Mind Full to Mindful: Zen Wisdom From a Monk's Bowl

by Om Swami

When our mind that is full of conditioning starts to empty itself by way of mindfulness and a natural awareness, a sort of calm rises to the brim of our consciousness. What if we could do away with our conditioning and have a mind that would not be so quick to judge everything around us? While our ability to make quick judgements has an evolutionary basis and allows our mind to do more by going back to the patterns it knows, this ability is also the cause of most of our emotional and mental suffering. Whenever something doesn’t fit in our conceptual reference, we struggle to cope with it. Unlike other forms of meditation where you go through rigorous practices to tame your mind, in Zen, I don’t have to go anywhere. Everything I need to be happy is here. I don’t have to concentrate or build my concentration. Not all meditation means sitting down in one rigid posture. Walking, eating, doing the dishes, everything we do in life can be done in a manner that it turns into meditation. The way a child lives merrily, or at least freely, from one moment to another, a Zen practitioner aims to be mindful of the ‘natural’ flow of life, the nature of things.