meditation
Ideas for practice and teaching
meditation
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
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
Can you find where this moment comes from or where it goes home to?
John Tarrant • Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life
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.
Tim Freke • How Long Is Now?
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 per... See more
Tara Brach • Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of R.A.I.N.
But, meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel.
Jon Kabat-Zinn • Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
Just as there is no one instrument that is the sole, true embodiment of music, there is no hierarchy of traditions or practices. Who is to say that the violin is better or worse than the piano?
Barry Magid • Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide
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
I guess I meditate because attention is my art form. I’d even wager that much of what we call art — paintings, novels, poetry — are secondary, byproducts of rarefied attention. Attention, then is the primary art form.