Put your dharma where your heart is!

I'll be heading up to Nyamgal Monastery in upstate New York next week to attend a weekend retreat on "Overcoming the fear of death: the bardo journey and rebirth." It sounds fascinating and I will report back to y'all what I find out. Speaking of teachings,
we heard part two of a talk by a Buddhist nun, whose name I can't now remember, at our center today. She pointed out that dharma practice needs to be part of our being, that we shouldn't meditate for half an hour or an hour each day, and then go about our lives in the same way we've always done it. We need to carry the dharma into our lives and practice it continuously. Indeed, the happenings of life are the only way we can make spiritual progress. The practice of awareness is key, she said. Constantly bring our attention back to the present moment. Try to do it as many times as possible throughout the day. Eventually, this starts to happen spontaneously, and the time you spend with your awareness completely in the present becomes longer and longer. Once it happens continuously, you are a Buddha. She gave the example of eating. When we eat something we like, the first few bites, we are kind of in the present moment. We might make judgments about the food, like "This is pretty good," or "This is not as good as last time," which are sort of in the present moment, but really we are caught up in our ideas about the food, and are not experiencing it directly. Then, after those first few bites, we are completely away from the present moment, thinking of all sorts of things completely unrelated to what we are directly experiencing. Once something clicks into place in ourselves, and we begin to find it natural to identify with the knower and not the known, a whole shift in our inner psychic world takes place, she said. To cultivate that continuous awareness, we can practice awareness of our body and our breath. These are easy things to return the mind's awareness to throughout the day. They are also excellent focuses of meditation, but the point is that it is not enough to sit. We have to carry that awareness into whatever we're doing in the present moment.