Mindfulness is a kind of marinating in the present moment.
Squash and zucchini look solid enough, with their fixed edges, until you set them in a marinade of olive oil, soy sauce, lemon juice, and garlic and leave them alone for a while. The edges soften. The shape stops being quite so certain.
We marinate in the present moment the same way. We let go a little of the self’s urgencies, the ego’s agendas. We dissolve some at the edges.
Mindfulness works on the boundary of who we think we are, the same way. It softens the edges of the separate self we have all quietly agreed to believe in.
Life, at that point, gets very simple. I hear the geckos trilling and clucking outside my window. I feel the overhead fan turning the air across my bald head.
The Japanese Zen teacher Soen Nakagawa Roshi put it this way:
Every pine and bamboo, pure wind blowing.
It is easy enough to hear a bird, or a bus going by. It gets harder when the sound is a person talking, since then we tend to get caught up agreeing, disagreeing, correcting, taking offense.
Ajahn Chah taught on this. A sound arrives, we decide it is bothering us, and the moment we decide that, we suffer. Look closer, he said, and the sound turns out to be only a sound.
We are the ones who go out to meet it and get tangled up.
Left alone, as he put it, “the sound is just sound.”
We are not dismissing something small here just because it sounds simple. The practice itself is plain: bring attention to an anchor, the breath, the body, a sound, and rest there.
Soon enough the mind wanders off with its own plans. Each time we notice, we see where it went, and we bring it back, gently.
That noticing is not a failure. It is the whole practice.
Each return to the anchor is another moment of marinating in the present.
Over time the marinade works deeper, into the more porous layers of what we call a self. Ordinary life starts showing its other possibilities. Insight arrives unannounced.
One of Roko Sherry Chayat’s own teachers, Gempo Yamamoto Roshi, once walked from temple to temple on a pilgrimage through Japan.
At the side of the road one day, relieving himself, he heard the sound his own water urine hitting the ground, and in that ordinary, unglamorous instant, he woke up to his own true nature.