Uncategorized Quotes - Page 378

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves.

Love exists in itself, not relying on owning or being owned.

The path of meditation and the path of our lives altogether ha to do with curiosity, inquisitiveness.

Whatever you do, put your inner work first.

In his talk, Suzuki Roshi says that meditation and the whole process of finding your own true nature is one continuous mistake, and that rather than that being a reason for depression or discouragement, it's actually the motivation.

Pema Chödrön

It's helpful to always remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing withwhatever arises, without picking and choosing.

Pema Chödrön

Sitting meditation begins with good posture.

Pema Chödrön

Sitting meditation gives us a way to move closer to our thoughts and emotions and to get in touch with our bodies.

Pema Chödrön

Meditation practice is how we discover basic goodness and learn to cultivate bodhichitta. With this view, practice, and activity, even the most mundane situation becomes a vehicle for awakening.

Pema Chödrön

Poetry is the way that we transcend language through language. And thus our freedom lies in the poetry of all things

Ilyas Kassam

Yesterday I talked about cultivating precision, gentleness, and openess, and described how the meditation technique helps us to remember the qualities that we already possess.

Pema Chödrön

If the object of meditation were something concrete, something solid and graspable - an image or a statue or a dot on the floor or a candle - it would be much more of a concentration exercise. But the breath is very elusive; even if you wanted to give it one hundred percent attention, it would be difficult because it is so ephemeral, so light, so airy and spacious. As the object of meditation, it brings a sense of softness and gentleness.

Pema Chödrön

If we emphasized only precision, our meditation might become quite harsh and militant. (...). One thing that is very helpful is to cultivate an overall sense of relaxation while you are doing the meditation.

Pema Chödrön

The meditation technique itself cultivate precision, gentleness, and the ability to let go - qualities that are innate within us.

Pema Chödrön

Left alone, I am overtaken by the northern void-no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and snow, thrust an implacable being into the blue. In the early light, the rock shadows on the snow are sharp; in the tension between light and dark is the power of the universe. This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning than a gust of snow; such transience and insignificance are exalting, terrifying, all at once…Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one’s own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound.

Peter Matthiessen

The central feature of the practice of meditation and hard work known as Zen is that, as Matthiessen says, it “has no patience with mysticism, far less the occult.” Nor does it have any time with moralism, the prescriptions or distortions we would impose on the world, obscuring it from our view. It asks, it insists rather, that we take this moment for what it is, undistracted, and not cloud it with needless worries of what might have been or fantasies of what might come to be. It is, essentially, a training in the real…”the Universe itself is the scripture of Zen." Pico Iyer from introduction.

Peter Matthiessen

We are the reflections for the stars to gaze upon, upon a sea of glass.

Tom Althouse

All other creatures look down toward the earth, but man was given a face so that might turn his eyes toward the stars and his gaze upon the sky.

Ovid

I sit in meditation…and soon all sounds, and all one sees and feels, take on imminence, an immanence, as if the Universe were coming to attention, a Universe of which one is the center, a Universe that is not the same yet not different from oneself: within man as within mountains there are many parts of hydrogen and oxygen, of calcium, phosphorus, potassium, and other elements. ‘You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars…’(Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation)The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no ‘meaning,’ they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share.

Peter Matthiessen

The inner emptiness is the door to God.

Swami Dhyan Giten

Even though there are so many teachings, so many meditations, so many instructions, the basic point of it all is just to learn to be extremely honest and also wholehearted about what exists in your mind - thoughts, emotions bodily sensations, the whole thing that adds up to what we call "me" or "I".

Pema Chödrön

In sitting meditation, our practice is to watch our thoughts arise, label them "thinking", and return to the breath.

Pema Chödrön

This meditation is called nontheistic, which doesn't have anything to do with believing in God or not believing in God, but means that nobody but yourself can tell you what to accept and what to reject.The practice of meditation helps us to get to know this basic energy really well, with tremendous honesty and warmheartedness, and we begin to figure out for ourselves what is poison and what is medicin, which means something different for each of us.

Pema Chödrön

Through meditation, difficult thoughts and emotions may well rise up. And through practice, you can meet such emotions with kindness, listen to them, explore them and then really let them go.

Gyalwa Dokhampa

Meditation is a vehicle for opening to the truth of this impermanence on deeper and deeper levels.

Jack Kornfield

Meditation practice is neither holding on nor avoiding; it is a settling back into the moment, opening to what is there.

Jack Kornfield

There are several different kinds of painful feelings that we might experience, and learning to distinguish and relate to these feelings of discomfort or pain is an important part of meditation practice, because it is one of the very first things that we open to as our practice develops.

Jack Kornfield

Skill in concentrating and steadying the mind is the basis for all types of meditation.

Jack Kornfield

If we are engaged in actions that cause pain and conflict to ourselves and others, it is impossible for the mind to become settled, collected, and focused in meditation; it is impossible for the heart to open.

