meditation
Ideas for practice and teaching
meditation
Meditation helps you practice mindfulness – “you break the link between the thought and the behavioral imperative it seems to communicate”Example: practice ignoring the urge to check your email while yo u’re actively engaged with your kids
Tim Ferriss • #599: New Insights from Sam Harris, Dr. Peter Attia, Ramit Sethi, and Elizabeth Gilbert | The Tim Ferriss Show • Podcast Notes
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
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.
John Tarrant • John Tarrant : Articles
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
Recently, one of my private meditation students asked me, “What do you feel like when you meditate?” Right away I said, “Ordinary. Beautifully ordinary.”
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.
Ram Dass • Be Here Now
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
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.
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