One of the funny things about learning to look into the mind is that normally that’s the last place we ever look! If you consider the way we normally think, we carry on an endless dialogue with ourselves full of memories, justifications, anticipations, commentaries, fantasies, daydreams and so on. We just keep thinking, comparing, analyzing. And we believe what we think. I have  my beliefs, they are true because that’s what I believe! What I like must be good because I like it!…..The aim of meditation practice is to first teach us how to quiet the mind and then to look into the mind itself. It teaches us how to distance ourselves from our thoughts and emotions and to see them as just thoughts and emotions. They are mental states. They arise for a short time, then they disappear, then another state arises. They are like bubbles. Our problem is not that we have thoughts and emotions but that we identify with them.

Ani Tenzin Palmo, Reflections on a Mountain Lake

photo serge melki