Tag: Meditation

Sunday Quote: Living fully

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rope_bridge

 

What you can plan

is too small

for you to live.

David Whyte, What to Remember when Waking

Keeping mental energies in awareness

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The heart is just the heart; thoughts and feelings are just thoughts and feelings. Let things be just as they are! Let form be just form, let sound be just sound, let thought be just thought. Why should we bother to attach to them? If we think and feel in this way, then there is detachment and separateness. Our thoughts and feelings will be on one side and our heart will be on the other. Just like oil and water — they are in the same bottle but they are separate.

Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart

Watching our thoughts

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cat village (1 of 1)

 

 

A thought is an object to be known

just as the absence of thoughts is an object to be known.

What is the difference?

Sayadaw U Tejaniya

What we long for

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File:Blandat 001.jpgIf you want to build a ship,

don’t gather people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work,

but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 

photo: Staffan Ström

FInding our own Mango grove

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What could be more relaxing than letting go of preferences and worries?  What can liberate our hopes and fears other than letting them arise and disassemble themselves naturally in the space of an open mind? Meditation leaves plenty of room for everything: all of our hopes, fears, and anxieties as well as our joys and aspirations. There is no need to control our thoughts, because when we practice we have committed ourselves to letting them be—not judging them as good or bad, spiritual or not spiritual, helpful or harmful. The only thing we need to practice is a quiet place to sit: a room, a park bench, or our own bed. The sutras describe a peaceful mango grove as an ideal place to practice. The Buddha and his disciples practiced meditation in such a place. If you think about it, in the midst of our busy lives, any quiet place to sit can be our modern-day mango grove.

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, Take Charge of Your Practice

 

A gift of clarity

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In mindfulness meditation, we work to create the conditions favorable to the arising of mindfulness, relaxing the body and the mind, focusing the attention carefully but gently on a particular aspect of experience, while producing sufficient energy to remain alert without losing a sense of ease and tranquility. Under such conditions, properly sustained, mindfulness will emerge as if by some grace of the natural world, as if it were a gift of clarity from our deepest psyche to the turbid shallows of our mind. When it does, we gradually learn how to hold ourselves so that it lingers, to relocate or re-enact it when it fades, and to consistently water its roots and weed its soil so that it can blossom into a lovely and sustainable habit of heart and mind.

Andrew Olendzki, The Real Practice of Mindfulness