This is the second week of the summer retreat. In the first week we learnt that to be truly alive means to be truly there. To practice meditation is to learn to come home to our body, to allow our mind to come back to our body. Nowadays most of the time our body is here buy our mind is elsewhere. Our habits make us go further and further away from who we are. We start to loose touch with who we are. We start to create tension and stress first within the body, and then it penetrates to our mind.
We see that we need to learn to slow down. That is why the first practice of meditation is to learn to stop. Stopping here is not physical stop, but stopping from the thinking, from the worries, from the fear, and being aware of what is going on inside of us. Because we are not aware, we continue to have stress and tension. When we learn to stop, we learn to be with ourselves, we learn to recognize why I am feeling tensed within my body, why I am feeling pain within my body, why there is a burden that is heavy within my heart. We have been carrying it without knowing. Now we are here, we learn to generate the energy of mindfulness.
Mindfulness is a seed that each and everyone of us has inside of us. Mindfulness is like the light, it shows us the dark areas inside us and around us. To generate mindfulness is very simple and concrete. Whenever we listen to the sound of the bell in the practice centre, we learn to stop physically and mentally. We direct our attention to the in-breath and the out-breath. That moment when we are aware of our in-breath and our out-breath, we are stopping.
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