meditation

If anxiety, anger, or any other feeling comes along and is just some mild atmosphere in the background of your experience, don't worry about it. But if it's so strong that it stomps up to the foreground and demands to be addressed, note how it feels ... physically. Neutrally, nonjudgmentally, matter-of-factly, allow yourself to experience the

You’ll try as much as you need to try till you’re convinced that trying doesn't work. It's self-defeating, it prevents settling down, and that's going to make meditation tedious. Most people go through a certain amount of this. It's clearly recorded that the Buddha did, and that his enlightenment came when he finally stopped trying. You try for a

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

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

It’s still possible to get caught up in habitual patterns of the thinking mind and the compulsive body. But eventually, there is a remembering, a coming home. The mind stops, the body quiets, the heart opens. When this happens, in that natural stillness and wakefulness, everything is complete and nothing more is needed. There is no me, no

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.

Ordinary means that there is no need to add or take away from what is going on in the mind. Each portion of life has the whole of life. There is nothing wrong with what is in the mind except the sense that something is wrong. In this way simplicity turns to a form of compassion.