever I am doing. How can I cultivate these moments and use them to bring more mindfulness into my daily life, while still being able to maintain focus on whatever task it is my work requires me to complete?
Escape through zazen
Recently, I have been using zazen as a form of escape. When I feel overwhelmed or frustrated, I just want to go sit so I can have some peace and quiet and get away from it all. My intuition tells me I should not be using my practice as an escape from my suffering. Do you have any thoughts or advice on this?
Diary writing in zen pratice
Dear Christian Dillo, Thanks to your work, I’ve rediscovered mindfulness as a moment to moment abiding in the changing sensations of the body, instead of constantly hovering above my thinking and feeling (as I did before, which was quite frustrating). This has really shifted how I experience practice. However, I’ve been grappling with a question I’d like to ask you. I write a lot, mostly diary writing. This has helped me greatly with expressing unconscious feelings and thoughts, and has brought me more awareness of the contents of my mind. However, I also notice that after writing in my diary, I can become upset of the stories I’ve constructed about my life: what went well, what didn’t, where I’m not living up to my own expectations. Writing seems to reify my own struggles, linking all sorts of meaning and concepts to them and makes them more ‘real’, so to say. My question is: since (diary) writing is about putting your life into a conceptual framework, how does it relate to living mostly non-conceptually (just feeling, seeing, hearing without putting an extra layer of thought on top of everything)? Thank you in advance, All the best, Anne (from the Netherlands)