Imagine how it might feel to suspend all your judging and instead to let each moment be just as it is, without attempting to evaluate it as “good” or “bad.” This would be a true stillness, a true liberation.
Meditation means cultivating a non-judging attitude toward what comes up in the mind, come what may.
Jon Kabat Zinn
There is a twilight zone in our hearts that we ourselves cannot see. Even when we know quite a lot about ourselves – our gifts and weaknesses, our ambitions and aspirations, our motives and our drives – large parts of ourselves remain in the shadow of consciousness. This is a very good thing. We will always remain partially hidden to ourselves. Other people, especially those who love us, can often see our twilight zones better than we ourselves can. The way we are seen and understood by others is different from the way we see and understand ourselves. We will never fully know the significance of our presence in the lives of our friends. That’s a grace, a grace that calls us not only to humility, but to a deep trust in those who love us. It is the twilight zones of our hearts where true friendships are born.
Henri Nouwen
I like to think of mindfulness simply as the art of conscious living.
In fact, the most important point is just to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already.
Jon Kabat Zinn
I think Carl Rogers said it best. He said the great paradox was that it was not until I accepted myself just as I was that I was free to change. In other words – acceptance, pausing and being with our life just as it is, is the the precondition to all transformation. For us to be free, we need to stop believing the thoughts that something is wrong. We need to stop running away from the very vulnerability that needs a profound type of self-compassion. Whatever we cannot embrace with love or with acceptance imprisons us. It keeps us in the trance of a bad self. So the path of emotional healing is really the path of stopping the war, of pausing, of not believing the judgments, of not continuing to punish ourself. Instead of running away and trying to escape the rawness that is here, really meeting it with a deep, deep compassion.
Tara Brach, Meditations for Emotional Healing
The 2008 Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists at Imperial College, London was told that the evidence-base for the therapeutic value of meditation for a wide range of health problems was significantly stronger than most pharmaceutical products. A new meta-analysis of 823 randomly controlled trials of meditation, conducted by the US National Institute of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, showed the clinical benefits of meditation across a wide range of physical and emotional disorders.
Meditation is a way of life rather than quick fix achieved by using gimmicks such as incense, music and light, Dr Avdesh Sharma, past president of the Indian Psychiatric Association, said. It doesn’t work immediately. You need to practice it for several weeks before the effects begin to be felt. Dr Sharma added: If meditation was a drug, we’d all want shares in it. It has a beneficial effect on most physical health problems and is very effective for mental health problems significantly reducing levels of depression, anxiety and insomnia by improving relaxation, oxygenation of the brain, and energy levels.
Meditation is really about paying attention,
and the only way we can pay attention is through the senses, including the mind.
Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves, and our experience.
Jon Kabat Zinn
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