We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators:
We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.
Pema Chodron
Tag: Be fully present
Letting go our story lines
The essence of practice is always the same:
instead of falling prey to a chain reaction
of revenge or hatred,
we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction
and drop the story lines.
Pema Chodron
Giving full attention to each thing today
Attention means focus, it means simplicity, it means giving your attention to one thing, one person at one time. Not in a fixated compulsive addictive way, but to be able to really give yourself, at that moment, to the person you are with. Learning to meditate is learning to pay attention. It is the art of attention in the simplest purest most immediate way. When you sit to meditate you let go of all the 1001 different things that are going on in the head. But don’t underestimate how distracted you are. It’s not easy, so don’t expect it to be easy. But it is simple. And because it is simple, anyone can do it who really wishes to do it, and is humble enough to keep coming back to it and learn, day by day, little by little, how to pay attention.
Laurence Freeman, Benedictine monk
Sunday Quote: When we open our eyes
It was early,which has always been my hour to begin looking at the world
Sometimes I need only to stand
wherever I am to be blessed.
Mary Oliver, It was early.
Mont Blanc silhouette, early morning, Feb 2012
Never having really lived
The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered:
“Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
How to deal with our inner commentator
A great distraction at times are so-called “running commentary” thoughts such as, “Now I am not thinking of anything,” “Things are going very well now,” “This is dreadful; my mind just won’t stay still” and such like……..All such thoughts should simply be noted as “Thinking,” and, as Huang Po says, “dropped like a piece of rotten wood.” “Dropped,” notice, not thrown down. A piece of rotten wood is not doing anything to irritate you, but is just of no use, so there is no point in hanging on to it…Nor is there any need to try to retrace the links in a chain of associated thoughts, nor to try to ascertain what it was that first started the chain. Any such impulse should itself be noted simply as “Thinking,” and the mind should revert to the breathing. However badly things have just been going, one should take up again at the only place one can – where one is – and go on from there.
Bhikku Mangalo, The Practice of Recollection
