Meditation
We may meditate in hopes that it will lower our stress and anxiety in everyday life, but the practice of meditation is actually about learning to embrace this moment, right now, even if it’s uncomfortable, imperfect, or even painful.
Jude Star • Freedom From the Future
It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.
Reader
Thich Nhat Hanh (via Jude Star)
If you let go a little, you will find a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will find a lot of peace. If you let go absolutely, you will find absolute peace and tranquility.
Ajahn Chah (via Jude Star)
Overview of the work of Jude Star, whose writing on meditation and and meaning I appreciate a lot.
As you progress, you will discover a profound truth: in life, as in meditation, physical pain is unavoidable, but suffering of every kind is entirely optional.
Culadasa John Yates • The Mind Illuminated - A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science
As the saying goes, pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. If you can simply stay present with whatever is arising in awareness—whether it’s a first dart or a second one—without reacting further, then you will break the chain of suffering right there.
Rick Hanson • Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom
Shinzen has this simple formula he will often display while teaching:
Pain x Resistance = Suffering
Pain x Equanimity = Purification
Purification is maybe a big idea, but you can think of it as the undoing of what keeps us closed off to a more expansive and connected state of being or awareness. When we open to pain and allow it to move through us uno
... See moreJude Star • New Horizons: Innovative Teachers of Awakening - Part 1: Shinzen Young
S = P x R. The amount of suffering you experience is equal to the actual pain multiplied by the mind’s resistance to that pain.
Culadasa John Yates • The Mind Illuminated - A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science
“Although it can be useful to think of mindfulness as ‘being with things as they really are’, it is in fact more accurate, and more helpful for our purposes, to understand basic mindfulness practice as a way of looking that merely fabricates a little less than our habitual ways of looking.” -Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees
Jude Star • How To Explore Meditation: A Primer
– Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees
The key to this whole process is to embrace the stage you’re at. If you’re mostly seeing the world conceptually, really notice what that’s like. As you pay attention to the conceptual projection onto people and objects, you’ll naturally start to see things more apart from the projection, or with a little less fabrication.