There is no question that meditation is beneficial and can help us learn to induce a peaceful state of mind. Many meditators, however, are taught to try to remain in that meditative state of mind throughout the day. They may be doing themselves a disservice, though. Trying to limit oneself to that meditative state of mind can be like putting one’s conscious awareness into a box.

Zen Buddhists of some schools emphasize the greater importance of ‘mindfulness’ over the meditation. The difference is that mindfulness is the cultivation of the ability to go about your everyday lives in a heightened state of awareness. They say that when you are meditating, you should meditate, but that when you eat, you should just eat.

If you learn to apply this to your daily life, you eventually learn to live in the moment even while experiencing the most stressful situations. Interestingly, many extreme athletes have had these moments of complete awareness when they have pushed their limits and are facing life-threatening situations.

A Giro ski helmet isn’t going to be of much comfort to a snowboarder when he’s flying down a near-vertical slope. At speeds like that, his life is going to depend on all the hours of practice he’s put into his sport and the reflexes and automatic responses he has cultivated.

Emotions like fear and even rational thought are useless and even reduce your ability to perform when you are racing down a ski slope. When you are trying to outrun an avalanche, this is doubly true. A snowboarder’s experience is a good case in point. When he realized that an avalanche was about to swallow him whole, something happened inside him. His mind became still and calm and it was as if he was a very alert but disinterested observer of all that was going on around him. He even said that he remembered observing his brown boots and wondering why he had bought brown snowboarding boots instead of another color!

Obviously, he came out of his ordeal intact. In fact, he did outrun the avalanche and when he reached safety, he remained in that vividly aware state of mind for some time. He only snapped out of it when he glanced at his digital sport watch and realized with a shock that his entire experience had only lasted a short time. It seemed to have lasted hours!

This feeling of extreme detachment can be achieved, but not through meditation alone. Mindfulness is something that is cultivated slowly. The best advice to meditators is to not cling too tightly to that nice ‘blissed out’ feeling after meditation. Enlightenment is much bigger than that.

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