A Gentle Re-Minder

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from Full Catastrophe Living
by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Chapter entitled Yoga Is Meditation
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Bringing mindfulness to any activity transforms it into a kind of meditation.  Mindfulness dramatically amplifies the possibility that any activity in which you are engaged will result in an expansion of your perspective and of your understanding of who you are.  Much of the practice is simply a remembering, a reminding yourself to be fully awake, not lost in waking sleep or enshrouded in the veils of your thinking mind.  Intentional practice is crucial to this process because the automatic-pilot mode takes over so quickly when we forget to remember.

I like the words remember and remind because they imply connections that already exist but need to be acknowledged anew.  To remember, then, can be thought of as reconnecting with membership, with the set to which what one already knows belongs.  That which we have forgotten is still here, somewhere within us.  It is access to it that is temporarily veiled.  What has been forgotten needs to renew its membership in consciousness.  For instance, when we "re-member" to pay attention, to be in the present, to be in our body, we are already awake right in that moment of remembering.  The membership completes itself as we remember our wholeness.

The same can be said for reminding ourselves.  It reconnects us with what some people call "big mind", with a mind of wholeness, a mind that sees the whole forest as well as individual trees.  Since we are always whole anyway, it's not that we have to do anything.  We just have to "re-mind" ourself of it.
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