What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Starting a Meditation Practice

Usually in meditation we don’t shut our eyes. But right now I’d like you to shut your eyes and just sit there. What’s going on? All sorts of things. A tiny twitch in your left shoulder; a pressure in your side…Notice your face for a moment. Feel it. Is it tense anywhere? Around the mouth, around the forehead? Now move down a bit. Notice your neck,

The truth is, there are insights that can come right away. When you practice mindfulness of breathing, you know right away that you are alive, and that to be alive is a wonder. If you can be aware that you have a living body, and notice when there’s tension in your body, that’s already an important insight. With that insight, you have already begun

I would like to encourage everybody to practice meditation so we can actually see and look more. If we don’t understand ourselves, it will be very difficult to appreciate anything else that goes on in our world. And on the whole, please cheer up. Don’t analyze too much.

The practice of meditation involves letting be—trying to go with the pattern, trying to go with the energy and the speed. In this way we learn now to deal with these factors, how to relate with them, not in the sense of causing them to mature in the way we would like, but in the sense of knowing them for what they are and working with their pattern

Chögyam Trungpa. He described the basic practice as being completely present. And emphasized that it allowed the space for our neuroses to come to the surface. It was not, as he put it, “a vacation from irritation.” He stressed that this basic practice, which is epitomized by the instruction to return again and again to the immediacy of our experie