meditation
Ideas for practice and teaching
meditation
You can do this now by focusing on the feeling that there is much more to life than you understand.
Tim Freke • How Long Is Now?
"But it is true as a matter of conscious experience. The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world."
Sam Harriss • Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
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
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
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?
The space between stories is an invitation to sit with mystery and the uncertainty it holds.
Niels Devisscher • Belonging and Butterflies in Times of Breakdown
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
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
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.