Crossroads Meditation

I remember coming across the expression "Crossroads Meditation" some time back, to describe a kind of meditation where one is bombarded by a lot of sensory information: traffic sounds, distracting signs, and so on. And at the time, I think I had assumed it meant "challenging" one's sitting practice to see if it has 'matured' or not. Nowadays, I don't think that's the real purpose or meaning of the expression "meditating in the crossroads". I think that it is pointing to the idea that meditation can happen in any situation. It does so because mind is always including every phenomena that arises. It is only an illusion that I separate the phenomena into these objects and then call them 'obstacles'. I wonder, how would that change if one realizes that the sounds and sights they experience are all coming from themselves?

In our group practice tonight, there were a lot of people mingling outside from the previous group. And, as always, I felt that mixture of anxiety and wanting to help others to calm down. In the guidance, I suggested that there really isn't a need to feel any of the sounds or stimuli as separate from the mind. This is a hard thing to understand for me, because I often associate meditation and mind with a total stillness and quiet. But if I have to wait for total stillness to be aware, I would just be craving silence all the time. Real life doesn't seem to work that way.

Something that helps me is to remind myself that no matter how I might respond to situations, it is 'the mind responding to mind'. There is nothing beyond that. If I am shaping a piece of clay into a chair and accidentally make it look like a toilet, does the clay itself change? It is the same substance. In the same way, even if I am responding with anger to a situation that doesn't seem to warrant that strong emotion, I can still trust that it's just mind responding to mind. This is not an invitation to anarchy, but more like a hint to use a gentle approach when facing different environments. I don't need to look for a way to resolve or stop interruptions. I can let the interruptions be signs that all situations are bound to change. And it's not even about 'going with the flow' of thoughts, because even that expression assumes a mind separate from thoughts.