Living Meditation by Laurie Buchanan
University of Life – Living Meditation Course Description
For some people, meditation is a loving task that they make time for. For others, meditation is a way of living; a way of life. Most of us would agree that:
– we are not our bodies
– each person is an expression of divinity
– the essential quality of divinity is light
When we focus on light—Divine Love—we find joy in our journey, our actions are not contrived, we maintain awareness, have a servant’s heart (act for the benefit of others), have peace of mind, and we recognize the presence of light in everyone and everything. As we hold light—HeartLight—sacred space is created; space that allows us to move with equanimity.
Living meditation is dynamic; it occurs throughout our everyday experience—the good, the bad, and the indifferent. It’s easy to spot people whose lives are a living meditation. They teach more by who they are and what they do, than by what they say. They shine—their light precedes them.
“Whatever you are not changing, you are choosing.”
~ Laurie Buchanan
www.HolEssence.com
Copyright © 2010 Laurie Buchanan — All Rights Reserved.
Tuesdays with Laurie 
I love what you say about living meditaton, Laurie! I think the whole purpose of sitting meditation is to help us to realize that all of life is joyous meditation. When I sit in more formal meditation, it seems easier to remember that the next step can be taken in awareness. It helps reclaim the day for awareness, instead of being focused more in the mind. I always love it that it’s available as an aid…but I also love it to see people who are living meditation every single moment of the day! Great post! (And going to meditate soon…)
Kathy – I enjoy sitting meditation too. That, along with Tai Chi (moving meditation) are what provide the “wind beneath my wings” so to speak.
And is that a photograph or a painting? It is stunning!
Kathy – I’m glad you enjoy that photo. I took it in Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia (south of Halifax, on the east coast of the peninsula). Because we were hiking, I used my small (itty-bitty) Canon Elph camera. It takes the best photographs!
Beautiful! A Life Lesson in a paragraph. Thanks for the inspiration as I head out to face my day with all the other expressions of Divine Love ( people!) that I will have contact with today. I’ll be looking with new eyes. Thanks.
Sandi – I’m glad you stopped by this morning. I hope you had a great day! I had a fantastic start reading “Ladies Who Lunch” on your blog, Under Southern Skies. Oh my gosh, I laughed so hard. Your writing is a cross between Fannie Flagg and Erma Bombeck!
Ah Laurie, as I head out to dig and turn the soil for a new bed today, your read will keep me mindful – that this work too is part of my living meditation. I seem to “sit” less in meditation as I ‘live” more in meditation. Your post sings to me and envelops possibility… for more lives well lived.
Thank you so much for being you, for your continuous heart-inspiring and soul-search gifts.
Terrill – Your words here have made my heart smile — thank you. I hope you had a wonderful time turning the soil in your new bed today.
Thanks for the divine(pardon the pun) inspiration today.
As you know we picked up our new member of the family today. After he checked out the whole house, his living medidation, he made himself at home and took a nap (his divine meditation). He is outside right now with Mike.
This gave me some time to meditae how animals are all part of that divine love. It is weird having a dog again, however I am sure in a couple weeks it will be old news as we will be used to each other.
I also love Lauries greeting for divine love: The divine in me celebrates the divine in you. I hope I got it right…..
Kim
Kim – Thank you for sending me photos of OREOZ. I hope you’ll post a photo of him on your blog so that everyone can see him. And yes, you got it right — The divine in me celebrates the divine in you.
The Rev Michael Bernard Beckwith calls meditation “un-distractable attention”.
Whenever we are giving attention to the moment, or the person, or what is around us in Nature, or the reading of this blog (for example); from reading this blog with attention, I realize that the act of reading it, is a Living Meditation.
Attention – fully. Alive – fully. Aware – fully.
“In” meditation – fully.
Living a meditation. Meditation (attention) as Life.
Now, if I could only “stay there”.
Deb
Deb – I’m so glad you stopped by today. I love what you shared — thank you.
I know you’re guiding The Gaia Minute conference call Monday (Apr 19), and that you’ll be sharing an adaptation of Richard Blackhawk Kapusta’s excellent guided meditation from his Journey of the Spirit CD. Here are the details for readers who may be interested:
Monday Apr 19th, at 9am MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT time in the US. The call-in number is 1-218-862-1300, please enter the conference code: 855 676, when prompted. If I the host has not yet arrived, you will receive a message “The Host has yet to join the call”. You are prompted then, on how to log in and wait.
