Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to your own experience. To do this requires that you become aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experience and learn to step back from it.
When we begin practicing paying attention to the activity of our own mind, it is common to discover that we are constantly generating judgments about our experience.
Jon Kabat Zinn
The losing of paradise is enacted over and over again by the children of Adam and Eve. We clothe our souls with messages and doctrines, and lose contact with the great life in the naked breast of nature
Rabindranath Tagore
Does the rose have to do something? No, the purpose of a rose is to be a rose. Your purpose is to be yourself. You don’t have to run anywhere to become someone else. You are wonderful just the way you are. This teaching …. allows us to enjoy ourselves, the blue sky, and everything that is refreshing and healing in the present moment. We already have everything we are looking for, everything we want to become. I am happy in the present moment. I do not ask for anything else. I do not expect any additional happiness. Aimlessness is stopping and realizing the happiness that is already available.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Each meditation session is a journey of discovery to understand the basic truth of who we are. In the beginning the most important lesson of meditation is seeing the speed of the mind. But the meditation tradition says that mind doesn’t have to be this way: it just hasn’t been worked with. What we are talking about is very practical. Mindfulness practice is simple and completely feasible. And because we are working with the mind that experiences life directly, just by sitting and doing nothing, we are doing a tremendous amount.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
Meditation is really just learning to enjoy your experience, so you don’t have to tense up. Don’t make meditation a project like everything else. The word “natural” is very important. Yesterday I was walking around and it was so beautiful here….We appreciate nature because it’s so uncontrived and unselfconscious. Bring that to mind and know that the body itself has its own intelligence.
Elizabeth Matthis-Namgyel, in Pema Chodron on 4 Keys to Waking Up
The biggest hindrance to (mindfulness) is constant intrusive thoughts. This is normal for everyone and from the beginning you should expect it. The nature of our mind is to think, and it is childish to imagine that we can simply turn that process off when we wish to.
Our minds have been almost completely out of control for most of our life. Recognizing this can help us to be practical and patient — it may take us some time and a lot of skillful practice to tame the crazy “monkey mind.”
Bob Sharples
photp mahbub shaheed
One of the funny things about learning to look into the mind is that normally that’s the last place we ever look! If you consider the way we normally think, we carry on an endless dialogue with ourselves full of memories, justifications, anticipations, commentaries, fantasies, daydreams and so on. We just keep thinking, comparing, analyzing. And we believe what we think. I have my beliefs, they are true because that’s what I believe! What I like must be good because I like it!…..The aim of meditation practice is to first teach us how to quiet the mind and then to look into the mind itself. It teaches us how to distance ourselves from our thoughts and emotions and to see them as just thoughts and emotions. They are mental states. They arise for a short time, then they disappear, then another state arises. They are like bubbles. Our problem is not that we have thoughts and emotions but that we identify with them.
Ani Tenzin Palmo, Reflections on a Mountain Lake
photo serge melki
