meditation
Ideas for practice and teaching
meditation
After all our futile efforts to transform our ordinary minds into idealized, spiritual minds, we discover the fundamental paradox of practice is that leaving everything alone is itself what is ultimately transformative.
Barry Magid • Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide
Recently, one of my private meditation students asked me, “What do you feel like when you meditate?” Right away I said, “Ordinary. Beautifully ordinary.”
It’s still possible to get caught up in habitual patterns of the thinking mind and the compulsive body. But eventually, there is a remembering, a coming home. The mind stops, the body quiets, the heart opens. When this happens, in that natural stillness and wakefulness, everything is complete and nothing more is needed. There is no me, no
... See morejoantollifson.com • Being Just This Moment: My Awakening journey
When we say to ourselves, “This feels bad. I need a way to fix this!” that’s the very moment when the most growth and promise lies at our fingertips. But in order to access it, we have to do the opposite of what we want to do. We have to resist the urge to analyze or find a solution or protect ourselves from our emotions.
We have to stop and feel... See more
We have to stop and feel... See more
Heather Havrilesky • Tolerating Unknowns Will Make You Stronger
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
We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing -- our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can't hold on to anything -- a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self -- because all things come and go. Lacking any... See more
Tara Brach • Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of R.A.I.N.
When I practice 'being conscious of being conscious', I don't just watch my experience, I find myself appreciating my experience.
Tim Freke • How Long Is Now?
Again, Dzogchen posits that the state beyond suffering is not something apart from us to be attained, but rather the enduring condition of our own being, obscured by investment in the subject-object mode of perception and the resultant attempts to manipulate experience. As an expression of this view, its contemplative practices emphasize
... See moreWe often disapprove of parts of our lives without really examining them—it’s like never going into certain rooms of your house. But meditation allows all the voices and all the images into the room. When we open the invisible doors, we can come to rest in the life we have; we can love it as it is instead of waiting for a shinier version. Every day
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