Mindfulness of Driving
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Driving can be a very stressful activity, but it can also be a tremendous opportunity for developing mindfulness and metta (lovingkindness), and it can evenbecome a kind of meditation practice in its own right.
Obviously, when you’re driving it’s not recommended that you close your eyes and focus on your breathing, and I had to put a warning on my meditation CD when one customer wrote saying how excited she was about receiving her copy and how she couldn’t wait to listen to it in the car. The thought terrified me, but I hope that she’d have quickly realized even without me telling her that sitting meditation and driving don’t mix.
Then one time that I was leading a meditation workshop in Spokane, Washington, a young woman told me about a time she spaced out and rear-ended a truck, totally destroying her own car. She rather sheepishly confessed to the fact that she’d been listening to a tape on mindfulness by the Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh at the time she’d crashed. She’d been paying so much attention to what the tape was saying about the need to pay attention that she stopped noticing what was going on around her. Fortunately no one was hurt.
So here are a few suggestions for ways that you can use driving as a meditation.
1. Switch off the radio and experience the silence. We often drive along while listening to the radio or to recordings on tape or CD. Just as an experiment, try seeing what it’s like to have the sound turned off. It might seem at first as if something is missing, but you’ll quickly learn that the silence gives you an opportunity to fill your awareness with other perceptions, some of which are more enriching. But before that, I’d just like to suggest that not listening to advertisements, the news, music, and opinion can leave you quieter, calmer, more focused, and happier than you otherwise would be.
Comments
Comment from Erik Olsen
Time: July 2, 2007, 8:18 am
Hi Bodhipaksa,
Just wondering if you have other articles or references re. Mindfulness and Driving. I recently found research-based 2 articles re. Mindfulness and Flight and thought I’d write a short paper on the topic of driving, which often pulls from the aviation arena. Any assistance you can help would be appreciated! I found your on-line article at http://www.wildmind.org/applied/daily-life/mindful-driving/
Comment from Bodhipaksa
Time: July 2, 2007, 8:53 am
Thich Nhat Hanh has written on mindfulness and driving, and you can find a reference here.
Saki Santorelli had some tips on driving in his 21 Ways to be Mindful
Of course there are plenty of resources on unmindfulness and driving — just Google “cell phone driving safety” and you’ll get a lot of hits!
If you come across any more resources please do let me know!
Write a comment