Someone once asked the buddha, “Sir, what do you and your monks practice?” He replied, “We sit, we walk, and we eat.” The questioner continued, “But sir, everyone sits, walks, and eats.” Then the buddha said, “When we sit, we know we are sitting. When we walk, we know we are walking. When we eat, we know we are eating.”
Have you had an experience when you finish a meal, and you ask yourself, “what did I just eat?”
When we eat, we are often not eating. We talk, watch TV, or think about work and life problems. We stuff food down our throat. We are too busy, so eating simply becomes a bodily need to be fulfilled.
If we pay attention to other aspects of our life, we realize we are absent in many waking moments. Our physical body is in a space, but our mind is somewhere else. When a family shares a difficult problem, our mind wanders and thinks about our own issues. When a group of friends meet, we play with our phones instead of engaging with each other. Even on a beach vacation, we salivate over the other people’s images on social media rather than admiring the beauty right in front of us.
No wonder we are stressed. Our body and mind are split between realities, never aligned. We are everywhere but nowhere.
There is a monumental cost living without awareness and mindfulness: We never live. We are either dwelling in the past, or worrying about the future. We say to ourselves: If I have this or that, then I will be okay. Except we won’t. Because we will yet desire something else.
If we don’t know how to engage with the present, we will never able to.