Mindful breathing brings your body and mind back together. In our busy society it’s a great fortune to be able to sit and breathe consciously from time to time. Paying attention to your breathing is a way for your body to relax. As you continue breathing with awareness, your breath naturally becomes slower and deeper. As you breathe, you can say to yourself:
“Breathing in, I’m aware of the tension in my body.
Breathing out, I release all the tension in my body”.
Thich Nhat Hahn, Making Space
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
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.
John Tarrant, The Paradox of Happiness
No seed ever sees the flower
Zen Saying
Simplification of outward life is not enough. It is merely the outside. But I am starting with the outside. I am looking at the outside of a shell, the outside of my life — the shell. The complete answer is not to be found on the outside, in an outward mode of living. This is only a technique, a road to grace. The final answer, I know, is always inside. But the outside can give a clue, can help one to find the inside answer.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, American writer and aviator, Gift from the Sea
We often are tempted to identify strongly with the mini movies or stories that are continually running in our heads. However, like the changing weathers of these last few weeks, many come and simply pass away.
We usually take ourselves to be the sum of these thoughts, ideas, emotions and body sensations, but there is nothing solid to them. How can we claim to be our thoughts or opinions or emotions or body when they never stay the same?
Jack Kornfield
