If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path.
Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation
Tag: Present moment
Getting a handle on the mind
To train the mind, first we have to get a handle on it. We are thinking all the time. If we observe that thinking process for a second, we’ll see that it is triggered by the five sense faculties: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. We smell something or we see something, and we’re distracted. It’s hard to train the mind by using just the five sense consciousnesses — just smelling or just tasting, for example. We need to get hold of the discursive mind itself, the consciousness of thoughts, memories, and dreams. It’s being pulled in a lot of different directions, so we need a technique to stabilize it.
Training the mind is dependent upon the body. We reduce the body’s activity to focus the mind, so posture is very important. Then we use the breath, which is stable and consistent, as a focus for our intention. Joining our mind with the breath in meditation is often compared to the horse and the rider. The horse is the breath and the rider is the mind. We want those elements to be in continual contact. We have to be pragmatic about our practice. The mind is powerful. After racing around all day, it’s hard to follow through with the intention, “I’m going to stabilize my mind for one whole hour.” Instead, at the beginning of our session, we take the attitude, “Now I am going to focus.” Focus will bring us to moments of stillness and deepening, which profoundly affect the mind.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
Just get there
Try making a commitment to getting into the meditation posture at least once a day. You don’t have to sit for any length of time., just get on the cushion. A lot of times the hardest part is getting there.
Once you’re sitting down you think “I might as well sit for a few minutes” and more often than not, you’re getting full sessions in.
Joseph Goldstein in Commit to Sit
Having a quiet mind…..
Can you be happy where you are, in your life, at this moment?
If this was a problem in Pascal’s time – more than 300 years ago – it is even more so today. IN a world increasingly driven by the need to achieve, and by advertising, media and social networking, we can physically be in one place but miles away from it in our mind and in the thoughts and aspirations which the images produce. I was reminded of this yesterday, standing in line in a boulangerie – in a beautiful place beside the sea and palm trees – when the man in front of me said “Yes, my body may be on holidays, but my mind is still in the office”. This difficulty to switch off – even in a place of great natural beauty – makes it hard for us to be where we are at this moment, physically, but also in the sense of being with what is the realiuty of our life at this actual time in our history. We find ourselves living in our thoughts, dreams and worries, and strangely sometimes seem to prefer to be there.
All man’s miseries derive from not being
able to sit quietly in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal, French Philosopher.
Open to us now
The seed of suffering in you may be strong,
but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Dealing with reality, step by step
What is actually important is here and now. Now is definitely now. There’s no point in thinking that the past that exists we could have now. This is now. This very moment. Nothing mystical, just now, very simple and straightforward. From that nowness however, arises a sense of intelligence, always, that you are constantly interacting with the reality, one by one, spot by spot, constantly. We actually experience fantastic precision, always. But we are threatened by the now so we jump to the past or the future. That’s the problem. And that is not trusting the nowness properly. Now possesses a lot of powerful things. It is so powerful that we can’t face it, therefore we have to borrow from the past to invite the future, all the time
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Mindfulbalance 