Inner Work

For the week of: June 3, 2002

Continuity

Setting aside time each day for meditation conveys enormous benefits: physical, psychological, and spiritual. Yet if our inner work only occurs within the confines of formal periods of meditation, our spiritual life cannot fully flower. We also need to practice during the rest of our day, as much as possible.

In the time-dimension limit of inner work, we would practice continuously throughout the day. The process of transformation accelerates dramatically whenever we manage to enter continuity of presence. Continuous presence means, in part, moment-to-moment-to-moment awareness, simple and direct, unbroken and seamless. This continuity standard of practice offers us a clear and high aim by which to measure ourselves and toward which to direct our efforts.

For this week, find a block of time, perhaps one to four hours, during which you can work to be as continually present as possible. We must be realistic about this and not fall into an illusion of continuous presence. However, we also need not adopt nor believe limiting assumptions about our inner life, such as the assumption that we cannot practice continuously. The goal of continuous presence, continuous practice in our ordinary daily life, spurs us on toward a new, more appreciative mode of living, toward unexpected peace, toward kindness and generosity of heart.

            So in a relaxed manner, we practice now. In the next moment, we continue to practice. And again in the next. Stringing these moments into an overlapping band, we ride the current of presence.

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