So thoughtful of you Laurie to share the details. Thanks.
I am so glad I read this today. I need to be a little more mindful of being meditative throughout my day — to be with what is as it is without judgment or preference to be someplace else. That is easier to do some days than others . . . have a great and wonderful day, Laurie!
Barbara – I like how you said, “… to be what is as it is …” I agree that it’s easier to do some days than others. When I have a “rough” day I usually say, “I’ve had a pearl of a day!” Meaning, it started out with an irritant (piece of sand in an oyster). But I respond by creating a smooth coating to encase the sharp sand (sacred space), providing much needed relief (HeartLight). Throughout the course of the day, it creates a beautiful pearl.
If you encounter an irritant, I hope you have a pearl of a day!
Hi Laurie et al
We live in the same world, yet with such profoundly different interpretations.
I have a laptop on my lap as I write this. Inside this old faithful machine is a piece of refined sand, with very fine lines etched in it’s surface, and a variety of minerals laid down in very small amounts in different places.
Playing across some of those tracks are patterns of electricity, that enable me to touch keys on this keyboard, and have characters appear on this LCD display, and then via signals across phone lines have these characters travel across the planet and various people around the world get to see them on their own screens.
Yet if anyone just looked at the CPU, it just looks like a bit of sand (it is just a bit of sand – a very special bit of sand).
Similarly with us.
Each of us is composed of some hundred trillion cells, and within each of those cells is some 10,000 times that many atoms, arranged in some 80,000 different types of molecules (the vast majority of them water).
The patterns at play in that collection of stuff, patterns of movement, patterns of electromagnetism, patterns of chemistry, are so much more complex than the patterns in grain of sand at the core of this computer, that the difference in complexity is a number bigger than the number of cells in our bodies.
We are our bodies, and we are much more than simply the matter of our bodies. We are the sum of all the patterns at all the different levels of matter and energy, of software within software, in a potentially infinitely recursive expansion.
We are linked to the whole of reality both at the level of atoms and matter through our constant interchange, via eating and breathing; and at the level of light and patterns via our senses, receiving pattern from the world around us and integrating it holographically through the way we store and retrieve it within our brains.
So yes, we are more than our bodies, in the sense that we have all these additional layers of pattern, potentially infinitely many layers of pattern, that we can build in awareness; and those levels require our bodies, as surely as this computer requires it’s CPU to function.
No computer, no software.
No body, no us.
Divinity is an essentially meaningless concept to me, and I can see why it appeals to many. I can tract its etymology, its cultural history; in similar ways to how I can tract ideas like the four elements, or phlogiston.
In my world, we are each of us amazingly complex entities, capable of free choice and creativity; yet for the most part we follow patterns that we unconsciously accept as children, as part of our culture, and never consciously challenge – instead we find agreement with others, and build “righteous” communities of agreement.
Each of us is, in a sense, founded on the idea of being right.
We so love to be right, and to make others wrong, that the idea of having our own ideas, of challenging the cultural, the historical, the conventional, rarely attains any real depth – we give it lip service if at all.
There is a lot of power in many of the traditions of our various cultural histories, and for the most part the power is not in the interpretation of the stories, but in the actions taken. Moving our bodies, calming our minds, opening to our inner intuitions.
Those inner intuitions are clearly not our conscious egoic selves, so many label it divinity within – and I am very confident that it is not that – not in the sense that most understand.
That incredible power and relatedness available from the massive unconscious within each of us is mostly a result of holographic relatedness of pattern on many levels.
Yes we are related to everything.
Yes we have this amazing, no-egoic power with us.
Yes we can experience love and relatedness.
And this is what we are – evolved entities on a small planet orbiting an insignificant sun in an ordinary galaxy – one set of current points in a history of evolution by natural selection that is some 4 billion years old on this planet, and is now operating on at least three levels.
That at least, is the most powerful interpretation I can find of the 54 years of my own experience and study of being.
By all means acknowledge that there is existence greater than the ego, and that there are abilities within us far greater than the egoic, and at the same time, own these abilities as your own, acknowledge ourselves as more than the eogic – claim all that we are.
Arohanui
Ted
Ted – I’m so glad you stopped by, it’s good to see you. And while I don’t always share the same vision that you do, I always enjoy reading your perspective. I’m glad that you shared it — thank you.
For other readers, here is a LINK to Ted’s website. When you get there, you’ll see that it’s about designing and implementing systems that promote peace, security, prosperity, freedom and abundance for every self aware entity.