Marcia Rose on A NEW YEAR…A NEW DAY…A NEW MOMENT

A reflection on practice by Marcia Rose

As we enter into this ‘new year’… as we open to the morning of a ‘new day’… as we bring mindful attention to each ‘new moment’… through our practice, we learn to receive & be aware of each ‘new arising’ with what Suzuki Roshi called ‘beginners mind’. The GREAT GIFT of mindfulness is to learn to meet the year, the day, the moment with paying a kind of extra-ordinary attention: a non-judging, non-manipulative, non-grasping, non-rejecting orientation to our present moment’s experience.

This GIFT that we can give ourselves is an orientation to the present moment that creates an openness, a receptivity & a presence within our heart-mind & body that makes room for a spacious, clear & calm presence of being.

A truly mindful relationship to our present moment’s experience is what allows clarity & true understanding – insight/wisdom – to arise… to just simply & naturally arise, which it inevitably does. We don’t need to do anything to make it happen. The truth is actually not far away. It’s ever present, right here, right now.

Each & all of us want a happy new year. What is this… what is happiness? The Buddha spoke about happiness beyond our ordinary experience of pleasure. He said that true happiness arises when we are mindful. Our meditation practice cultivates mindfulness. Mindfulness happens when we bring our full attention without judgment or manipulation, with no grasping or rejection, to the present moment. This is not such an easy relationship to our body & heart/mind experience… and so we practice this over & over again… year by year, day by day, moment by moment.

A good question we might ask ourselves is, ‘What’s the importance of this? ‘ When we aren’t bringing a full mindful attention to the present moment, we are actually living at a distance from experience, living at a distance from life itself… which keeps the cycle of our conditioned habits, patterns & reactions going round & round… feeding & strengthening themselves. Like it is with our computers… you push a button & out comes what’s in there. Without a clear mindful presence, when our ‘buttons are pushed’, our old conditioned patterns & reactions pop out… automatically… and we’re not having a ‘happy new year, a happy new day, a happy new moment’.

Our meditation practice is about bringing everything into clear, sharp focus…. to see things as they truly are…. as though for the first time….”moving from innocence to innocence” as Krishnamurti said. When my grandson was 2 ½ years old he saw a pine cone for the first time, with a mind & heart that was fresh. He turned it round & round several times, looking at it very carefully. He smelled it. He licked it. He put it up to his ear. His mother & I said,” It’s a pine cone.” He dutifully repeated ‘pine cone’.… and then went on mindfully investigating this new object.

This is a state of mind that we can learn or re-learn to bring into our life. Our meditation practice is the perfect vehicle for this… and it’s transformative. It transforms the entire context of our life. We learn to touch the ‘radical acceptance’ & ease of simply being present in the moment. We have stopped trying to manipulate, shape or change our inner experience. For the moment, we’ve renounced the habit of restlessness, which is amazingly refreshing. It’s a moment of stillness… a resting place… a refuge.

As we begin to learn & allow ourselves to rest in this stillness more often, a great healing begins to take place… an unbinding, an unwinding of all the conditioning we’ve taken on as ‘me & mine’, as who I think I am. A great dismantling begins to happen as we begin to allow ourselves to rest in this silence & spaciousness… simply within the clarity & lucidity of present moment mindful awareness.