Jack Kornfield

Look deeply at yourself, and see in yourself the divine architect's incomprehensible art!

Bryant McGill

The distant sea, lapping the sandy shore with measured sound; the nearer cries of the donkey-boys; the unusual scenes moving before her like pictures, which she cared not in her laziness to have fully explained before they passed away; the stroll down to the beach to breathe the sea-air, soft and warm on the sandy shore even at the end of November; the great long misty sea-line touching the tender-coloured sky; the white sail of a distant boat turning silver in some pale sunbeam: - it seemed as if she could dream her life away in such luxury of pensiveness, in which she made her present all in all, from not daring to think of the past, or wishing to contemplate the future.

Elizabeth Gaskell

My foot slips on a narrow ledge; in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us…the present moment. The purpose of mediation practice is not enlightenment’ it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.

Peter Matthiessen

In the book of Job, the Lord demands, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”“I was there!”-surely that is the answer to God’s question. For no matter how the universe came into being, most of the atoms in these fleeting assemblies that we think of as our bodies have been in existence since the beginning. Each breath we take contains hundreds of thousands of the inert, pervasive argon atoms that were actually breathed in his lifetime by the Buddha, and indeed contain parts of all the ‘snorts, sighs, bellows, shrieks” of all creatures that ever existed or will exist. These atoms flow backward and forward in such useful but artificial constructs as time and space, in the same universal rhythms, universal breath as the tides and stars, joining both the living and the dead in that energy which animates the universe.

Peter Matthiessen

I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched. The blinding snow peaks and the clarion air, the sound of earth and heaven in the silence, the requiem birds, the mythic beasts, the flags, great horns, and old carved stones, the silver ice in the black river, the Kang, the Crystal Mountain. Also, I love the common miracles-the murmur of my friends at evening, the clay fires of smudgy juniper, the coarse dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a time… gradually my mind has cleared itself, and wind and sun pour through my head, as through a bell. Though we talk little here, I am never lonely; I am returned into myself. In another life-this isn’t what I know, but how I feel- these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon- the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the supper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again to the sky.

Peter Matthiessen

When we are quiet and still we contract and settle.

Bryant McGill

Quit trying so hard and sit quietly with yourself and you will see that there are no demands within you.

Bryant McGill

The Best Music you can ever hear in your Life is Silence -- silence of yourself, silence of your loved ones

Vinay Kumar

Success is a spiritual process, not a worldly one; that is to say it is an internal process, and not external.

Bryant McGill

To understand ourselves and our life is the point of insight meditation: to understand and to be free.

Jack Kornfield

Success comes from finding your center and self.

Bryant McGill

I think they paid attention to their lives and became wise. For those of us who don’t arrive at wisdom naturally, meditation is one way to get there through practice.

Sylvia Boorstein

Two qualities are at the root of all meditation development: right effort and right aim—arousing effort to aim the mind toward the object.

Jack Kornfield

Success, just like poverty, is a state of mind.

Bryant McGill

You can become instantly successful with a simple thought, but long-lasting and pronounced success comes to those who renew their commitment to a mindset of abundance every minute of every hour of every day.

Bryant McGill

Meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree. It completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are.

Matthieu Ricard

It is the garden of peace you seek, but it is not a tangible place that exists in the world — it is within. Go there, within.

Bryant McGill

True wisdom is being able to say 'it is what it is' with a smile of celebratory wonder on your face.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Meditate, Ānanda, do not delay, or else you will regret it later. This is our instruction to you.

Gautama Buddha

When you commune with your ever-present inner calm, you are released from the madness and pain of all outer turmoil.

Bryant McGill

Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences, or of the more elevated departments of science, than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Let it all go and enjoy the profound gifts found in your quiet places.

Bryant McGill

Right where you are, the potential of the universe is.

Alexandra Katehakis

All things are accomplished by the meditative act of releasing illusions and simply becoming.

Bryant McGill

At the same time all the houses round about promptly took part in this silence, and so did the darkness above them, reaching as far as the stars. And the footsteps of invisible passers-by, whose course I had no wish to guess at, the wind that kept on driving against the other side of the street, the gramophone singing behind closed windows in some room - they made themselves heard in this silence, as if they had owned it for ever and ever.

Franz Kafka

This is Buddhist meditation-to penetrate, to be one with, in order to really understand.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Breathing meditation can quiet the mind, open the body, and develop a great power of concentration.

Jack Kornfield

Life is so humbling, when we slow down and witness the gifts.

Bryant McGill

The focusing of attention on the breath is perhaps the most universal of the many hundreds of meditation subjects used worldwide.

Jack Kornfield

To learn to concentrate we must choose a prayer or meditation and follow this path with commitment and steadiness, a willingness to work with our practice day after day, no matter what arises.

Jack Kornfield

Start deep within yourself and slowly build outward toward your goal.

Bryant McGill

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Uncategorized Quotes - Page 378

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