Don’t go outside your house to see flowers.
My friend, don’t bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty;
inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens
Kabir
Meditation is not a means to suppress “thinking”. A calm mind is not without thoughts but one in which we are able to investigate our thoughts in a non-judgmental, compassionate and calm way. When we do this, we improve our capacity to think and reflect with clarity. Inner simplicity is born of willingness to learn how to let go. Meditation is fundamentally about listening without prejudice to our minds. The liberation of being able to listen to our minds without rejecting, interpreting or judging beings clarity and calm.
Christine Feldman, Beginners Guide to Buddhist meditation
We tend either to feel once removed from what is happening, or to become entirely lost in it. Both tendencies leave us with a sense of artificiality, however dramatic and sensational the situation may be. My understanding …is that it is possible to live in-between these two modes of limited being. We remain one with experience – not torn apart by a commitment to an image. Through abiding in the in-between we discover a subtle kind of personal confidence. It is not “my” confidence because it is a confidence that belongs to reality. The struggle of moving from finding security in false identities into realisation of limitless abiding beyond personality is difficult. It feels like it will cost us everything. But [instead]…we find there are more and more situations in which we remember ourselves more quickly. We are now more likely to be able to accord with whatever situation we are in as we move through the world – not because we have become more liberal or compromising, not at all, but because we don’t hold ourselves so tightly.
Ajahn Munindo, Unexpected Freedom
When you are practicing….. do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything. It appears as if something comes from outside your mind, but actually it is only the waves of your mind, and if you are not bothered by the waves, gradually they will become calmer and calmer.
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.
Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves. Sanctity in such an age means, no doubt, traveling from the area of anxiety to the area in which there is no anxiety or perhaps it may mean learning….to be without anxiety in the midst of anxiety. Fundamentally, as Max Picard points out, it probably comes to this: living in a silence which so reconciles the contradictions within us that, although they remain within us, they cease to be a problem.
Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.
Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
Mindfulness helps you go home to the present.
And every time you go there
and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Mindfulbalance 