A lord asked Takuan, a Zen Teacher, to suggest how he might pass the time. He felt his days very long attending his office and sitting stiffly to receive the homage of others. Takuan wrote eight Chinese characters and gave them to the man:
Not twice this day
Inch time foot gem.
This day will not come again.
Each minute is worth a priceless gem.
Takuan Soho, Zen Teacher, 1573 – 1645.
Mindfulness means attention. It means that when you are washing your face in the morning, you actually feel the slippery soap and the warm water splashing in your hands. All too often, direct experience of the real-time present is replaced, forgotten, hastily bypassed. In our rush to get to the next moment, we substitute a fantasy life, an imagined life in the future for the actual life we are living. I’ve washed my face thousands of times, and I’m bored with it, so instead I am already caught up in planning and rehearsing what I need to say later in the morning at the 9.30 meeting. Which is more real – my presence at the sink or my ideas about this mornings agenda? Mindfulness lets us reclaim the lives we are actually living.
Gaylon Ferguson, Natural Wakefulness
We tend to personalize everything. Why everything gets at us and makes us so angry is because of something our mind is doing – but to acknowledge that entails giving up some position of “me” and “my emotions” that are right and justified. Now, I’m not saying that abandonment means not feeling anything – that attitude really drives people into dangerously repressed places. The way is about seeing how things get under our skin ad chafe our heart. It’s about abandoning the action of taking in dukkha. We widen our perspective into being aware of how we are feeling and with that clear and steady awareness, we can watch the mental process very carefully.
Ajahn Sucitto, Turning the Wheel of Truth
Mindful breathing brings your body and mind back together. In our busy society it’s a great fortune to be able to sit and breathe consciously from time to time. Paying attention to your breathing is a way for your body to relax. As you continue breathing with awareness, your breath naturally becomes slower and deeper. As you breathe, you can say to yourself:
“Breathing in, I’m aware of the tension in my body.
Breathing out, I release all the tension in my body”.
Thich Nhat Hahn, Making Space
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche talked about mindfulness meditation as a process of “touch and go.” “Touch” means really acknowledging, really appreciating, the texture of a particular mental content, not just bouncing off of it. It is the difference between a gentle squeeze and a superficial tap. This touching, acknowledging, appreciating, is the seed for developing insight — a way of being present to phenomena that invites fresh meanings to emerge. Because Westerners tend to be more split off from the experiential body than people in more traditional cultures, the practice of Focusing can facilitate our ability to touch genuinely what arises in the mind-heart in a non-discursive way. As Pema Chodron recently advised a questioner with doubts about her meditation practice, “There is a secret ingredient — direct, nonverbal experience.”
David Rome, Searching for the Truth that Is Far Below the Search
Everyone wants to use happiness as a fix for problems, yet happiness is its own, very big thing, and it is selling happiness short to make it a fix for problems. To be happy is to experience life not as a series of struggles but as a gift, one that has no known limit. When you get the hang of being more interested in life than in agreeing with your thoughts, then you will get the life you get. And you will be able to have as much happiness as you want with almost no effort whatsoever. When you stop believing your thoughts, you look around just for you, just because it is interesting to look around. Some people call that enlightenment. But you won’t call it that. You’ll be too interested in the new view.
John Tarrant, The Paradox of Happiness
