The Art of Solitude

Standing out in this way serves to affirm your existence (ex-[out] + sistere [stand]).

In the end, the only thing that really matters for me as a meditator is how well or badly I respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by the situation at hand. If my contemplative practice fails to contribute to my flourishing as a person in my relationships with others, then I have to question the purpose of spending months and years p

“It is familiarity, rather than knowledge, that takes away their strangeness.”

There is something banal and everyday about solitude. Even in company we spend much of our time alone, absorbed in our innermost thoughts and feelings, quietly talking to ourselves. Whether we live in Manhattan or the middle of nowhere, this is our condition.

That is why it is not enough to remove oneself from people, not enough to go somewhere else. We have to remove ourselves from the habits of the populace that are within us.

The practice of Zen is about coming to terms with the question of who and what you are. Allow yourself to be a mystery for yourself rather than a set of more or less interesting facts.

he described how meditating on “the sensation of being in a body” became a tool he then transferred to making sculpture. He insists that his sculptures do not represent the body but reveal the space the body inhabits. Meditation would also have helped him remain still and calm enough while he had his own body cast for works such as Untitled (for Fr

Being unable to control events, I control myself: I adjust myself to them if they do not adjust themselves to me.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to