meditation
Ideas for practice and teaching
meditation
One of the virtues of meditation is that it allows you to tolerate or even enjoy such between moments, to befriend the material your mind throws to the surface when it is not otherwise occupied by chasing something or trying to improve its condition.
John Tarrant • Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life
Here are some rules of thumb that might help you navigate whatever practice you are trying out.
- Criticizing, judging, or assessing yourself isn’t virtue. It doesn’t help in meditation; it’s just more noise. And if you are criticizing, judging, or assessing yourself, don’t criticize that, and so on, until you wear out and compassion enters.
- Criticizin
John Tarrant • John Tarrant : Articles
You can do this now by focusing on the feeling that there is much more to life than you understand.
Tim Freke • How Long Is Now?
“It’s against this background of seeking satisfaction amidst ceaseless change, that you can see how radical an act of meditation actually is—meditation is the act of calling off the search, it is the art of doing nothing.” – Sam Harris
Tim Ferriss • #599: New Insights from Sam Harris, Dr. Peter Attia, Ramit Sethi, and Elizabeth Gilbert | The Tim Ferriss Show • Podcast Notes
A regular sitting practice makes all those aspects of life, of our body and mind, all the things that we keep ordinarily at arm’s length, increasingly unavoidable. It’s not what we might have had in mind when we first signed up, but it’s what we get.
Barry Magid • Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide
Ordinary means that there is no need to add or take away from what is going on in the mind. Each portion of life has the whole of life. There is nothing wrong with what is in the mind except the sense that something is wrong. In this way simplicity turns to a form of compassion.
John Tarrant • Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life
Recently, one of my private meditation students asked me, “What do you feel like when you meditate?” Right away I said, “Ordinary. Beautifully ordinary.”
Meditation is not about manufacturing a state of mind that’s clear, calm or full of insight. It’s about interfering less and less with what is actually here.
John Tarrant • John Tarrant : Articles
When presencing or resting in the nature of mind, mental events are said to effortlessly “self-liberate” and spontaneously dissolve on their own, no longer held in place through movements of attraction or aversion based on reification; this is described as the “method” of Dzogchen (Norbu, 2006)