Much of my reflective, spiritual reading is a nice backdrop but it is not true practice for how I want to live. What has had the greatest noticeable impact on me has not been what I read or listen to but what I practice on my pillow.
My experience sitting on my pillow has the greatest lasting impact. It is a wonderful practice for living. It is good practice for being aware when I am siting at my computer keyboard or next to a friend. It is practice for unpleasant experiences at the Fair or a delightful walk through my garden in the rain.
The concepts of spirituality I read and hear are interesting and helpful. They especially help my cognitive functions to prepare for and make sense of what I experience. They help my mind relax and move out of the way. They may even help me move through the thicket of confusing experiences. But it is my meditation practice that helps me the most.
What I experience for the few minutes I sit on my pillow helps me prepare for what I experience afterwards. The practice may end with the ringing of my bell, but the reverberations of the practice continue deeply into my day. The practice of descending into deep concentration allows my practiced awareness be less cluttered and impeded by the feelings and thoughts that readily arise. Putting aside the hindrances of distracting feelings and thoughts while I am sitting on my pillow trains me in dealing with similar thoughts and feelings that naturally occur later on.
Those thoughts and feelings may often be useful as I navigate my daily life. However, they are often a distraction that keep me from being intimately aware of what is going on. They distract me from being deeply aware of what is actually right in front of me. They keep me from being aware of things and people as they really are.
I am beginning to see that my awareness, my sense of presence grows as my concentration practice becomes less cluttered. It has been months since I began to use my breath habitually to guide me on a contemplative plane while I sat on my pillow. Now it happens more frequently when I am no longer sitting. My skill in descending into steady awareness has become more stable. I only have to nod gently in the direction of my breath, and I touch a steady state of focused awareness and penetrating joy.
Practice has slowly brought me to a place of simple awareness independent of content supplied by my mind. When I remember my breath, I can experience who or what is before me with little distracting explanation supplied by my mind.
I even sometimes think I may almost experience things close to the way they really are, without the shaping veneer supplied by my mind. In time, this may become more routine, more habitual. With practice.