Awareness is our true self; it’s who we are. So we don’t have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness out with our thoughts, fantasies, opinions and our judgments. We’re either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we’re doing something else.
Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special
Photo Buddpaul
If you can’t see what you are looking for,
see what’s there.
It’s enough.
Mark Nepo
Photo Aka
There is no other time than now. We are not, contrary to what we think, “going” anywhere. It will never be more rich in some other moment than in this one. Although we may imagine that some future moment will be more pleasant, or less, than this one, we can’t really know. But whatever the future brings, it will not be what you expect, or what you think, and when it comes, it will be now too. It too will be a moment that can be very easily missed, just as easily missed as this one.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Photo Moonsun1981
Meditation is misunderstood as something you envision in your head, when in fact it is something to be seen with your own eyes.
What you begin to see is that the place where you thought your life occurred — rumination and memory, anxiety and fear — isn’t where your life takes place at all. Those mental recesses are where pain occurs, but life occurs elsewhere, in a place we are usually too preoccupied to notice, too distracted to see: right in front of our eyes.
The point of meditation is to stop making things up and see things as they are.
Karen Maezen Miller
What we are seeking is right here. But we persist in looking south to find the north star. Any kind of speculating is just the discursive mind doing its habitual thing – creating scenarios in the mind that block us from discovering what is right in front of us. This moment is not some narrow, tiny point but is actually everything. Right now includes memories of the past, fantasies about the future, judgements about the present, emotions and sensations of all kinds. As soon as we say, “I’m living in the present,” we’ve made a significant cognitive error, and created another barrier for ourselves. Meditation practice ….. brings us into the direct intimate experience of this moment. There’s no room for speculating. We feel fully alive. There’s no place to go, and yet, we are continually moving through space and time. The path is never blocked if we can realize that we are always on it, going in the only direction we can go. We’re always heading for here, here, here, here.
Melissa Blacker, Trail Temporarily Closed
Mindfulness meditation is a wonderful tool for making each day, each moment of our life count. Paradoxically this is achieved by not doing more, but by doing less. We may feel that we need to do the things have to be done faster so that we have time for doing more things. Mindfulness practice goes the other way. I may need to go to the store to get a carton of milk. The way to make the experience more satisfying is not doing it as fast as possible while thinking of other things, but to enjoy the walk to the store by paying attention. This way, we make every moment count. We are not sacrificing the means for the goal., Otherwise, our day becomes a series of dry chores. When night comes we may feel that we haven’t lived.
Joseph Emet, Buddha’s Book of Sleep
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