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
Cheerfulness comes naturally with meditation. It is a quality of space created within the mind. When there’s space in the mind, the mind relaxes, and we feel a simple sense of delight. We experience the possibility of living a life in which we are not continuously aggravated by emotions, discursiveness, and concepts about the nature of things…. Despite all the ups and downs of our life, we are fundamentally awake individuals who have a natural ability to become compassionate and wise. Our nature is to be cheerful. This cheerfulness is deeper than temporary conditions. The day does not have to be sunny for us to be cheerful. 
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.
Awareness is born of intimacy. We can only fear what we do not understand and what we perceive from a distance. We can only find compassion and freedom in intimacy. We can be afraid of intimacy because we are afraid of helplessness; we fear that we don’t have the inner balance to embrace it without being overwhelmed. Yet each time we find the willingness to meet fear, we discover we are not powerless. Awareness rescues us from helplessness, teaching us to be helpful through our kindness, patience, resilience, and courage. Awareness is the forerunner of understanding, and understanding is the prerequisite to bringing suffering to an end.
Mindfulbalance 