When you have children, you realize how easy it is to not see them fully, and perhaps miss all those early years. If you are not careful, you can be too absorbed in work, and they will be only too happy to tell you about it later. Being a parent is one of greatest mindfulness practices of all.
Nourishing the soul is the process of drinking at the life stream, coming back to one’s true self, embracing the whole of one’s experience – good, bad, or ugly; painful or exalted; dull or boring.
The mind that has not been developed or trained is very scattered. That’s the normal state of affairs, but it leaves us out of touch with a great deal in life, including our bodies.
Most people think that to meditate, I should feel a particular special something, and if I don’t, then I must be doing something wrong.
How we see and hold the full range of our experiences in our minds and in our hearts makes an enormous difference in the quality of this journey we are on and what it means to us. It can influence where we go, what happens, what we learn, and how we feel along the way.
The funny thing about stopping is that as soon as you do it, here you are.
Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel.
You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.
Zen has an expression, “nothing special.” When you understand “nothing special,” you realize that everything is special. Everything’s special and nothing’s special. Everything’s spiritual and nothing’s spiritual. It’s how you see, it’s what eyes you’re looking through, that matters.
The real meditative practice is to open up to the full range of what happens in life. And parenting is a fantastic arena for doing that kind of spiritual training. It’s as much a potential door into enlightenment as anything else.
In letting go of wanting something special to occur, maybe we can realize that something special is already occurring.
Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us.
Living in a chronic state of unawareness can cause us to miss much of what is most beautiful and meaningful in our lives.
We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable.
There is just this moment. We are not trying to improve or to get anywhere else.
Make a list of what is really important to you. Embody it.
Practice moment to moment non-judgemental awareness.
In any given moment we are either practicing mindfulness, or defacto, we are practicing mindlessness.
Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.
Mindfulness meditation is the embrace of any and all mind states in awareness, without preferring one to another.