Meditation involves a principle of awareness that you can practice in every moment of your life.
While the time that we spend on the cushion most definitely has an effect on the quality of our emotional and mental life in the rest of the day, making an effort to practice mindfulness during so-called “ordinary” activities such as working, driving, doing housework, and spending time with our friends and families is a very powerful practice.
We often see these things as impediments to practice. In fact an interesting thing is that a lot of people fall into the habit of using the word “practice” as a shorthand for “meditation practice.” So they’ll say things like, “My practice is going very well. I’ve been sitting every day.” And this implies that the rest of our lives is “not practice.” But in fact, anything we do can be part of our practice, which I’d broadly define as the ongoing effort to cultivate mindfulness, compassion, and an awareness of things’ ungraspability.
So we can use eating as a practice. We can use driving as a practice. We can use showering, or shaving, or taking a leak as a practice.
No matter what we’re doing, we can always be more mindful when we’re doing it. No matter what we’re doing, we can always be kinder and more compassionate; even when we’re on our own, we can be kind with ourselves, or show an attitude of kindness and care in the way we handle objects. And we can always — always! — recognize when we’re hoping on in some way (to feelings, to anticipated outcomes, to thoughts) and learn to let go.
Living mindfully in this way is incredibly enriching. It helps prevent the arising of unpleasant states of mind such as stress and depression, and it also helps us to live with freedom, dignity, and with respect for ourselves and others.
Living with mindfulness brings us into the field ethics, of talking about how best we can live our lives. But it also is a way of living meditatively.
This section of the site will develop into an extensive guide to applying the principles of meditation to your daily activities.
We’ve started with a section on bringing Metta (lovingkindness) into your everyday life, and more information on mindfulness. Soon, we’ll add other tools to help you live with more awareness.
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I try to be mindful.but sometimes a forget that I'm dong it. and it's head to do.how can i do it continuously?
It's almost impossible to be continually mindful, Nisansala. I think the best we can do is to keep bringing the mind back into focus as often as possible. Using reminders like notes, random mindfulness bells, etc., we can prompt mindfulness more often, but we're still going to have periods of unmindfulness. But that's OK. We don't have to be perfectly mindful -- just mindful enough. And if we're training the mind through meditation, then in our periods of unmindfulness the mind is going to be better behaved than it normally would!
How to be aware while reading
Book?
I think it very much depends on the kind of book and why you're reading it, Sanjeeb. If you're studying, then it's advisable to pause and reflect on what you're reading, mentally making lists of key points and committing them to memory. The dangers while studying are that you read words without really understanding them, or you understand them but make no effort to remember them.
If you're reading a novel you can be aware of your feelings (including the feeling you get from reading words that are put together well or badly, but also feelings you have about the characters and situations). And you can be mindful of the thoughts and images that arise.