VULNERABILITY IS OUR BEST CHANCE



There are many sorts of meditation and to me they are all good as long as they allow the effective return to BEING in us. Yet, through experience, we all come to privilege one sort of meditation of which we know the results better.
Personally I choose to keep meditation the less possible separated from everyday life. I believe that two months of seated meditation, twice a day and for some 15 minutes each time, should be enough to experience BEING as pure OBSERVATION. After these two months we can gradually integrate meditation to our life activities.
In Zen Buddhism, KINHIN is the walking meditation. It is practised between long periods of the seated meditation known as Zazen. Practitioners walk clockwise around a room while holding their hands in shashu (叉手), with one hand closed in a fist and the other hand grasping or covering the fist. They also put their feet on the ground in a certain way and follow many other rules that would be too long explaining here.
Faithfully following the details of this practice was meant to mantain the attention focused on the Present Instant. Yet, too often focusing on the details of a complex method of meditation may be counter productive. The goal is not the method by which we retrieve the ISness of Reality in us, but this ISness itself. When you've captured a fish it's all right to put down your fishing net.
I practised KINHIN myself for some years and realized walking meditation deseved more than just being a kind of break between two Zazens or seated meditation. I privilege walking meditation for two reasons. 1) Through walking meditation you follow the transformation that occurs within you and all around, as you progress on your path and you are able to see that everything occurs within the context of a unique Present Instant. 2) During seated meditation, since nothing changes around, you can more easily be recaptured by your thoughts. Yet, the walking meditation I propose is different from KINHIN. The goal is to consciously fill your body with BEING's presence or Reality's ISness. Externally you don't have to take any special posture, you just walk naturally and manipulate Reality the less you can, you just ARE.
There are many situations when we find ourselves walking in our life and we can use them as to meditate and therefore learn to reintegrate BEING in us. Ultimately the goal is to live our life from BEING's presence in us and liberate ourself from identification with thoughts. When thoughts appear in our conscious space we just observe them like we observe the rest of the cosmic manifestation. Of course, likewise in any meditation, consciously breathing while walking is a key that helps us embracing Reality's ISness and experiencing it in our whole body, which is what I call BEING's presence. Yet, breathing should be only observed - as part of our whole experience - and not manipulated.
If we are tenacious enough, normally, walking meditation should contaminate our other moments and situations like a fire that spreads everywhere. This should induce us living our life more and more from BEING's presence standpoint which normally dismantle the cognitive armour of identification with thoughts. Yet, as this dismantlement unlocks what is unresolved underneath in us, at some moments we may need our teacher's help to defuse the stored pain-memories that rise to consciousness as to leave us.

Patrick Ali Pahlavi

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