I used to have a sign pinned up on my wall that read: Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us…It was all about letting go of everything.
The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.
We can learn to act and think in ways that sow seeds of our future well-being, gradually becoming more aware of what causes happiness as well as what causes distress.
A further sign of health is that we don’t become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it’s time to stop struggling and look directly at what’s threatening us.
When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into it’s dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment
Pointing directly at your own heart, you find Buddha.
If your mind is expansive and unfettered, you will find yourself in a more accommodating world, a place that’s endlessly interesting and alive. That quality isn’t inherent in the place but in your state of mind.
There isn’t any hell or heaven except for how we relate to our world. Hell is just resistance to life.
Authentic joy is not a euphoric state or a feeling of being high. Rather, it is a state of appreciation that allows us to participate fully in our lives. We train in rejoicing in the good fortune of self and others.
Words themselves are neutral. It’s the charge we add to them that matters
Meditation practice is not about later, when you get it all together and you’re this person you really respect.
Meditation is a totally nonviolent, nonaggressive occupation.
IN practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal—quite the opposite.
Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, or unconditional friendliness, a simple, direct relationship with the way we are.
The calligraphy reads, “Pointing directly at your own heart, you find Buddha.” Listening to talks about the dharma, or the teachings of Buddha, or practicing meditation is nothing other than studying ourselves.
Many religions have meditations on death to let it penetrate our thick skulls that life doesn’t last forever.
In sitting meditation, we train in mindfulness and unconditional friendliness: in being steadfast with our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts.
Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better.
In sitting meditation, our practice is to watch our thoughts arise, label them “thinking”, and return to the breath.
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.
It’s helpful to always remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing withwhatever arises, without picking and choosing.
Sitting meditation gives us a way to move closer to our thoughts and emotions and to get in touch with our bodies.
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.
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.
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.
The meditation technique itself cultivate precision, gentleness, and the ability to let go – qualities that are innate within us.
Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives.
One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are.
While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves.
The path of meditation and the path of our lives altogether ha to do with curiosity, inquisitiveness.
We’re here to get to know and study ourselves. The path, the way to do that, our main vehicle, is going to be meditation, and some sense of general wakefulness.
Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists, exists in what we already have.
We don’t have to be harsh with ourselves when we think, sitting here, that our meditation or our oryoki or the way we are in the world is in the category of worst horse.
In order to work with difficult outer circumstances, we need to gather our inner strength. If even ten or twenty minutes of meditation a day helps us to do this, let’s go for it!
Making good use of our limited time – the limited time from birth to death, as well as our limited time each day – is the key to developing inner steadiness and calm.
When we touch the center of sorrow, when we sit with discomfort without trying to fix it, when we stay present to the pain of disapproval or betrayal and let it soften us, these are times that we connect with bohdichitta.
We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.
The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.
The first noble truth says simply that it’s part of being human to feel discomfort.
Constantly apply cheerfulness, if for no other reason than because you are on this spiritual path. Have a sense of gratitude to everything, even difficult emotions, because of their potential to wake you up.
If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart…
Without giving up hope—that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be—we will never relax with where we are or who we are.
there’s more to liberation than trying to avoid discomfort, more to lasting happiness than pursuing temporary pleasures, temporary relief.
The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security.
Patience is the training in abiding with the restlessness of our energy and letting things evolve at their own speed.
If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.
As the twelfth-century Tibetian yogi Milarepa said when he heard of his student Gampopa’s peak experiences, ‘They are neither good nor bad. Keep meditating.’
PATIENCE is the antidote to anger, a way to learn to love and care for whatever we meet on the path.
In reality, when you feel depressed, lonely, betrayed, or any unwanted feelings, this is an important moment on the spiritual path. This is when real transformation can take place.
Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. It is all we ever have so we might as well work with it rather than struggling against it. We might as well make it our friend and teacher rather than our enemy.
A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiviness is bitter or sweet.
You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.
In Buddha’s opinion, to train in staying open and curious—to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs—is the best use of our human lives.