Can mindful doing be meditation?
Are you as confused about what meditation is as I am sometimes? If you listen to what has been thought of as the “spiritual community,” it looks like sitting in stillness, eyes closed, breathing and humming for a specific amount of time until you attain a sort of blissful nothingness.
That is good and helpful. I have no argument about this method. But in honesty, I don’t practice it that often.
Why?
Because I found another method that works best for me: mindful being that leads me to mindful doing. This often looks like a creative endeavor that I do all by myself. Like journaling, cleaning, baking cookies, crafting something pretty or interesting. Sometimes it looks like caring for my plants or petting my cats.
When I’m connected in this way, my mental story-telling mind shuts down, and I’m filled with peace and joy. My breathing is easy; there’s no pain in my body. Time becomes a non-factor, yet I am productive.
When I work with my mind in the way it was intended to assist, it stays out of story-telling torture and allows my best ideas to come to me. I’ve written all my books, created all my classes, and received all my session wisdom in this way.
Plus, the space created through mindfulness, allows me to receive everything I need in real-time for day-to-day living. In my head I’ll hear things like: slow down, a deer is about to step in front of your car. And it does. Or go into this store, it has the thing you’re looking for. Or you can leave your flowers out, the weather will not get nasty in the night though it’s predicted.
Little stuff like that makes life easier for me, and it’s always accurate so I always trust it.
I guess when you get down to it, everything is meditation when you go about it in a mindful way. If I feel stressed, I do take a deep breath and slow my roll. The stress almost immediately eases. Few things are worth stressing about, yet the story-teller will argue you crazy in your head about that.
I often suggest mindful being/mindful doing when a person is caught in the mind-created story-telling loop. A deep breath followed by a mindful action creates a necessary pause in the runaway looping story, and the body often responds with lovely ease.
Here’s a few other examples people have shared with me of mindful being/mindful doing:
My neighbors have these graceful grasses growing in their garden. They’re about shoulder height. When they’re stressed, they hold their arms out wide and walk through the grasses feeling the grounding presence of the plants’ gentle touch.
My daughter-in-law is in remission from an aggressive form of cancer. When she was too sick to do anything but lay in bed, she’d visualize the many beautiful gardens she wanted to create on their property. She told me that was her meditation therapy and got her through. She now sells her flowers at the local farmer’s market.
My 96-year-old dad gets on his stationary bike and says the rosary while he’s exercising for a long list of people. It makes him feel good inside.
You get to live your life—only yours. Find your best way to give yourself some alone time so you can connect to whatever it is inside that comforts and makes you feel good about you. There’s no one-way-fits-all meditation.
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