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Welcome to the Imperfect Buddhist, where we discuss present moment awareness and incorporating Buddhism into modern life. My name is Matthew Hawk Mahoney, and today's episode is titled, Buddhism and the Sacred Power of the Present Moment.

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What is the present moment? It's this very instance, this little sliver of experience where everything's happening.

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Living in our fast paced world, we're told we need to think about what we want to become when we get older. Most of us never really feel like we ever get older. We're always waiting for that big moment to come. The raise, the promotion, the perfect person to come into our life. That moment when we'll feel happy, completed, and everything will be just the way it should be. Our fast paced society doesn't leave a lot of room for the present moment. If someone's caught staring outside the window,

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at wind rustling the leaves outside on a fall day? They might be asked, what are you looking at out there? Oh, you're daydreaming.

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I was out to lunch with a friend. A couple weeks ago, Chris and I were sitting down to enjoy an Italian sub. We were talking about religion. Him and his partner are Christians and they've been practicing for a long time. I said, I really don't feel like what the heart of Zen Buddhism talks about is very religious. And I looked at him and I was like, where else do you think God is going to contact you?

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Can God contact you in the future, worrying about the future, dreaming of the future? Is he going to contact you somewhere in the past in your mind? Or is God going to contact you now in this very moment, this present moment?

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The heart of Zen Buddhism is cultivating and polishing our awareness and connection to what's happening around us and becoming more and more aware of the subtleties that exist on multiple levels beyond just the surface. The present moment holds huge transformational potential when we start to bring our attention to what is happening in our bodies, minds.

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experiences, we start to see them as phenomenon. We start to see that thoughts come and go. We start to see that emotions come and go. We start to see the people come and go. We start to see that life conditions come and go. Rich, poor, sick, healthy, young, old. We come in contact with the transitory nature of life.

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And so then we start to recognize that those things cannot be counted on for any type of security or self. Because if these things are all changing, then who are we?

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Our sense of self begins to change and what we are is more and more revealed. We are the presence that is experiencing life, experiencing all these changes. We start to identify with the presence that witnesses all of phenomenon.

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I read on a YouTube quote, one guy left a comment and he says, the longer I continue to do my spiritual practice, the more that I realize that true spirituality is not about becoming something you're not, but it's about letting go of what you're not until the true you is revealed. So that's why Zen Buddhism, it doesn't really force a whole lot down your throat. Yes, there's some precepts and there's some different teachings that you can read, but the real emphasis is on Zazen.

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practice. The real emphasis is on sitting and being present. Because when you do that, all this stuff that's talked about by the Buddha, you start to experience it yourself. So there is no real need for someone to shove anything down your throat if you are experiencing it in your own practice. But where else can we connect with the sacred other than this present moment, this very instance? When we call it this instance, we lost it.

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as James Brown would say, in the cut. I'm in the cut. You're in that very instant.

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I remember early on in my practice, just noticing how my mind wanted to go off so much into the future, into the past, and daydream or complain. And I was really bringing my attention and my awareness into the sensations of the present, whether that was my breath or the sounds around me. I didn't have any significant experiences until one day I was in my sister's backyard in Lake Oswego, Oregon, walking around doing what I understand now was walking meditation.

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And I remember my eyes catching this redwood tree and this sense of presence being there. I saw the tree as I normally would, but there was an extra depth, an extra layer to it that I connected with. When we try to put words to these experiences, sometimes we lose the significance of the experience. But the best way I can put it is that there was an extra dimension between me and the tree. And maybe it was just the opposite of that, that there was no me and the tree, that I was feeling a connection.

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a oneness while looking at the tree. And there was not so much an observer and observed, but a connection with. In that moment, the tree seemed to breathe that there was a sense of liveness to this, what I would normally look at as like an inanimate object. That was my first lived experience of this new level of life that was around me and always happening that I hadn't been in contact with since childhood.

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So when you think about whether you're Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, when have those real special spiritual impactful moments happened to you? Were they somewhere while you were dreaming about the future or caught up in your past? Those significant lived moments where you felt a deep connection with the divine, where did that happen? You experienced them in the present. The gift of...

