Bridging the space between formal practice and everyday life

What situations do you find hardest to stay mindful, to keep the ego from rearing up, to remain true to yourself, to stay in the flow?

I'd guess it would be a situation involving a group of people. Maybe your family, maybe work colleagues, housemates... The closer they are, the better they know how to press your buttons!

So maybe we can do yoga or sit in meditation and observe our tendencies to judge ourselves, perhaps as someone who's easily distracted, or someone who always wants to make things ok, or worries about what others think of us doing yoga or meditation. Maybe we can even start letting go these "I am" identifications: "I am a person with tight hips", "I always get angry when I can't do something", etc. But how does this help at a family dinner when your adversarial uncle starts drawing you into a conversation on the rights and wrongs of intervening in Syria? It's not much use to pull out your best warrior II pose on him... (might make him shut up for 5 mins though!)

It's not easy to bring what you learn on the mat or on the cushion into everyday life. But isn't that why we call it a practice? We're practising for everyday life. And what use is a practice where you can achieve beautiful flowing, non-dual, ego-less, oneness for 30 mins a day but still bite your colleagues head off in your morning meeting?

That's why it's helpful to build a bridge into our practice. A bridge between formal on-the-mat/cushion time and normal life. We create time to do a reasonably unchallenging activity 100% mindfully, bringing our practice to bear on something that isn't on the mat/cushion.

For this reason, in Zen we practice working meditation, or Samu in Japanese. It's emphasised to such a degree that it's actually one of the four principal components of Zen practice (along with sitting meditation, private meetings with your teacher, and talks).

Working meditation includes the practice of mindfulness, giving or generosity, duty, and selfless service. In Zen monasteries every monk (or retreat participant) has a duty to do work for the maintenance and upkeep of the building and grounds, or help with the cooking, shopping, accounts, etc. But it's more than a duty - the task is performed with the same mind as sitting meditation. Doing the activity 100%, becoming the activity. An opportunity to put what you've learned on the mat/cushion into practice.

Me doing samu on retreat in Japan (weeding the gravel)

For inexperienced practitioners (like myself), the working meditation activity should be super-simple: something like cleaning, gardening, or chopping wood/vegetables. The repetitive simplicity of these kind of activities needs very little thinking power, leaving plenty of energy to devote to being 100% mindful. A favourite
in Japan is weeding the gravel in the monastery garden (see photo).

Can you see the true nature of the universe in every weed you pick? In every stone or piece of earth you move? Can you disappear into the flow of the cleaning cloth sliding over the kitchen floor?

Gradually as our practice develops and we're able to stay with it more and more doing simple tasks, we can introduce some harder things. Cooking, for example, requires much more cognitive input, but can you stay 100% mindful when the saucepan is boiling over but the recipe says "gently simmer"?

I remember my teacher Daizan saying that the monastery accountant is always one of the most senior monks because it takes a very developed practice to stay 100% with it when you're doing the books!

So you can see that letting go of our frustrations, our right/wrong judgements, our need to win the argument, remaining empathetic, compassionate, loving, and not letting the ego direct our actions is hard enough when we're just hoovering the living room. Doing all that whilst your uncle is banging on about how important it is for our economy to maintain a military presence around the world, including Syria, is advanced practice!

Start small, and build up. If we're patient, diligent, and compassionate, one day we might find ourselves flowing through every situation with ease, being 100% our true nature without a speck of self.