Tag: Awareness

Meditation in its simplest sense

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The word ‘meditation’ can mean all kinds of things. It’s a word that includes any kind of mental practices, good or bad. But when I use this word, what I’m mainly using it for is that sense of centring, that sense of establishing, resting in the centre. The only way that one can really do that is not to try and think about it and analyse it; you have to trust in just a simple act of attention, of awareness. It’s so simple and so direct that our complicated minds get very confused….The more I pay attention and I’m aware, the more I recognise that in this still point there’s this resounding sound of silence.

Ajahn Sumedo

Hold on lightly – let feelings pass through awareness

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Meditation is a special kind of dance in which we commit ourselves wholeheartedly to the practice of deconstructing the materialistic view of reality. The challenge is simultaneously to hold on and to let go; it is to see clearly what we are doing and at the same time see through it.

Ajahn Amaro

Today, choose…

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At any given moment, you can choose to follow the chain of thoughts, emotions, and sensations that reinforce a perception of yourself as vulnerable and limited — or you can remember that you true nature is pure, unconditioned, and incapable of being harmed.

If you’re determined to think of yourself as limited, fearful, vulnerable, or scarred by past experience, know only that you have chosen to do so.

The opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche


Being truly in the present

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If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything.

When a child presents himself to you with his smile, if you are not really there – thinking about the future or the past, or preoccupied with other problems – then the child is not really there for you. The technique of being alive is to go back to yourself in order for the child to appear like a marvellous reality. Then you can see him smile and you can embrace him in your arms.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Love

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Love is not a matter of getting what you want. 

Quite the contrary.

The insistence on always having what you want,
on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled,
makes love impossible.

Thomas Merton

Bring your mind to the present moment

Karl Duffy2 Comments

I think the most important thing is to consciously choose to bring your mind to the present moment. How do you do that? You decide that you’re going to see what your eyes are looking at; you bring your consciousness to the present moment. When you are going up the stairs, you look at the steps, you look at the handrail. Most of us unconsciously climb the steps, never think about the steps, can’t even say what the color of the carpet is, if there is a carpet, because we’re somewhere else.

Pay attention to the present moment. Bring your mind, bring your ears to the present moment, start savoring the awareness of the information you perceive in the present moment, and let that grow. And it’s like with any circuitry: the more you concentrate on it and experience it, the more it will develop itself.

Jill Boite Taylor