How do we find a sense of oneness, stillness, and perfectness? On top of our raw experience we assign value to what we are perceiving, making up stories based on past experiences and habitual reactions that, over time, we build up. How can mindfulness allow us to by-pass the reactivity? How do we cultivate a sense of spaciousness? Bodhipaksa says of the 6-element practice, “This body sitting here right now is made up of the flesh of animals I ate back in the days when I ate animals, and plant matter from all over the world. It is continually returning to the outside world. The breath I exhaled just a few seconds ago is drifting away and will become trees and part of grapes in this area and soon someone will be drinking that as a glass of wine. That is me as well, except it is not really me anymore. This is an interesting process that is going on where we are observing this river that is ‘kind-of us,’ but it is also not us at the same time. We do this with all of the elements. . . we realize that there is nothing separate or static about us at all.”
