How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind

by Pema Chödrön

the root of suffering is mind—our minds. And also, the root of happiness is our mind.

Meditation helps us to clearly see ourselves and the habitual patterns that limit our life. You begin to see your opinions clearly. You see your judgments. You see your defense mechanisms. Meditation deepens your understanding of yourself.

The only thing you can measure your meditation against is the question: “Was I present or not?” And even then, to say to yourself that you weren’t present is a result of the fact that you’ve been meditating and you recognized that fact.

Rather, we meditate to become completely open to life—and to all the qualities of life or anything that might come along. We are training in a kind of ultimate equilibrium or equanimity, which is not based on the outer circumstances being still, but on the mind being able to be flexible and open.

During meditation, we maintain a simple attitude, and that’s the attitude of “keep coming back.”

Meditation works very directly with beginning to see what we’re doing and beginning to realize that we have a choice in any moment to either return to the present or to escalate our suffering by letting our stories and thoughts take over.

So whenever you find yourself caught in an emotional attack, you have to ask yourself: “How much of this is really happening on the outside, and how much of this is my mind?”

when we get too caught up in technique and trying, we lose the point of meditation completely.

Emotions don’t have to be so evil and scary; they are just energy. We are the ones who ascribe the labels of “good” and “bad” to our emotions.

You’re feeling anger or fear or jealousy or poverty, and then as you breathe in, there could be the recognition that billions and zillions of people feel this right this moment, and they have felt this in the past, and they will feel this in the future. You’re touching into a universal experience.

If you think about it, fixing and freezing is so boring compared to the real morphing quality of things.

In many cases, we can even be eating a whole box of chocolates with the idea that we are doing the most pleasurable thing in the world, but the fact is that we rarely allow ourselves to eat even one bite of chocolate and be fully present for it.

Rather than seeing everything as a problem, or an obstacle to being happy, or even as an obstacle to meditation and being present (“I could be present if it wasn’t so noisy here,” or “I could be present if I didn’t have so much pain in my back”), we can see it as a teacher that is showing us something we need to know.

Everything is support in our awakening.

Not struggling against what arises in your life is an act of friendliness. It allows you to fully engage in your life. It allows you to live wholeheartedly.