Discipline provides a constancy which is independent of what kind of day you had yesterday and what kind of day you anticipate today.
Breathing is central to every aspect of meditation training. It’s a wonderful place to focus in training the mind to be calm and concentrated.
When experience is viewed in a certain way, it presents nothing but doorways into the soul.
From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.
Mindfulness is so powerful that the fact that it comes out of Buddhism is irrelevant.
So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.
The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment.
We call the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment ‘practice’ or ‘meditation practice.’
Mindfulness is not about getting anywhere else.
Even before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that’s compounded by a factor of trillions.
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.
Can you question who you are? And are you comfortable with not knowing?
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.