Your body is your first home:
“Breathing in, I arrive in my body.
Breathing out, I am home.”
Thich Nhat Hahn
Category: Be fully present
The Basics of Practice 6: Not reacting
In the process of focusing on our breathing and watching our thoughts come and go, we learn that they don’t have to react to every thought that comes into our minds, that just because the mind is jumping around and agitated at times doesn’t mean we have to jump with it. With practice, we become more comfortable with silence and sitting still.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Just passing through
The impermanence, the emptiness of mind states…..
Just like the weather, they blow in and out.
Good mood. Bad mood. Tranquil mood. Frazzled mood
Sylvia Boorstein, It’s Easier than you think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness
The Basics of Practice 5: The natural breath
As you start the practice, you have a sense of your body and a sense of where you are, and then you begin to notice the breathing. The whole feeling of the breath is very important. The breath should not be forced, obviously; you are breathing naturally. The breath is going in and out, in and out. With each breath you become relaxed.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
Open to the life we have
Today dawned very foggy over Ireland and England, narrowing down things and dulling the senses somewhat. Sometimes, in similar ways, we narrow down our possibilities by not being open to all that is actually going on in our lives, as we think better is to be found elsewhere, or in the future:
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 is a good day”, goes the Zen koan.
John Tarrant, Enlightenment is Something we do Together
photo aeou
The Basics of Practice 4: Just watch
Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to your own experience. To do this requires that you become aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experience and learn to step back from it.
When we begin practicing paying attention to the activity of our own mind, it is common to discover that we are constantly generating judgments about our experience.
Jon Kabat Zinn
