Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don’t know. We never know if we’re going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know.
Pema Chodron
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
Practice is separate from any posture. It is a matter of directly looking at the mind. This is wisdom….. You must examine yourself. Know who you are. Know your body and mind by simply watching. In sitting, in sleeping, in eating, know your limits. Use wisdom. The practice is not to try to achieve anything. Just be mindful of what is. The whole of meditation is looking directly at the mind.
So, be patient. Live simply and be natural. Watch the mind. This is our practice.
Ajahn Chah
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
The issue is not so much the presence or absence of thought activity during meditation. Rather, the issue is the degree to which ones thought activity is driven, unconscious and fixated.
The great majority of human beings are literally addicted to thinking. Even the most wretched substance abuser can go a few hours between “fixes,” but most human beings cannot abide even for a few seconds without some sort of “thought fix.” If there’s nothing significant to think about, we fill the void with fantasy and trivia. Simply stated, meditation breaks the addiction to thinking. One is then in a highly desirable situation. When you want to have a complete experience of hearing and feeling (for example as you listen to music), you can do so without being compulsively pulled into thoughts which are not relevant to the music. When you want to have a complete experience of tasting and feeling, as when enjoying a bite of food, you can likewise do so. On the other hand, when it is appropriate to think, you find that your thinking abilities are vastly improved.
Shinzen Young
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
