I lean more towards the methods of meditation as you offer them in that post in your IP journal. To me, it is something that can be down regardless of what else we are doing.
Obviously, as you point out, activities like running, or music, trend towards more meditative practice than not. Even some martial arts forms like Aikido are considered to be of the "moving meditation" sort of activity where you enter a Zen-like state while flowing through the motions.
In the other option for that lesson of the IP, Krishnamurti offers rather interesting content on what "meditation" IS. If I gather his words properly, it is not as much the separation of the self from the world, sitting on a pillow in a dark room with incense and soft melodies, alone, quiet. Instead, it is a realization of focus, mindfulness, being engaged in everything you are doing, fully, all the time. Krishnamurti explains our reliance upon but selective use of our senses. While we have five (or six), we usually only engage with our world through one or two at a time, and ignore the impulses we are receiving through the others. Think about it. How often do you fully experience something with ALL of your senses in tune? When we talk to someone we may hear them, maybe see them too, but we don't generally smell them, taste them, and feel them to the same extent we are hearing or seeing. We have dominant sense that help us become aware of our surroundings, and we use whichever is best suited to interpret and understand. Meditation though, could be the full focus of all our senses in what it is we are doing at each moment of each day.
I have begun attempting this understanding of Krishnamurti in even the most mundane activities. My daughter just turned 8, and can mostly shower by herself, but needs help drying and combing her hair. Its a daily struggle just to get her to that point, and she is quite the busy butt so hardly stays still while I am helping. When I focus on it, keep my mind at peace, and try to engage all my senses in that moment and that activity, it becomes meditative to me. The same can go for taking out the trash, watching a football game with a friend, walking to the bus stop in the morning, sitting on the computer typing out a response to a thread here on TOTJO.
I grew tired of letting life just click by. I grew tired of resenting work on Monday morning, and waiting all week for Friday. If I let myself disconnect from life too much, it just becomes a collection of weekends with gaps of inactivity in the middle, and when I glance back, several years have floated by with no relative changes to my condition.
I too do not have the "time" in my daily routine to carve out 30-40 minutes to sit alone in a dim room and enjoy the silence. So instead, I find that silence surrounding each moment while I am actively living it, and find simple things like acknowledging the stop of an out breath and the start of an in breath to be incredibly useful in centering myself when things are otherwise swirling around me.
Not sure if that was direct to your original question...but that's my general take. Why wait for a holiday, or set up a personal meditation time, when it is something that can be accomplished all day every day, no matter what else is happening around us?
Cheers
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