The heart is just the heart; thoughts and feelings are just thoughts and feelings. Let things be just as they are! Let form be just form, let sound be just sound, let thought be just thought. Why should we bother to attach to them? If we think and feel in this way, then there is detachment and separateness. Our thoughts and feelings will be on one side and our heart will be on the other. Just like oil and water — they are in the same bottle but they are separate.
Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart
In mindfulness meditation, we work to create the conditions favorable to the arising of mindfulness, relaxing the body and the mind, focusing the attention carefully but gently on a particular aspect of experience, while producing sufficient energy to remain alert without losing a sense of ease and tranquility. Under such conditions, properly sustained, mindfulness will emerge as if by some grace of the natural world, as if it were a gift of clarity from our deepest psyche to the turbid shallows of our mind. When it does, we gradually learn how to hold ourselves so that it lingers, to relocate or re-enact it when it fades, and to consistently water its roots and weed its soil so that it can blossom into a lovely and sustainable habit of heart and mind.
Andrew Olendzki, The Real Practice of Mindfulness
Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it.
It is all we ever have, so we might as well work with it rather than struggling against it.
We might as well make it our friend and teacher rather than our enemy.
Pema Chodron
From time to time we come to a stuck place … After a while, the doing, fixing mind gets to the end of what it can accomplish and becomes the problem rather than the solution. Then we get stuck. And that sense of stuckness spins out into blaming our apparent self, our system of practice… we assess our character, our heart, our history, our past, our flaws, and our virtues. We fidget, become distracted, and jump to conclusions that will cement the stuckness into a situation...We can note that the stuckness, having eluded our attempts to get rid of it or gloss over it, takes us to an ‘edge.’ We want to hold on to some identity, or to a conviction in our practice tradition, but we can’t quite do it. We are taken to a place of uncertainty, a place where there is a feeling of not being anything solid but where there is still a hankering to be something. This is the edge.
The stuck stuff captures and convinces by its power to stimulate the mind… [but] if we can see them for what they are… these energies won’t stick. We realize that the stuck state is just a pattern of energies that we weren’t fully aware of; and when that fullness of awareness is brought to bear, the self is taken out of it and it becomes unstuck. And it takes us to a [place that is] more intimate and comfortable than our personalities.
Ajahn Sucitto
The purpose of meditation is to develop a sane relationship to experience. The struggles we have in life – shutting down, pushing away, feeling overwhelmed, and all the neurotic attachment — arise from the confusion we harbor about how to relate to the rich energy of the mind. When eating, we ingest, process, and eliminate food. But how do we digest our experience? It’s not so clear…The practice methods […] are designed to bring us into a sane relationship with our experience. As the great Tibetan Buddhist master Tilopa said to his disciple Naropa, “Son, it is not experiences themselves that bind you, but the way you cling to or reject them“
Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, Are we Really Meditating?
In meditation we learn to become familiar in a positive way with how our mind works. Our mind becomes open, inquisitive and supple. We’re comfortable looking at ourselves honestly. We’re not too hard on ourselves, but at the same time we’re becoming wise to our little tricks. We know how we get slippery. We know when we’re about to buy in to habitual reactions such as anger or jealousy. At some point we have the strength and discipline to make a choice about how we’re using our minds. We can be open to alternatives beyond the knee-jerk reaction. We can say, “Traffic is bad, but I don’t always have to be irritated. I can choose a different response.”
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
