Drop into the moment that is now.
No need to judge, no need to have an agenda as to what will be, no need to say, “I am meditating”.
Just be here, drink in all that this moment has to offer as if it is the only one that you have – because it truly is
Ego could be defined as whatever covers up basic goodness. From an experiential point of view, what is ego covering up? It’s covering up our experience of just being here, just fully being where we are, so that we can relate with the immediacy of our experience. Egolessness is a state of mind that has complete confidence in the sacredness of the world. It is unconditional well-being, unconditional joy that includes all the different qualities of our experience.
Pema Chodron.
We are living in a very stressful time with all the successes of Western civilization, Western education and technology, the miracles that the West has performed! And it continues — there is no end to it. Yet people have not become more peaceful and contented. In fact they feel even more stressed by it all. So the problems of modern society in the West are coming not from a lack of anything, from tyrannical governments or from anything terribly wrong, but just from the level of stress in the mind — the speed, the nervousness, the tension, the tendency to get caught up in things and having no way of letting go, no understanding of the nature of things. So people end up taking drugs, drinking a lot, seeking sensory deprivation, trying to bury their heads in the sand; they go off to remote islands in the Pacific or do anything they think will help them find some inner peace…..[However] The silence, the cessation of suffering, is now; it is here and now, in the mind; we don’t have to go anywhere to get it. One can bear with conditions because the silence is not from denying or rejecting, but from understanding, from letting go, and from realizing that all is subject to arising and ceasing. In that movement is a stillness and peacefulness that all of us can experience and know directly for ourselves.
Ajahn Sumedho, The Still Silence
We already have what we need — the opportunity to weave the tapestry of happiness every day with the needle and thread of our own mind.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
See the world as a mirror. It is all a reflection of mind. When you know this, you can grow in every moment, and every experience reveals truth and brings understanding.
Ajahn Chah
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Mindfulness is a form of Mind-Body medicine, a different way of knowing, a different way of being with our experience. From an early age, and once we start school, our capacity to think and analyse is prioritized as the best way of working with what happens in each day. However, we learn in mindfulness is that through awareness there is a wider, kinder, less judgmental way of being with reality. We also come to see that there is a wisdom in our bodies which often “knows” much more than our thoughts. So tuning into our bodies is the fundamental daily skill of mindfulness. Broken down to its most basic from – we focus on the breath in the body, which allows us to notice our thoughts as they arise in the mind and, gently, gradually, let go of struggling with them. In this way we work with what has brought us to this day, as well as laying the foundations for greater happiness and health in the future. Thubten Chodron quotes a Tibetan saying: ‘If you want to know about your past life, look at your present body. If you want to know about your future life, look at your present mind.’ There is a great wisdom in this.
Inherent in any media technology – from the telephone to TV to Twitter – is an emphasis of some ways of thinking and a de-emphasis on other ways of thinking. If you look at the Internet, what it emphasizes is the ability to supply lots of information, in many forms, very quickly. As a result, it encourages us to browse through information in a similar way – by grabbing lots of bits of data simultaneously. What it doesn’t encourage us to engage in is more attentive ways of thinking – the mode of thinking that underpins deep reading, contemplation, reflection and introspection. All of these ways of using our minds – which to me, are very important are de-emphasized by the Internet, and as a result, we’re not practicing them as much anymore. I worry that as a society, we are in danger of losing them.
Nicholas Carr, from an interview with Karen Christensen
