Why practice the morning sitting?
Why not practice guitar for half an hour instead?
1. Before we ask ourselves to do something, we begin by asking ourselves to do nothing. When our body is prepared to do nothing when we ask it to, perhaps it will do something when we tell it to: such as, integrating & co-ordinating specialised motor skills while playing a musical instrument.2. As relaxation develops & deepens over time, emotional states and memories fixed within muscular patterns and bodily postures lessen their hold on us. Our personal history, locked inside the body, begins to let us go; increasingly we move into the here-and-now. We gradually develop a relaxed & engaged sense of personal presence: life becomes a little more real.
3. We begin to distinguish between what-we-are & who-we-are. For example, we discover the distance between the background noise of monkey-mind, its associational rattling & automatic mental commentaries (conventionally referred to as thinking), and who is listening to it.
4. The volitional attention is practised & strengthened. Effectively, for nearly all practical concerns, the quality of our attention describes & defines who we are, and is pretty much all we can claim to own in life.
By Robert Fripp, via www.dgmlive.com