Buddhism: meditating, working, peace and joy

I’m listening to music from the movie: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring.

It is a deep, peaceful melody, tainted with bits of melancholy and mystery. It is slow, artful, and delicate. It teaches you to examine each moment, and as you do, new sounds emerge. It is a loop, the same tones repeating themselves over and over; but it is different each time. It gets deeper, and if you let it, it will draw you into its rich, colorful depths.

I am also doing a lot of meta-bhavana (abiding in loving-kindness) meditation lately. However, with my dissertation deadline looming, I have not meditated quite as much as I should (i.e. every day). But at the same time I have felt a great benefit from the meditation I’ve done lately, and I do feel as though it is extending out into life as a whole most of the time. It’s an old Buddhist axiom that it’s easy to have loving feelings and spacious awareness when sitting on a meditation cushion in the mountains or in a monastery, but in ‘real life’ is where our true depth is tested.

And so it is a struggle: a first difficult, with real life overwhelming us all the time, but slowly growing easier, real life having less of a grasp on our feelings and level of awareness. Eventually, so the story goes, our love and our awareness become boundless, and nothing in the world can break that. We become walking emanations of joy and understanding. We still live in the real world, but things ‘out there’ no longer dictate how we feel ‘in here’.

So the story goes.

And like the tune from Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring the story seems to get a little deeper, a little richer, a little subtler every time I hear it.