Learning to do nothing special

The practise that is being taught here at the Dhamma Garden is about seeing each moment of life as it is. In order to see how impulses arise, how like and dislike of situations take over, you are advised to let go of any preconceived idea or technique, like doing sitting or walking meditation or focussing or labelling. Instead you are encouraged to see the naked truth of what drives you in your everyday life, when you move between walking, standing, sitting, and lying down. These are called "the main postures", while "the minor postures" are the filling of such necessities as eating, going  to the bathroom, yawning and going to bed, as well as all the possible postures and body movements we continually do in between.

Learning to see is a process that is best done when you are alone, without being side-tracked by the desire to talk (except to the teacher), or the distraction of entertainment. That's what the kutis are for here in the Dhamma Garden. Your meals are cooked by your friends, and you get as much to eat as you wish. Staying in a kuti is a worry-free time devoted to a new discovery of freedom: the awakening of a natural, unforced awareness.

Staying by yourself is that opportunity to see how perception covers and reveals the truth of what the Buddha called Dukkha, of suffering or stress. Relieving Dukkha, or pressure on the body is what makes us move  from one posture to the next, to the next and on and on. We just do not realise it in daily life, since there we function according to desire and craving and are continuously distracted by an ever changing multitude of objects.

By not sitting for meditation and wishing to create a higher state of mind, by not doing anything special at all, the natural, the ordinary, that which is not special, has a chance to get seen. The natural means that there is a seeing process and a seen object, a hearing process and a heard sound and so on. That's what the Buddha called nama-rupa, Name and Form, mentality and materiality. There is continual change in  perception, in other words, there is a lot to discover in natural truths, which we otherwise do not see. That is special about this place, that you are invited to come and see for yourself, and are supported here without any limits.

By seeing how we are forced to move our bodies from posture to posture, we discover a field of observation wholly new, and yet so close to our experience. The awareness that awakens there is called Sati by the Buddha, while the understanding that knows spontaneously what is Nama (mentality) and what is Rupa (materiality), is called clarity of knowing, Sampajanna. Sati-Sampajanna is the pair praised so much by the Buddha, when developed, along with presence of mind (yoniso manasikara), the leading principle in the awakening of awareness.