After more than 50 years of a daily zazen meditation practice it seems it can be summarized with one word: attention. With full wholehearted attention to the moment, the mind can settle down from its busyness. Awareness to the body and present moment surroundings is what gets attention. Yet, it’s only natural to be distracted, to lose attention, to drift and daydream, and even fall asleep sometimes. This is why my teachers in the early 70s used at kaisuka slapstick. When they saw that we were drifting and drowsy, they would use this instrument to bring us back to full awareness. 

The other day, while meditating outside, a beaver‘s tail had the same effect on me. The loud slapping of his tail brought me to full attention. It’s so difficult today when culture has become very sophisticated in drawing our attention away from the moment. We seem to have little awareness to the present moment as we live on a constant diet of dissatisfaction, complaint, and mindless consumption. There have been a number of events where culture has been slapped into attention. These were moments where we have humbled ourselves with a deep sense of compassion and stewardship for each other and the planet. However, we seem to keep coming under the cultural influence of small tribal thinking in times where we need magnanimous thinking. We are times where we need more healing and less hurting.

Can you face the moment in the affirmative? Can you greet this rising moment with a resounding “yes“? Can you say yes to deeper understanding? Can you allow the unfolding moment with a sense of love and wholeness? Can you allow and greet healing with the affirmative? A helpful meditation for this is “Breath in Yes, Breath out Thank you”.

Or do you meet the moment with complaint? Is your day filled with resistance and the negative? Are you continuously carried away by those things you fear or by your craving for what you want things to be? Can you allow your curiosity to feed deeper understanding? Can you stretch into greater and greater Being? When your thoughts are surrendered, you can more deeply touch the experience of love, wholeness and a deeper healing that knows you are supported, you’ve always been supported, and you always will be supported. This is the true experience of Grace, of God, living in and of all things and the awareness to that inner light that is in all living things. It’s not limited to membership or certain requirements. When we awaken to presence, to love, we see how no one can “not belong”. We see how everyone has been loved, is loved and will always be loved. This is the experience of breaking the illusion of Separateness.

Mojo is a golden retriever who tries to uphold the Golden Rule. He is now five years old and started howling with my horn toning when only ten months old. Since then we have a daily routine of harmonizing together with the intention to “More healing, Less hurting”. It’s a call to start the day with deeping intention to nonviolence, not fighting and meeting each moment fresh in gratitude for the opportunity to “just be”. It helps navigate through the gravity of the day so we don’t end up like the fishing boat in the background.

The ritual starts with “Ready” on mid-G, “Set” on F# and “Go” on F. We then go down the chromatic scale to low C and follow with mid C down to mid-G where we sing the opening melody of “Imagine” before ending on a flury that juices our mojo for the day.

Once you break through the illusion of being separate, once you experience “unity consciousness“, this understanding of “no me, just we“ layers open the paradox to how we must care for each other since we are each other, knowing that no one cares for us since there is no “me“. This is the essence of Toltec wisdom, “Don’t take things personally” since there is no me.