If you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it will all come back to you multiplied ten thousand times. In the kingdom of love there is no competition; there is no possessiveness or control. The more love you give away, the more love you will have.
John O’Donoghue
Sometime go outside and sit,
In the evening at sunset,
When there’s a slight breeze that touches your body,
And makes the leaves and the trees move gently.
You’re not trying to do anything, really.
You’re simply allowing yourself to be,
Very open from deep within,
Without holding onto anything whatsoever. Don’t bring something back from the past, from a memory.
Tsogni Rinpoche
Do not try to become anything. Do not make yourself into anything.
Do not be a meditator. When you sit, let it be. When you walk, let it be.
Grasp at nothing. Resist nothing.
Ajahn Chah
In meditation we first become familiar with a technique: to recognize and release thoughts and emotions and return our attention to the breath. As we learn to abide peacefully, we also become familiar with what I call a healthy sense of self. We become strong, caring, clear-minded individuals in harmony with ourselves and our environment. The meditation posture itself embodies this healthiness: grounded, balanced and relaxed.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
I came across a definition of meditation that it comes from the root meaning ‘right balance.’ That rang true for me because, personally, my attention is often so fragmented, egocentric, narcissistic or self-concerned that there isn’t a whole lot of inner balance or alignment with what is. Rather, I am stuck in a state of nonbalance. Right balance is when my mind is not spinning out endless movies and delusions, or maybe it still is but I am just not so attached to believing them. Meditation is when I can watch stuff go by and the part of me that usually interrupts and says, ‘That’s a good story, or that son of a bitch, or I’m guilty and awful,’ that part sits back and sees it as just one more story but without attachment to it.
Joan Borysenko, quoted in Oprah Magazine
On an evening when an Irish golfer needs to stay focused, some thoughts on a key early practice in meditation. Being mindful means we work on our capacity to simply watch our thoughts and emotions, allowing them pass through a stable field of awareness without disturbing it excessively. To do this we need to strengthen our capacity to let go of distractions and the running after happiness by creating a calmness and constancy in the mind that observes good and bad with an equal ability to accept things as they are. This capacity to focus – to be one-pointed in our attention – is at the heart of our freedom from anxiety:
Concentration is the cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. You can think of concentration as the capacity of the mind to sustain an unwavering attention on one object of observation.…….. A calmness develops with concentration practice that has a remarkable stable quality to it. It is steadfast, profound, hard to disturb, no matter what comes up. You can look deeply into something if you sustain your looking without being constantly thrown off by distractions or the agitation of your own mind.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, there you are.
The incredibly warm weather means that the birds are everywhere and active. The first swallows have returned. Birdsong fills the air at dawn and dusk. And they are busy….finding worms, building nests and testifying to life. We can learn so much about what leads to real happiness from how Nature works. When we are close to nature , in the mountains or in the garden, we touch into a wisdom within our deepest selves, as Mark Nepo did, observing a robin building a nest:
It was a small thing, watching the robin carry a twig too big for its nest. It tried once, then twice to use it, and somehow…it knew it was no good. It simply flew off and picked another.
I went and found the twig. I rolled it in my hand and thought of the times I’ve labored, trying to make things too big fit. So often what we want is like that twig, too big to be of use, and we stay lodged in an unhappiness created by holding on to something that cannot complete our nest.
It was humbling to watch a small bird work, singing as it went, leaving what it couldn’t use as it found it. If we could only treat each other with such simple kindness.
from The Book of Awakening
