Silence is a very perilous part of life. It tells us what we are obsessing about. It reminds us of what we have not resolved within ourselves. It shows to us the underside of ourselves, from which there is no escape, which no amount of cosmetics can hide, that no amount of money or titles or power can possibly cure. Silence leaves us with only ourselves for company. Silence is, in other words, life’s greatest teacher.
Joan Chittister, Illuminated Life
You learn about a thing … by opening yourself wholeheartedly to it.
You learn about a thing by loving it.
Barbara McClintock, Nobel prize-winning geneticist
Dogen defined practice as giving life to your original self. This is not giving life to your deluded self, which we do all the time, but to your original self, your basic goodness, … which each one of us intrinsically possesses whether we realize it or not. This is the word practice. It can be understood in a very oceanic way or in a very shallow way, but still practice is always practice, and its truth is to ignite and reveal your true self within your everyday life.
J Kwong , No beginning, No End. The intimate heart of Zen.
Mindfulness knows what is going on outside, and also, inside our own skin. However we experience life, through whichever sense gate life comes to us – eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, even the mind itself – mindfulness is capable of knowing that seeing, or hearing, or smelling, or tasting, or feeling, or even thinking – is happening in this, the present moment.
So, we can practice mindfulness and become more present. All we have to do is to establish attention in the present moment, and to allow ourselves to be with what is here. To rest in the awareness of what is here. To pay attention without trying to change anything. To allow ourselves to become more deeply and completely aware of what it is we are sensing! And to be with what it is we are experiencing. To rest in this quality of being, of being aware, in each moment as our life unfolds. And, to the extent we can practice “being” and become more present and more aware of our life and in our life, the “doing” we do about all of it, will be more informed, more responsive, and less driven by the habits of reaction and inattention.
Jeffrey Brantley
Whatever is newly born needs a name and when we are more and more welcomed by the silence, naming becomes our job . We have to notice, to bless with attention the beasts before us, both the rough and the smooth. To name is to bring an attitude of wonder to the work of sorting, and even to the work of dealing with difficult states of mind. When we can name what is happening to us, we are no longer fully identified with it and have begun to separate from the grasping dark. If what we feel is known and named to be a tiger, then the whole world is not tiger. We can divide the compulsion and the image, the action and the emotion. There is a landscape through which we move, trees casting their own stripes on the forest floor, places where tiger is not.
John Tarrant, The Light inside the Dark
Meditation practice is not about blanking
the mind. Trying to stop thinking would be like trying to stop digesting or stop pumping blood. The stomach is made to digest food, the heart is made to pump blood and the mind is made to think. That’s what it does. It generates thoughts, pretty much non-stop, But right now. as you are reading this page, are you involved with your stomach digesting or your heart pumping blood? Arc you attending to them? Of course not. They go on automatically in the background while your attention is directed toward reading.
During meditation practice, the idea is to direct your attention to your breath and allow the mind to do its thing automatically in the background, just like all your other organs are always doing. It’s not a battle unless you make it a battle. It’s merely a habit you are trying to form, the habit of dis-identifying with the mind as “me.” The mind is not “you” any more than the stomach or heart or ears are “you.” They are parts of you. They are part of how you get along in the world. They are important tools, but they are not you. You are something deeper and more mysterious than any of your parts – including the mind.
Bo Lozoff, The Big Mistake about Meditation
