What if your meditation practice this week was to be mindful about just one thing?
It’s customary during a Zen Buddhist retreat for the students to choose one small, daily task and focus on bringing mindfulness to it. It could be brushing your teeth, walking your dog, putting on your shoes, buckling your child into the carseat, eating lunch, or stirring sugar into your tea/coffee. Ideally, it’s a task you do every day.
The goal, of course, is to find a way to bring your attention to something you usually pay no attention. When you practice awareness right in the middle of your disregard, you re-train your mind. And though it’s not likely to bring you any mind-altering realizations, you start to think that if you can get out of bed with intention, you can also speak with intention, and listen with intention.
It’s also an easy way to practice authenticity. I know, we tend to imagine authenticity as this big, blustery act of showing up fully and being vulnerable. It’s very American to make authenticity such a production. Actually, authenticity is presence. It’s being who you are, where you are, without pretense. Authenticity means doing less, not more. It’s the act of releasing and letting go and exhaling.
Robert Aitken, in talking about the paramita of meditation, says, “Authenticity is the key, but it is not a problem. If you are sincere enough to come here and give it a go, that is enough to start with. Sincerity builds. Authenticity builds. Character builds. How do they build? Like everything else- with practice.”
In this second week of January, when we may be feeling the bloat of our New Years overcommitments, it may be just what we need to remember that change is worth pursuing, but it doesn’t have to be next-level all the time. Maybe this week, the most powerful, transformative thing we can do is to pick just one thing to be more mindful about.
Maybe, if you’ve made it your commitment to meditate in January, you couple that with a daily 5 minutes or more of meditation. Maybe you don’t, and this one little thing is the way you decide to grow your own sincerity, authenticity, and character.
Whatever you choose to do this week, do it well. Give it attention. Trust that the practice of bringing awareness to even one small thing is enough to guide you toward your deep, authentic self.
This post is part of the Paramita Project, where I’m practicing one paramita, or virtue, every month for ten months. You can read all my posts on January’s paramita, meditation, here.
