meditation
Ideas for practice and teaching
meditation
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.
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
The lesson here, which you can actually apply to anything that happens in meditation, is: Just say "Hmmm." There's a scene in The Big Sleep where Humphrey Bogart, as the detective Philip Marlowe, is considering a clue. Tugging at his earlobe, he says, "Hmmm." When Lauren Bacall asks him, "What does 'Hmmm'
mean?," Bogey replies, "It means, 'Hmmm."
Tha
... See moreDean Sluyter • Natural Meditation
“... This aliveness is always here. We don’t have to work to get it. It is ever-present. Seeking enlightenment is a form of postponement, postponing what can only be realized now ...” ~ Joan Tollifson
Joan Tollifson • Can We Embrace "Yes Buts?" Painting The Sidewalk Joan Tollifson - Stillness Speaks
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
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
I started to meditate in a different way. I let go of the idea of what meditation was supposed to be. So I would sit down and let my experience simply be, in a very deep way. I started to let go of trying to control my experience. That became the beginning of discovering for myself what True Meditation is. From that point on, that shift - moving... See more
Recently, one of my private meditation students asked me, “What do you feel like when you meditate?” Right away I said, “Ordinary. Beautifully ordinary.”
Allowing and encouraging a quality of play and experimentation in practice is vital, and vitalizing. I can’t emphasize this enough. Usually that’s how we learn best as human beings, and it keeps things from getting rigid and feeling heavy.