Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life by Ezra Bayda

I narrow my awareness to focus solely on the experience of breathing. The value of this practice is that it allows me to settle into sitting.
    But the value of this (or any other) concentrative practice—that it can shut life out—is also its limitation. Practice is about opening to life, not about shutting it out. And even though continuous concentration on the breath can make us feel calm and relaxed as well as focused and centered, this is not the point of sitting practice. As much as we would like to have pleasing or special experiences, the path of meditation is about being awake. It’s about being awake to whatever we feel. It’s ultimately about learning to be with our life as it is. So although concentration practices can certainly be helpful at times, we aspire to spend most of our sitting time in a more wide-open awareness.
    In order to make the transition from concentration on the breath to a wide-open awareness, I usually do a few rounds of Three-by-Three’s. This forces me to stay focused and at the same time expand the awareness to become more wide open. Three-by-Three’s help to bring a groundedness to practice without which wide-open awareness can tend to be too spacey and amorphous.
    Yet, wide-open awareness is the essence of being-in-the-body. This is where we become aware of bodily sensations, thoughts, changing states of mind, and input from the environment. I try to keep about one third of my attention on the breath, to stay grounded, but the basic practice is just to be aware, to simply observe and experience whatever is happening. There is really nothing special about this approach—it is very low key. We’re attempting to see and experience life as it arises by letting it just be there—minus our opinions and judgments. Yet, as low-key as this approach is, there is still the never-ending struggle between just being here and our addiction to the comfort and security of our mental world.
    So this first aspect of sitting—being-in-the-body—simple as it sounds, is actually very difficult. Why? Because we don’t want to be here. A strong part of us prefers the self-centered dream of plans and fantasies. That’s what makes this practice so difficult: the constant, unromantic, nonexotic struggle just to be here. As we sit in wide-open awareness, however, as the body/mind gradually settles down, we can begin to enter the silence, in which passing thoughts no longer hook us. We enter the silence not by trying to enter, but through the constant soft effort to be present, allowing life to just be.
    The second mode of sitting is labeling and experiencing . As we sit, emotions arise. Sometimes they simply pass through when we become aware of them. But sometimes they demand our attention. When that happens, we become more focused in our practice. With precision we begin to label our thoughts. As well, we focus on experiencing the bodily state that is an inextricablepart of an emotional reaction.
    As emotions arise, we can ask, “What is this?” The answer to this question is never analytical. It cannot be reached with thought, because it is not what the emotion is about. It’s what it is. So we look to our experience itself, noticing where we feel the emotion in the body. We notice its quality or texture. We notice its changing faces. And we come to know, as if for the first time, what the emotion actually feels like.
    Invariably we will slip back into thinking. As long as we are caught in thinking, we can’t continue to experience the bodily component of our emotions. In fact, the more intense the emotion, the more we will want to believe our thoughts. So the practice is to label the thoughts over and over—to see them clearly and to break our identification with them. It will almost always involve moving back and forth between labeling and experiencing.
    Learning to stay with—to reside in—our emotions in this way allows us to see how most of our emotional distress is based on our