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Present moment awareness is that it allows us to tap into and align ourselves with living a more sacred life. We open the possibility to have those experiences more often. We have to play to win. The main practice is zazen, where very little instruction is given. Most teachers will tell you as beginner to focus on your breath, the sensation of the in-breath, the space between the in-breath and the out-breath, and then the out-breath, the space between the out-breath and the in-breath.

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and trying to continuously bring your attention back to just the sensations of breathing, the sound, and watching that breath.

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There's another form of Zen meditation called Shikantaza, which is just sitting. And this is fully taking your open, spacious mind and receiving what is present. You're not focusing on any particular object of concentration, but you notice. With a wide sphere of receptivity, you notice and you hold your attention in that space for as long as possible.

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So these are just a couple of examples of how Zen Buddhism has this focus on helping people cultivate a present moment awareness, where they can connect with the sacred. And the only place that it exists is now. Or as Thich Nhat Hanh would say, life is available only in the present moment.

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Maybe you're saying to yourself, why would I want to go sit in silence in this Zazen thing? Why would I do that for hours or potentially days on a retreat? I want to read something from Dainin Katagiri. Hopefully I'm pronouncing his name right. I've been reading his book, Returning to Silence. He says, when you sit down in Zazen, you don't know why. If you think about it, you can come up with many reasons. But the reasons don't hit the mark exactly. You cannot ignore the reasons you have thought of because they are part of the truth, but not the complete truth.

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What you want is just to be present, right in the middle of true reality, where you and Zazen exactly merge, nothing else. To sit Zazen is to call upon something, and to sit Zazen is exactly the something you are calling upon. You sit exactly in the middle of something you are always looking for and calling upon. We don't know what it is, but it is always there. If you sit down, you feel something, you taste it, by virtue of deeply seeing the human world.

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of hearing the sound of the world, immediately we manifest ourselves with wholeheartedness. Whoever we are, whatever reason we have to decide to sit down, immediately we sit with our whole mind, our whole heart. Even for a moment, that's pretty good. Very naturally, all we can do is constantly return to the source of Zazen, which means Zazen based on casting off body and mind.

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The key to awakening and connecting with the divine is the present moment. But you might say, man, there's nothing in my present moment other than stressful situations, mean people, bad food, messy home. But we learn in our spiritual lives that it is all usable and all workable. And if you have some struggle, you might be better off than someone that has a really perfect life because they're less pushed and less likely to seek.

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Sometimes the present moment hurts. Sometimes the present moment isn't very fun, isn't very comfortable. Lately my wife and I have been cutting back on our TV usage as we've become aware that we've used it as a form of escapism. So a lot lately I've been confronted with myself more than normal outside of my normal meditation practices. And there's a feeling of fear inside. I'm recognizing that

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because of past traumas and experiences that I've had, that there's a fear that I could lose it all, that this house that we bought and this marriage and love that we've built, our savings, all that stuff, it's just gonna be taken from me. It's just gonna be gone one day. And while that could be true, that insecurity, that fear is not really that fun to be with. There's a part of me that wants to run from it, that wants to distract myself, put my mind in some type of...

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simulated reality with TV or my phone or whatever. And this is a little bit different than my early practice where the present moment was like a refuge from all the stuff going on in my mind. And now it almost feels like the present moment is putting me in contact with something I would rather avoid. And Scott Peck talks about in his book, The Roadless Travel, that all mental illness comes from the inability to experience suffering. I want to work through my suffering so that it doesn't

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affect parts of my life and grow and fester into some nasty wound that harms myself or other people. I encourage you if you are listening to this and you're like, okay, I'm going to make an effort to be present and really bring my attention to the present moment and you do encounter uncomfortable energy experiences internally that you can bring this awareness that you've cultivated through meditation, zazen, this open spacious awareness which is called the

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In my case, I can witness the fear. I'm afraid. I'm worried I'm going to lose this. I see this fear and tightness in my stomach, in my chest. Okay. And then that experience has a little bit less hold on me. There's a lot that can be born out of just being present. Maybe the feeling or fear or idea goes away or just simply noticing that leads us to take action that will care for ourselves. I'll tell you one thing, ignoring it won't make it go away.

