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

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

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Here are some rules of thumb that might help you navigate whatever practice you are trying out.

1. 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.


2. Criticizin

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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

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We 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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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.

nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know…nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched. maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. but what we find as... 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.”