meditation
Ideas for practice and teaching
meditation
Ideas for practice and teaching
Imagine that you're passing a lazy afternoon at a sidewalk café on a mild spring day, sipping your drink, chatting with a couple of friends, and watching the cars go by. That's easy. In fact, it's effort-less: the cars just go wherever they go, and you're happily unem-ployed. But now suppose that for some reason you suddenly fall under the delusion
... See moreOver 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.
When we meditate for a purpose—to be calm, to gain insight—we are striving, not meditating. If we spend our time assessing how we are doing, we are defending ourselves against the intimacy of life, not letting it get hold of us.
It is as if we lived in a world where only diamonds could be used to put out a fire. In this alternate universe, fires are easy to start and break out everywhere, but water, which is as common there as here, won’t put them out. Only diamonds, which are just as rare as on Earth, will put out a fire. Only a very few unique individuals are capable of
... See moreOrdinary 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.
Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW...so you stop asking.
A lot of meditation is just showing up for what we have, and there is joy in that. It’s diferent from the kind of happi- ness that comes from getting what you wanted. It’s a joy that doesn’t have a good reason. It’s a joy that allows you to be sad or upset, because you’re alive in the midst of it.
Practice is not about overcoming human problems. It’s not about becoming serene and transcendent. It’s about embracing our lives as they really are, and understanding at every point how deep and profound and gorgeous everything is—even the suffering, even the difficulty. So we forgive ourselves for our limitations, and we forgive this world for its
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