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Acting like it's not there or that it's a problem won't go away. It'll actually magnify whatever the problem is. It'll find a way to infiltrate other parts of your life.

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You might be saying to yourself, I can't be present. My current life is so busy. I work at the grocery store and I have a million customers come through. I'm paid like $10 an hour. I'm stressed. And then I have to go pick up my kids. It's all workable. And that's the beauty of this practice is that there is nothing left out. First to start as a philosophy that it's all sacred. It's all workable. And then as an experience, as you do practice this and you start to make the...

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effort and go through the motions and bring your presence to the moment, you do start to see that yeah, maybe it's a little bit hard at first when you have that long line of customers or someone's being abusive, but then you start to see little chinks in the armor. You start to get these waves of peace, moments of illumination where you can make sense of something or find wisdom in something, find wise action where maybe before you were so caught in reactivity or in your mind that there was no room for peace or wisdom.

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You're opening a space for that new action of love, wisdom, and peace to have influence. We don't have to be led around by our minds. We don't have to be pulled by our hair, by our fears, our worries, our hopes. They don't have to pull us down the road anymore. We can open our eyes. We can take a look around us and we can start putting one foot in front of the other on this path.

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And we might start to feel the dirt between our toes, the grass on our feet. We might start smelling some beautiful flowers along the road. We might be like, wow, okay. Yeah, there are some dark clouds or it's where I'm getting rained on. The water ain't so bad.

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I get it. This is a really tough time for most people. I feel a lot of people feel like we're on the verge of just some terrible catastrophe, whether that's climate change or war or financial collapse. And if we don't believe it, we're definitely fed a lot of that by the people around us on YouTube or news or our friends. There's just a lot of this catastrophe feeling going around. It can be hard to be present in this moment where

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There's this feeling of lack of hope for a lot of people. It feels pointless. People feel disillusioned. It's hard to be present and to be here in that.

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But I'm telling you, if you're somebody that is making that effort and choosing to be present in the midst of all this, you're bringing a great gift to yourself and the people around you. You're going to be an island in the middle of a storm, an island of peace in people's lives. You will be a refuge. In Buddhism, you will be called a bodhisattva. You are a refuge, place of safety, and an island of peace. That's certainly my goal.

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in life and what leads me to do this podcast.

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What's there left to say about the present moment? It's the key. It is everything to spiritual life. It is the doorway into illumination, to all the profound experiences and not so profound experiences, to just everyday wisdom. We can bring our attention and our awareness back to ourselves and the life around us with a sense of curiosity and a witnessing presence. What we are not will drop away and who we are will become more and more revealed.

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we can be a blessing to ourselves and the people around us. Instead of talking about all this stuff, I would like to encourage you to set aside time, whatever that is, whether it's the morning, afternoon, the night, or all three, or all day. You wanna set aside a whole day and do a retreat, you go for it, buddy. But see if you can set aside some time for cultivating that present moment awareness. And I think it is fine to be mindful on your day, like I mentioned working at the grocery store with customers.

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Yes, you can be present and mindful in that experience, but there will be challenges and it will be harder to cultivate that awareness if that's all you're doing. And so if you can set aside time to sit for 10 minutes in the morning and focus on your breath, sensation of breathing, cultivating an awareness, a presence, then we can take that presence into our daily life. And it'll be a little bit easier to be in the cut, as James Brown would say, because we're worked out a little bit. It's like lifting weights.

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If you want to lift something really heavy, you lift maybe some smaller weights for a while. You wake up and do some stretches. And that's what meditation or zazen is. It's our conditioning. We're conditioning our mind to be present and to interface with the wisdom of the present moment.

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This podcast brought to you by The Present Moment. Thank you for stopping in and being with me on this journey. I really enjoyed making this episode and sharing it with you. I hope that you have a beautiful, spectacular, wonderful week ahead and I'll talk to you soon. All right, bye.

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