meditation
Ideas for practice and teaching
meditation
Ideas for practice and teaching
Over and over again we will have to do this. We will forget. Farther down the path, tomorrow, or perhaps later today, we will forget about stillness. And when we do, we will have lost the thread. Without this central practice, none of it will make any sense.
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.
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.
We so routinely look outside of ourselves for answers that when we turn to look within, it can feel foreign. It can feel challenging, confusing, scary, and painful.
When I practice 'being conscious of being conscious', I don't just watch my experience, I find myself appreciating my experience.
Once we see that the goal of awakening is to be conscious of both our separate identity as a person and our essential identity as awareness, it becomes much easier to wake up to oneness.
You’ll try as much as you need to try till you’re convinced that trying doesn't work. It's self-defeating, it prevents settling down, and that's going to make meditation tedious. Most people go through a certain amount of this. It's clearly recorded that the Buddha did, and that his enlightenment came when he finally stopped trying. You try for a
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