When your mind is reeling in confusion, breathe deeply into the centre of your chest.
Connecting to the core of your being this way extends loving kindness to yourself , even when there is none in sight.
Ezra Bayda
Tag: Present moment
Teens Day 18: A strong sense of self
In meditation we first become familiar with a technique: to recognize and release thoughts and emotions and return our attention to the breath. As we learn to abide peacefully, we also become familiar with what I call a healthy sense of self. We become strong, caring, clear-minded individuals in harmony with ourselves and our environment. The meditation posture itself embodies this healthiness: grounded, balanced and relaxed.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
……Just watch stuff go by
I came across a definition of meditation that it comes from the root meaning ‘right balance.’ That rang true for me because, personally, my attention is often so fragmented, egocentric, narcissistic or self-concerned that there isn’t a whole lot of inner balance or alignment with what is. Rather, I am stuck in a state of nonbalance. Right balance is when my mind is not spinning out endless movies and delusions, or maybe it still is but I am just not so attached to believing them. Meditation is when I can watch stuff go by and the part of me that usually interrupts and says, ‘That’s a good story, or that son of a bitch, or I’m guilty and awful,’ that part sits back and sees it as just one more story but without attachment to it.
Joan Borysenko, quoted in Oprah Magazine
Keep your mind calm….
On an evening when an Irish golfer needs to stay focused, some thoughts on a key early practice in meditation. Being mindful means we work on our capacity to simply watch our thoughts and emotions, allowing them pass through a stable field of awareness without disturbing it excessively. To do this we need to strengthen our capacity to let go of distractions and the running after happiness by creating a calmness and constancy in the mind that observes good and bad with an equal ability to accept things as they are. This capacity to focus – to be one-pointed in our attention – is at the heart of our freedom from anxiety:
Concentration is the cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. You can think of concentration as the capacity of the mind to sustain an unwavering attention on one object of observation.…….. A calmness develops with concentration practice that has a remarkable stable quality to it. It is steadfast, profound, hard to disturb, no matter what comes up. You can look deeply into something if you sustain your looking without being constantly thrown off by distractions or the agitation of your own mind.
Jon Kabat Zinn, Wherever you go, there you are.
Just let go and fall into the now
If we can let go for just a moment, if we can relax, if we can fall into the center of now, we can encounter directly the freedom that we’ve all been seeking. It is right here, right now. It doesn’t lie in the future. It’s not going to come when life changes, when the circumstances of our day-to-day reality become different. Freedom is something that’s right in the midst of this moment. When we begin to surrender our demand that life change, that life alter itself to suit our ideas, then everything opens. We begin to awaken from this dream of separateness and struggle, and we realize that the grace we were always seeking is actually right there at the center of our own existence. This is the heart of spiritual awakening: to realize that what we have always yearned for is the very thing, in our deepest source, that we have always been. Freedom is always available to us. In those very moments when we know we don’t know, when we take the “backward step,” heart wide open, we fall into grace. Adyshanti
Teens Day 13: Holding onto our thoughts
Sometimes we find that we like our thoughts so much
that we don’t want to let them go
Pema Chodron
Mindfulbalance 