Through mindful awareness we can realize an engaged life for ourselves and create a culture of engaged living in the world. Engaged living is about being aware of our choice to connect to our Truth, live in harmony with the Earth and in gratitude for every moment of our lives.
Cultural change has to originate within the individual. We’re perfect, limitless beings who haven’t yet realized it. Understanding that requires a strong enough will to make that independent shift. And changing a culture requires a number of individuals directing their willpower in that same direction.
Mindfulness and engaged living inevitably overlap. One who practices consciência plena turns their everyday life into an art. Many who live artful lives may be completely unfamiliar with mindfulness practice, but still choose lifestyle practices that engage their consciousness, community and the world. They may not specifically be practicing mindfulness, but rather participating in the act of creating culture rather than consuming it.
One of the most insidious afflictions troubling our world today is the dependence on distraction. Masking itself as endless entertainment choices, always on techno-gadgetry and 24/7 info-gluttony, we are markedly less aware of the reality of our existence than we were even 50 years ago. To realize the truth we have to continually question who we are. We have to understand that our thoughts determine our beliefs and without this realization, we’re subject to the whims of our conditioning. That conditioning becomes the status quo that we as individuals abide by, which we passively accept as our given society.
What do we need in order to question the status quo and actively accept our truth? Awareness. We first have to be aware in order to decide how to live differently. Mindfulness practice is an ideal way of generating awareness in life. In mindfulness practice, every action we take is done with awareness. This is not easy. Anyone who has ever meditated knows the difficulty in maintaining constant awareness. Learning to maintain that 24/7 is a lifelong practice.
Engaged living relates to the actions behind the awareness, both large and small. Though it’s difficult to practice mindfulness at all times, by making choices to live an engaged life, the structure of one’s life changes. And as the structure changes, mindfulness flows.
So, in that way engaged living is a macro application of mindfulness. A way to interact with life more fully, but in ways more easily adaptable to the attention-deficit society we’ve become. By questioning the way we communicate, seek health care, educate ourselves, build our homes, grow our food and form communities, we’re reinventing our culture from one that we passively accept to one that we’re actively involved in. It comes from an active acceptance that what is, is, but that we don’t have to live our own lives according to the norm.
Engaged living is a natural byproduct of prática do cuidado. The lifestyle alternatives that The Mindful Word explores are those that mindfulness practitioners would naturally adopt. Do we choose to listen deeply when in conversation or passively respond? If the former, nonviolent communication would seem an obvious choice rather than half-listening and speaking one’s mind to express the ego instead of connecting from the heart. Do we choose to appreciate the simple things in life or material objects? Voluntary simplicity is the natural choice for those living an engaged life.
Practicing mindfulness is the ideal way to create an engaged culture. Through mindfulness we realize just how silly it is to let our thoughts create our fears and desires. By no longer allowing unconscious thought to determine our lives, we avoid fears and desires and thus are free to accept our innate perfection. Easy to say, difficult to practice.
By creating life structures that were not determined by conditioned thought (the past) and by making choices in the moment according to what we see as real, we use our flashes of awareness to choose to accept what is true and real—whatever connects us to others and breaks the veil of separation. And in making those choices we guide our lives naturally towards mindfulness.
