When you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought.
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Being
Category: Meditation
When you are centered
You’re very busy doing your practices……and you get into a state of mind where you accept that whatever is happening is happening. Even the most awful things that happen, if you’re centered, you’ll be O.K. If not, the most trivial thing will send you off. It has nothing to do with the experience or the circumstance: it is the attitude that’s important. We have to stop clinging to the conditioned path and learn to be open to the unconditioned path.
Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
Teens Day 9: Negative, judgmental thoughts
The habit of judging our experience locks us into mechanical reactions that we are not even aware of and that often have no objective basis at all.These judgments tend to dominate our minds making it difficult to find any peace within ourselves.
It is as if the mind were a yo-yo going up and down on the string of our own judging thoughts all day long
Jon Kabat Zinn
Why do we practice?
Good practice is about fear. Fear takes the form of constantly thinking, speculating, analyzing, fantasizing. With all that activity we create a cloud to keep ourselves safe in make-believe practice. True practice is not safe; it’s anything but safe. But we don’t like that, so we obsess with our feverish efforts to achieve our version of the personal dream. Such obsessive practice is itself just another cloud between ourselves and reality. The only thing that matters is seeing with an impersonal spotlight: seeing things as they really are. When the personal barrier drops away, why do we have to call it anything? We just live our lives.
Charlotte Joko Beck
How to be master of your own happiness
Everything can be used as an invitation to meditation. A smile, a face in the subway, the sight of a small flower growing in the crack of cement pavement, a fall of rich cloth in a shop window, the way the sun lights up flower pots on a windowsill. Be alert for any sign of beauty or grace. Offer up every joy, be awake at all moments “to the news that is always arriving out of silence”.
Slowly, you will become a master of your own bliss, a chemist of your own joy, with all sorts of remedies always at hand to elevate, cheer, illuminate and inspire your every breath and movement.
Sogyal Rinpoche
We chase after happiness: Bring the mind home today
We are fragmented into so many different aspects.
We don´t know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home.
Meditation, then, is bringing the mind home
Sogyal Rinpoche
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