Waking Up to Your World

　　By Pema Chödrön

　　Throughout our day we can pause, take a break from our usual thoughts, and wake up to the magic and vastness of the world around us. Pema Chödrön says this easy and spacious type of mindfulness practice is the most important thing we can do with our lives.

　　One of my favorite subjects of contemplation is this question: “Since death is certain, but the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing

　　” You know you will die, but you really don”t know how long you have to wake up from the cocoon of your habitual patterns. You don”t know how much time you have left to fulfill the potential of your precious human birth. Given this, what is the most important thing

　　Every day of your life, every morning of your life, you could ask yourself, “As I go into this day, what is the most important thing

　　 What is the best use of this day

　　” At my age, it”s kind of scary when I go to bed at night and I look back at the day, and it seems like it passed in the snap of a finger. That was a whole day

　　 What did I do with it

　　 Did I move any closer to being more compassionate, loving, and caring—to being fully awake

　　 Is my mind more open

　　 What did I actually do

　　 I feel how little time there is and how important it is how we spend our time.

　　What is the best use of each day of our lives

　　 In one very short day, each of us could become more sane, more compassionate, more tender, more in touch with the dream-like quality of reality. Or we could bury all these qualities more deeply and get more in touch with solid mind, retreating more into our own cocoon.

　　Every time a habitual pattern gets strong, every time we feel caught up or on automatic pilot, we could see it as an opportunity to burn up negative karma. Rather than as a problem, we could see it as our karma ripening, which gives us an opportunity to burn up karma, or at least weaken our karmic propensities. But that”s hard to do. When we realize that we are hooked, that we”re on automatic pilot, what do we do next

　　 That is a central question for the practitioner.

　　One of the most effective means for working with that moment when we see the gathering storm of our habitual tendencies is the practice of pausing, or creating a gap. We can stop and take three conscious breaths, and the world has a chance to open up to us in that gap. We can allow space into our state of mind.

　　Before I talk more about consciously pausing or creating a gap, it might be helpful to appreciate the gap that already exists in our environment. Awakened mind exists in our surroundings—in the air and the wind, in the sea, in the land, in the animals—but how often are we actually touching in with it

　　 Are we poking our heads out of our cocoons long enough to actually taste it, experience it, let it shift something in us, let it penetrate our conventional way of looking at things

　　If you take some time to formally practice meditation, perhaps in the early morning, there is a lot of silence and space. Meditation practice itself is a way to create gaps. Every time you realize you are thinking and you let your thoughts go, you are creating a gap. Every time the breath goes out, you are creating a gap. You may not always experience it that way, but the basic meditation instruction is designed to be full of gaps. If you don”t fill up your practice time with your discursive mind, with your worrying and obsessing and all that kind of thing, you have time to experience the blessing of your surroundings. You can just sit there quietly. Then maybe silence will dawn on you, and the sacredness of the space will penetrate.

　　Or maybe not. Maybe you are already caught up in the work you have to do that day, the projects you haven”t finished from the day before. Maybe…

《Waking Up to Your World》全文未完，請進入下頁繼續閱讀…