A useful technique involves working with awareness of body touch-points. These are the parts of the body that come into contact with other objects in the course of each day, such as the bottoms of our feet as we move about, or the felt sense of sitting in a chair, or of our hands touching something. We bring our attention to a touch-point as often as we can remember. This is useful in breaking our habitual mental and emotional patterns.
Narayan Liebenson Grady
If you have a garden and a library,
you have everything you need.
Cicero
Looking back, I can see that my biggest obstacle at the time was that I thought of meditation as something that would help me get rid of the parts of myself that I didn’t like. I sincerely hoped that meditation would lead me to happy, peaceful states of mind where panic and fear could not touch me. Yet what my father was leading me to was much more radical than that: He wanted me to see that the only way out of suffering is to move toward it; that the path of true awakening lies in experiencing every single moment, whether pleasant or painful, with complete and unconditional love.
Unconditional love is something we can immediately see the value of when it relates to others, but how often do we think of cultivating unconditional love for ourselves? How often do we not only accept, but even cherish our own tender spots and painful feelings? What my father taught me in those early years was that when we simply let be and open ourselves to the richness of the present moment, we experience every thought, feeling, and experience as an expression of the mind’s luminous nature. From the perspective of awareness, no thought or emotion is any better or any worse than another. They are all manifestations of the mind’s infinite potential.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Took this photo on this beautiful morning, walking near the barley fields at the foot of the Jura. It does scant justice to the sweep of the mountains and the wideness of nature. We draw such scenes into our heart and take a sense of openness from them. In their space we find space.
By association with nature’s enormities, a man’s heart may truly grow big also. There is a way of looking upon a landscape as a moving picture and being satisfied with nothing less big as a moving picture, a way of looking upon tropic clouds over the horizon as the backdrop of a stage and being satisfied with nothing less big as a backdrop, a way of looking upon the mountain forests as a private garden and being satisfied with nothing less as a private garden, a way of listening to the roaring waves as a concert and being satisfied with nothing less as a concert, and a way of looking upon the mountain breeze as an air-cooling system and being satisfied with nothing less as an air-cooling system. So do we become big, even as the earth and firmaments are big. Like the “Big Man” described by Yuan Tsi, one of China’s first romanticists, we “live in heaven and earth as our house.”
Lin Yutang
Real questioning has no methods, no knowing – just wondering freely, vulnerably, what it is that is actually happening inside and out. Not the word, not the idea of it, not the reaction to it, but the simple fact… Anxiety arises… will one immediately act by “knowing” it from previous times and bracing against it? “Oh, not that again–I hate it–it’s going to get worse, how can I get rid of it.” and so forth. [Or] simply meeting it as for the first time, attending quietly, feeling it, letting it move on its own, revealing itself for what it is without interference by the brain.
Toni Parker, The work of this moment
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images,
the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience
Joan Didion
