Things don’t just happen in this world of arising and passing away. We don’t live in some kind of crazy, accidental universe. Things happen according to certain laws, laws of nature. Laws such as the law of karma, which teaches us that as a certain seed gets planted, so will that fruit be.
We all want to be happy. We need to expand the notion of what that means, to make it bigger and wiser.
What you learn about pain in formal meditation can help you relate to it in your daily life.
When you’re wide open, the world is a good place.
You don’t have to believe anything, adopt a dogma in order to learn how to meditate.
Everyone’s mind wanders, without doubt, and we always have to start over. Everyone resists or dislikes the thought of or is too tired to meditate at times, and we have to be able to begin again.
Sometimes people don’t trust the force of kindness. They think love or compassion or kindness will make you weak and kind of stupid and people will take advantage of you; you won’t stand up for other people.
Everyone loses touch with their aspiration, and we need the heart to return to what we really care about. All of this is based on developing greater lovingkindness and compassion.
Faith is not a commodity that you either have or don’t have enough of, or the right kind of. It’s an ongoing process. The opposite of faith is despair.
From the Buddhist point of view, it is true that emptiness is a characteristic of all of life – if we look carefully at any experience we will find transparency, insubstantiality, with no solid, unchanging core to our experience. But that does not mean that nothing matters.
I’ve always said that lovingkindness and compassion are inevitably woven throughout meditation practice even if the words are never used or implied, no matter what technique or method we are using.
Voting is like alchemy – taking an abstract value and breathing life into it.
The meditation traditions I started and have continued practicing have all emphasized inclusivity: anyone can do this who is interested.
My earliest experiences in meditation were in a context of intensive retreats.
While you are meditating, if your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the present moment.
Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.
As we look around, it’s very clear that in this world people do outrageous things to one another all of the time. It’s not that these qualities or actions make us bad people, but they bring tremendous suffering if we don’t know how to work with them.
It’s a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society – in many ways – tells us that suffering is wrong. If it’s our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we’re taught to put them away somewhere so we don’t have to see it.
There are many different ways to practice meditation; it’s good to experiment until you find one that seems to suit you.
As we work to reweave the strands of connection, we can be supported by the wisdom and lovingkindness of others.