Very easy to say but which in reality requires ongoing practice to achieve. However, these are as succinct a guide to meditation as you will ever find. Because of the hectic pace of life in the world today and here in Ireland, this practice is no longer a luxury, but is a necessity for overall health:
Let the body assume its natural ease.
Let the mind assume its natural ease.
Now, just stay alert to anything that arises to disturb that natural ease.
Ajahn Amaro
It doesn’t actually take any more time to say good-bye or hug you know, your children or whatever it is in the morning when you’re on your way to work. But the mind says, ‘I don’t have any time for this.’ But actually that’s all you have time for, is this because there’s nothing else than this…So when your four year-old can’t decide which dress she wants to wear, that’s not a problem for you, unless you make it a problem for you. That’s just the way four year-olds are. And the more we can sort of learn these lessons the more we will not be in some sense running towards our death, but in a sense opening to our lives.
Jon Kabat Zinn
photo D Sharon Pruitt
Everything that has a beginning has an ending.
Make your peace with that and all will be well
Jack Kornfield, The Buddha’s Little Instruction Book
The art of living…is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past….on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as being utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and fully receptive
Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
Happiness happens when you fit with your life, when you fit so harmoniously that whatsoever you are doing is your joy. Then suddenly you will come to know: meditation follows you. If you love the work that you are doing, if you love the way you are living, then you are meditative.
Osho
Contrary to most professional opinion, a gnawing dissatisfaction with life is not a sign of “mental illness,” nor an indication of poor social adjustment, nor a character disorder. For concealed within this basic unhappiness with life and existence is the embryo of a growing intelligence, a special intelligence usually buried under the immense weight of social shams. A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities. For suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality and forces us to become alive in a special sense – to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves and our worlds in ways we have heretofore avoided.
Ken Wilbur, No Boundary
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