meditation

Over and over again we will have to do this. We will forget. Farther down the path, tomorrow, or perhaps later today, we will forget about stillness. And when we do, we will have lost the thread. Without this central practice, none of it will make any sense.

It is as if we lived in a world where only diamonds could be used to put out a fire. In this alternate universe, fires are easy to start and break out everywhere, but water, which is as common there as here, won’t put them out. Only diamonds, which are just as rare as on Earth, will put out a fire. Only a very few unique individuals are capable of

We're telling ourselves a story about who we are and what life is, and we're confusing this story with reality.

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

When I practice 'being conscious of being conscious', I don't just watch my experience, I find myself appreciating my experience.

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.

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.

You can do this now by focusing on the feeling that there is much more to life than you understand.