meditation
Ideas for practice and teaching
meditation
Ideas for practice and teaching
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 moreOnce 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.
Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW...so you stop asking.
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.
A lot of meditation is just showing up for what we have, and there is joy in that. It’s diferent from the kind of happi- ness that comes from getting what you wanted. It’s a joy that doesn’t have a good reason. It’s a joy that allows you to be sad or upset, because you’re alive in the midst of it.
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
... See moreAllowing 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.