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Every step we take can be a prayer.
Invisible Temples Everywhere
For years I have loved meditation centers, empty churches, libraries, anywhere with an agreement about silence and respect. But along with this love of quiet spaces comes an aversion to noisy, crowded places. Walking through the masses at Times Square, for instance. Or standing in line at Costco. Or at the DMV almost any time of the year.
In Buddhism, we work with the three poisons: craving, aversion, and delusion. Being human, we feel them all day, in big and small ways. As a practice, we try to notice how these poisons impact us and others. As we awaken, their hold on us loosens.
But usually, it takes earthshaking news to shock us out of complacency. A dramatic event suddenly brings the important stuff front and center. But without the dramatic event, the important stuff can be harder to identify and we end up wandering in a maelstrom of unconsciousness. We flip people off in traffic, or we harden against the intimate moment, or we just find new ways to waste our precious time on this earth.
What follows is a five-step meditation that has always steadied me—both with the big moments and the small ones. You say it to four groups of people: first, the…
