..續本文上一頁nly one moment for you to be alive, and that is the present moment. Go back to the present moment and live this moment deeply, and you”ll be free."

　　How do we liberate ourselves in order to really be in the here and the now

　　 Buddhist meditation offers the practice of stopping. Stopping is very important, because we”ve been running all our lives, and also in our previous lives. Our ancestors, our grandfather, our grandmother were running, and now they continue to run in us. If we don”t practice, our children will carry us in them and continue to run in the future.

　　A practitioner has the right to suffer, but a practitioner does not have the right not to practice. People who are not practitioners allow their pain, sorrow, and anguish to overwhelm them, and to push them to say and do things they don”t want to do and say. We who consider ourselves to be practitioners have the right to suffer like everyone else. It”s OK to suffer; it”s OK to be angry. We can learn to stop and stay with our suffering, attend to it with all of our tenderness and kindness, and take good care of our suffering.

　　Let”s try not to run away. We run because we”re too afraid. But if we can be present with our suffering, the energy of mindfulness is strong enough to embrace and recognize that pain and that sorrow. We suffer because we lack insight into our nature and into the nature of reality. The energy of mindfulness contains the energy of concentration, and concentration always contains the capacity of seeing deeply and bringing insight.

　　To see deeply, we have to first learn the art of stopping. The Buddha is often portrayed as sitting on a lotus flower, very fresh, very stable. If we”re capable of sitting in the here and the now, anywhere we sit becomes a lotus flower—whether that is at the base of a tree, on the grass, or on a stone bench. When we”re really sitting, we”re free from all worries, from all regrets, from all anger. Many of us sit on the meditation cushion, but it”s like sitting on thorns because we don”t know how to enjoy the lotus flower.

　　You can start by just appreciating your eyes. Breathing in, you are aware of your eyes; breathing out, you smile to your eyes. When you embrace your eyes with your mindfulness, you recognize that you have eyes, still in good condition. It is a wonderful thing to still have eyes in good condition. You need only to open them to enter the paradise of colors and forms. Those who have lost our eyesight know what it feels like to live in the dark and wonder at the capacity to see things.

　　We can just sit on the grass and open our eyes. The beautiful sunrise, the full moon, the orange, all these things reveal themselves to us when we are truly present. The blue sky is for us. The white clouds are for us, as are the trees, the children, the grass, and the loving faces of our dear ones. Everything is available to us because we still have eyes in good condition. Most of us don”t appreciate our eyes because we are not mindful. We may think that everything in us is wrong, but that”s not true. There are millions of things in us that are right.

　　When we cook, when we clean, when we walk, each movement can be made with mindfulness, concentration, and insight. With each step we take, we can touch the earth and become one with it. Our fear and loneliness dissipate. There is no other way. With every breath, we can generate mindfulness, concentration, and insight. Insight is our liberation. Insight liberates us from our fear, our ignorance, our loneliness and despair. It is this insight that helps us to penetrate deeply into the nature of no-birth and no-death, and the interconnected nature of all things. This is the cream of Buddhist practice—and we can do it by means of the very simple practices of breathing in and breathing out, being mindful of each step, and looking deeply.

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