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As you go through your day, spend a few seconds every few minutes to check your posture. Don’t do it in a judgmental way. This is not an exercise to correct your posture or to improve your appearance.
Profound realizations occur during sitting meditation, but also profound revelations can take place when we really examine our own inner workings in the midst of day-to-day activities.
You start to see the extent to which you are responsible for your own mental suffering. You see your own miseries, fears, and tensions as self-generated. You see the way you cause your own suffering, weakness, and limitations. And the more deeply you understand these mental processes, the less hold they have on you.
Ideally, meditation should be a twenty-four-hour-a-day practice.
Dedicate a certain interval to mindfulness of posture, then extend this mindfulness to other simple activities: eating, washing, dressing, and so forth.
Your practice must be made to apply to your everyday living situation. That is your laboratory.
If your meditation isn’t helping you to cope with everyday conflicts and struggles, then it is shallow. If your day-to-day emotional reactions are not becoming clearer and easier to manage, then you are wasting your time. And you never know how you are doing until you actually make that test.
Meditating your way through the ups and downs of daily life is the whole point of vipassana.
Each of us is born with the capacity for loving friendliness. Yet only in a calm mind, a mind free from anger, greed, and jealousy, can the seeds of loving friendliness develop;
The ultimate goal of our practice of meditation is the cultivation of these four sublime states of loving friendliness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity.
May my mind be filled with the thoughts of loving friendliness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity. May I be generous. May I be gentle. May I be relaxed. May I be happy and peaceful. May I be healthy. May my heart become soft. May my words be pleasing to others. May my actions be kind. May all that I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and think help me to cultivate loving friendliness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity. May all these experiences help me to cultivate thoughts of generosity and gentleness. May they all help me to relax. May they inspire friendly
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The Buddha said, “By surveying the entire world with my mind, I have not come across anyone who loves others more than himself. Therefore one who loves himself should cultivate this loving friendliness.”
Cultivate loving friendliness toward yourself first, with the intention of sharing your kind thoughts with others. Develop this feeling. Be full of kindness toward yourself. Accept yourself just as you are.
The Buddha asked us to think of such people the same way we would if someone were suffering from a terrible illness. Do we get angry or upset with people who are ill?
