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.
Mindfulness is a way of paying attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally, to what goes on in the present moment in your body, mind and the world around you.
Meditation is really a non-doing. It is the only human endeavor I know of being where you already are.
A lot of harm has come in all eras from people attached to one view of ‘spiritual’ truth.
There are certain ways in which I cultivate awareness, both through mindful yoga and taking care of my body and taking time to actually drop as deeply as possible into stillness, into whatever is unfolding in the present moment.
Peace is something that we can bring about if we can actually learn to wake up a bit more as individuals and a lot more as a species; if we can learn to be fully what we actually already are; to reside in the inherent potential of what is possible for us, being human.
Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing who that is.
Allow your attention to gently alight on your belly, as if you were coming upon a shy animal sunning itself on a tree stump in a clearing in the forest. Feel your belly rise or expand gently on the inbreath, and fall or recede on the outbreath.
To drop into being means to recognize your interconnectedness with all life, and with being itself. Your very nature is being part of larger and larger spheres of wholeness.
The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.