Cultivating Your Field

We're looking at our human/awareness mind, and its task of establishing and creating our Field of Engagement. The FoE is our bodies in a deliberate posture of @attention, wherein we observe the firsthand, physical effect that life is having on us.

Now that your field is (starting to get) prepared, we're going to look at how you take care of it...how your human mind will cultivate it. In fact, one of the original words for meditation is bhavana – 'to cultivate'.

Our daily practice is how we cultivate every aspect of our minds (building focus and insight – observer, body, emotions, thoughts...).

From wikipedia:

To explain the cultural context of the historical Buddha's employment of the term, Glenn Wallis emphasizes bhavana's sense of cultivation. He writes that a farmer performs bhavana when he or she prepares soil and plants a seed. Wallis infers the Buddha's intention with this term by emphasizing the terrain and focus on farming in northern India at the time in the following passage:

I imagine that when Gotama, the Buddha, chose this word to talk about meditation, he had in mind the ubiquitous farms and fields of his native India. Unlike our words 'meditation' or 'contemplation,' Gotama’s term is musty, rich, and verdant. It smells of the earth. The commonness of his chosen term suggests naturalness, everydayness, ordinariness. The term also suggests hope: no matter how fallow it has become, or damaged it may be, a field can always be cultivated — endlessly enhanced, enriched, developed — to produce a favorable and nourishing harvest.