In this Street LovingKindness video series, Sharon Salzberg takes us on a guided mindfulness meditation, integrated into daily life, while blowing bubbles.
Sharon invokes the joyous freedom of “Blowing Bubbles” in this second video of her series. Sharon draws on a line she attributes to the Buddha, “life is like bubbles in the stream,” and uses it to playfully explore life with wonder and curiosity. You might turn the passing of time into a playground as you move through your day with #StreetLovingkindness and bubbles. According to the video description, she released it on September 21, 2015, in honor of the International Day of Peace.
Blowing Bubbles Meditation
When we start on the path towards a more mindful existence, we sometimes run the risk of taking ourselves too seriously. Mindfulness exercises are meant to assist you in adopting various mindfulness practices as a part of your daily life, and we offer thousands of free resources to help you do just that.
However, it’s easy to become too focused on results, and to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Perhaps we’ve set goals for ourselves, and we’re holding ourselves to particular standards. For example, we might say, “I need to sit in meditation for at least one hour today.” Or, we might feel that we’ve “failed” to be mindful because we neglected to engage in a minimum number of exercises this week.
Life is like bubbles in the stream
Whether you’re just getting started with mindfulness meditation, or whether you’re someone who’s been at it for many years, these kinds of issues can come up. You might hold yourself to unreasonable standards, and perhaps take the process more seriously than it needs. It’s important to remember that mindfulness can be joyful, even playful. It’s not about hitting a certain metric each day or week to week: the goal is presence, awareness, clarity, and joy.
To that end, this simple mindfulness meditation on bubbles may help return you to the most basic foundations of your mindfulness practice. Life can be a playground if we choose to make it one. In this excerpt from her “Street LovingKindness” video series, Sharon Salzberg explores the idea of how we can use meditation to experience more of the simple joy in life. Rather than approaching meditation with an air of seriousness, this mindfulness exercise treats meditation as something simple, wondrous, and deserving of an almost childlike kind of curiosity. Feel free to share this meditation with anyone that you think might enjoy it.
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