As you start the practice, you have a sense of your body and a sense of where you are, and then you begin to notice the breathing. The whole feeling of the breath is very important. The breath should not be forced, obviously; you are breathing naturally. The breath is going in and out, in and out. With each breath you become relaxed.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
Today dawned very foggy over Ireland and England, narrowing down things and dulling the senses somewhat. Sometimes, in similar ways, we narrow down our possibilities by not being open to all that is actually going on in our lives, as we think better is to be found elsewhere, or in the future:
We often disapprove of parts of our lives without really examining them – it’s like never going into certain rooms of your house. But meditation allows all the voices and all the images into the room. When we open the invisible doors, we can come to rest in the life we have; we can love it as it is instead of waiting for a shinier version. “Every day is a good day”, goes the Zen koan.
John Tarrant, Enlightenment is Something we do Together
photo aeou
The losing of paradise is enacted over and over again by the children of Adam and Eve. We clothe our souls with messages and doctrines, and lose contact with the great life in the naked breast of nature
Rabindranath Tagore
Does the rose have to do something? No, the purpose of a rose is to be a rose. Your purpose is to be yourself. You don’t have to run anywhere to become someone else. You are wonderful just the way you are. This teaching …. allows us to enjoy ourselves, the blue sky, and everything that is refreshing and healing in the present moment. We already have everything we are looking for, everything we want to become. I am happy in the present moment. I do not ask for anything else. I do not expect any additional happiness. Aimlessness is stopping and realizing the happiness that is already available.
Thich Nhat Hahn
Each meditation session is a journey of discovery to understand the basic truth of who we are. In the beginning the most important lesson of meditation is seeing the speed of the mind. But the meditation tradition says that mind doesn’t have to be this way: it just hasn’t been worked with. What we are talking about is very practical. Mindfulness practice is simple and completely feasible. And because we are working with the mind that experiences life directly, just by sitting and doing nothing, we are doing a tremendous amount.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
The biggest hindrance to (mindfulness) is constant intrusive thoughts. This is normal for everyone and from the beginning you should expect it. The nature of our mind is to think, and it is childish to imagine that we can simply turn that process off when we wish to.
Our minds have been almost completely out of control for most of our life. Recognizing this can help us to be practical and patient — it may take us some time and a lot of skillful practice to tame the crazy “monkey mind.”
Bob Sharples
photp mahbub shaheed
I am starting a number of mindfulness courses these days and so the first posts this week will be on the basics of practice. However, in a sense, we all start over each day, each new week, each moment, discovering how little we actually like to be in the present moment….
Cultivating mindfulness is not unlike the process of eating. It would be absurd to propose that someone else eat for you. And when you go to a restaurant, you don’t eat the menu, mistaking it for the meal, nor are you nourished by listening to the waiter describe the food. You have to actually eat the food for it to nourish you. In the same way, you have to actually practice mindfulness in order to reap its benefits and come to understand why it is so valuable.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Mindfulbalance 