Kissing the Earth with your Feet
“When we walk like (we are rushing), we print anxiety and sorrow on the earth. We have to walk in a way that we only print peace and serenity on the earth... Be aware of the contact between your feet and the earth. Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh
In the aftermath of Thich Nhat Hanh's recent death, I was listening to a short dharma talk, mesmerized as much by his soft, smiling voice as his words. He recounted a meeting with a journalist at Plum Village some years back. "Thay", as his students called him, invited this young man to join them one morning in a walking meditation. He used words like "delight" and "ease" to describe their slow and silent walk into the beautiful morning, embraced by bird song, sunshine, a gentle breeze. Thay laughed quietly, remembering how the journalist later communicated his discomfort with the exercise, that it was "grueling" and "exhausting."
His simple and yet profound message over decades of teaching, one that was instrumental in bringing the idea of mindfulness into the mainstream, proposes that with the energy of mindfulness, any action in our daily life—including walking, brushing our teeth, washing the dishes—can become joyful and meaningful.
Later that afternoon, I discovered that when I had recorded the Primary Series class, a 90 minute practice that I filmed with myself and my son Liam for our Members series, I had somehow bungled the audio. Possibly within the editing software or in the conversion/compression software, I had somehow managed to record a double audio track so that participants heard 2 different classes at the same time! Oh, I was so irritated with myself. There was no way to salvage the audio.
Resigned and cranky, I sat down with my mic and my recording setup and went about the tedious job of recording voiceover. This was 90 minutes on a day that was already packed. Before I began I did a short meditation and soon found myself laughing: lurking in my mid brain was Thicht Nhat Hanh's gentle, amused voice recounting his experience with the young journalist, reminding me that how I experienced the next 90 minutes was entirely up to me.
So...maybe I didn't have to experience this as an exhausting, tedious reminder of my own failure? What were my other options? I sat for a few more minutes. And then queued up the recording, put on my head mic....and relaxed into it. Soon I found I was truly enjoying the moment to moment experience of witnessing the connection between myself—in the background mostly, quietly coaching—and my beautiful, strong son, moving through the sequence with ease and grace. And I let myself sink into that feeling of pure, swelling love as I gave voice and instruction to what was unfolding in the video. At the end I felt uplifted, calm and clear, almost as if I had gone through the whole physical practice myself. And for the first time in months, I felt wholly at peace with my injured, limited body. I felt a deep and abiding peace.
A mindfulness practice is a daily practice, and the challenge and the blessing of the practice is that we have opportunities to drop into mindfulness at any given moment.
"The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it."
