Continuity
The Insight Timer counter ticks over another consecutive day of meditation. It's been over a year now of daily walking. Thinking about the layering of continuity in life.
Practising
To be human is to practise. From the very beginning of our lives, from birth, from that first attempt at holding the gaze of the parent or guardian staring into our eyes, we begin building various kinds of continuity. Learning how to connect with other humans through gaze, touch, and the other senses. Learning how to communicate, practising various kinds of cries, babbling, and eventually words. Learning how to roll, creep, crawl, walk…
Everything is built through practice. In time, skills are mastered but to maintain them, continued practice is essential.
If you love music, you may have marveled at the breath-taking ability of a concert pianist to play an extremely complex piece of music, perhaps full of rapidly sounded notes, from memory. Many thousands of hours are necessary to reach that pinnacle of achievement, and after the concert, the musician keeps practising.
When I first began to meditate, I didn’t understand why it, too, was referred to as practice. I mean, how hard can it be just to sit still in silence?
It turns out, very, very difficult indeed, first fully to still the body, which wants to keep twitching, adjusting, scratching an itch, and then to allow the constant dinning of whatever thoughts, sensations, and feelings are bouncing around inside the outward stillness to become the background for the main event of connecting with Presence.
Walking
Many of us mastered basic walking within the first 18 months of life. But I have learned there is a lot more to walking than it appeared when I was young and took it for granted. I just had to fall a few times, once flat enough on my face that my nose bled for hours, to realise that it would now take a lot more practice and physiotherapy to regain the confidence to walk above a snail’s pace and without staring at the ground in front of me.
Even now on snowy and icy days, such as the ones we have been having around here this winter, I slow down and stare hard at the uneven and treacherous surface in front of me. afraid of falling.
Walking has another dimension in the context of meditation. Thich Nhat Hahn said of meditative walking that it is to walk so slowly and mindfully as to kiss the earth over and over with the soles of one’s feet.
When I was practising with the Buddhists in the little downtown sangha from 2018 to 2020, we did 45 minutes of meditation as part of our Sunday group practice, alternating walking and sitting meditation. It was fascinating. We also had group silent retreats from time to time, again spending the day before and after lunch alternating walking and sitting meditation.
I have led my Centering Prayer group from time to time in walking meditation too, and it looks like meditative walks will become gradually incorporated in the annual cycle of events for the Hamilton’s Well meditation community where I meditate Thursdays.
What skills am I mastering?
Yesterday’s Being With Yourself story and wonderings asked us to consider mastery of skills from a variety of angles and perspectives, and it got me thinking about the skills I have been learning.
I have spent the past three decades mastering what I do for a living, guiding children through a specific methodology and daily practice of math and reading, and learning from and supporting my colleagues both in the instructional and business sides of our work.
At the same time, in addition to my contemplative practice in its various forms, I have spent much time working on my singing in different choirs with different teachers and choir directors, and continue to learn more about it every week.
You would think that after all my years of teaching, mentoring, studying with people in small groups, choir and the Open Space practice that I would have mastered effective listening and holding space.
However, these are endlessly challenging skills to perfect. People are so very diverse in their needs in terms of what works best for them, the kind of listening they require.
Also, and this is a big also, the demands of the false self are constantly interfering with proper listening and caring as it is chattering away in the background when the person in front of me is talking, preparing what I want to say next, making notes on what they are saying etc etc.
Writing is another skill that it seems that I have learned, but as I begin to understand more about what it really takes to be a good writer, it can be daunting at times. Exciting too though.
Then there is all the inadvertent, unconscious practice that goes on day after day, if I let it. Practising spending too much time scrolling social media, or binge watching shows on Crave or Gem. Ruminating. Worrying.
Continuity
Every skill, every practice, each thing learned, re-learned, unlearned, learned at a deeper level then becomes another thread in the fabric of a life lived. It contributes to the continuity of experience. What impresses more as time goes by is how everything I learn informs and feeds into everything else, so that all the practice I have done in the previous sixty odd years pours into the present moment, whatever it is asking of me, and whatever I am learning in it.
I first began to see this a couple of decades ago. At that time I was about 10 years into running my business and feeling successful, while recognising I still had an awful lot to learn and grow into.
At the same time, I was reflecting on how the skills I had developed through volunteering in church, leading small groups, preaching, leading prayers, and so on were strengthening my work-related skills and vice versa. The Open Space training and my practice holding space in various contexts became another source which was in turn fed by the other streams in my life, including my personal relationships, with romantic partners, close friends, and my children and other family members.
What appeared initially to be separate and unrelated threads became over time a densely woven fabric where the threads are inseparable one from the other, and interdependent. They hold and are held.
All contribute to the continuity of life as it is.
What do you think?
Does this make any kind of sense from your perspective? Do you disagree violently or even just slightly?
Let me know whatever you would like to share!
Practicing along with you, my dear friend.