Beep, Beep

This from the Venerable Henepola Gutaratana: "Repeated practice in meditation establishes this function as a mental habit which then carries over into the rest of your life.  A serious meditator pays bare attention to occurrences all the time, day in, day out, whether formally sitting in meditation or not.  When you are meditating, then your focus will be the formal object of meditation.  If you are not in formal meditation, it will be just a pure application of bare attention itself, just a pure noticing of whatever comes up without getting involved.  Meditation is at one and the same time both bare attention itself and the function of reminding us to pay bare attention if we have ceased to do so."

This has only recently begun to make sense to me.  When I meditate, I'm trying to become aware of a thought that's trying to pop into my mind the split second before I actually think that thought.  This is not natural or intuitive.  I prefer to put myself either in the category of "I'm paying attention to my breath" or "I'm thinking about this thing."  I am also very aware of external sounds which compel me to quickly construct a story, a narrative, around the sound.  Sometimes the sounds are soothing (e.g., waves rolling onto the beach) and a perfectly acceptable meditation technique is just to listen to the sounds while trying to remain present.  Sometimes they're jarring and disruptive (e.g., someone running a leaf blower so that they can corral every fucking leaf within a hundred miles of their property line) in a way that reminds the meditator they can meditate somewhere quieter.  Mindfulness, however, takes a slightly different approach: concentrate on your breath or think a thought or perceive the thought right before it reaches your consciousness.  The first two actions make perfect sense while the last . . . action? . . . condition? . . . is in the realm of some New Age hippie crap and more of a sense than an action.  

As with many things in my life I have found that when I try my best at something I don't naturally want to do then I act in a kind, satisfying, healthy manner in my real, human life.  When I'm having a frustrating meditation session I find myself thinking: "What a waste of my valuable time."  Then, sometime later, I'll respond in a way that surprises myself, and this I attribute partially to my practice.  For instance, when someone honks their car horn at me I used to either get angry and react furiously or it would upset me, their behavior would upset me, and I'd internalize it and carry it with me the rest of the day.  Now I quickly decide if I'm at fault and, if so, I wave an apology at the other driver, or I shrug it off and let it go immediately.  I don't internalize the behavior of someone else.  The nice thing, of course, is that I don't spend 50% of my time behind the wheel of a car driving like an asshole so it's uncommon when someone expresses auditory displeasure with me.

That's the good thing.  There's probably a bad thing in there, too, but I can't remember what it is.