Living with Intention

I attended a Mindfulness and Meditation hosted by South Dakota Buddhist Vihara. Buddhist’s from Minneapolis come once a month to share meditation. During the service, we did a walking meditation.

For those of you not familiar with a walking meditation it is an opportunity to really get in touch with your body and awareness of yourself. The way the Buddhist taught it was to start by standing with both feet together, standing tall and relaxed. Slowly lift your right heel up, then the lift the bottom of the foot and slowly moving the foot forward. Set the foot down slowly. Then, lifting the left heel up, bottom of the foot and then slowly moving the left foot forward, slowly setting the foot down. Continue to do this walk in a slow deliberate method.

What I noticed during this exercise, with the other people that attended, was that most of us were walking towards the line we were to go to rather than being aware of the actual walking. People were focused on getting to the end rather than during the moments of walking meditation. I found myself also taking too big of steps to be able to do the walking meditation with intention.

This made me have an ah-ha moment.  How often in our lives we are living for the end result. Many people feel there are so many, many things they need to accomplish before they die, to keep themselves busy, filling their days with stuff. Many measure their productivity by the items they accomplish rather than by the awareness, intention and degree of presence. I know I’m guilty of doing this.

This quote so resonates with me, Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.

At the end of your day, reassess of how present you were during the day. Remind yourself, there is no perfection in being present, it’s simply an awareness.