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So when you walk from the parking lot or the bus stop to your workplace, when you walk to the post office or grocery store, why not go home with every step?
We’re alive, but we don’t know that we’re alive. We’re continually losing ourselves.
Perhaps you have been away from home for a long time, and home has become a mess. How many mistakes have you made as a result of ignoring how your body was feeling, what emotions were coming up inside, what erroneous perceptions were driving your thinking and your speech?
Even if it is a mess, you can accept it—and that is the starting point for reorienting yourself so you can move forward in a more positive direction.
Even if we are deep in our own particular kind of chaos, we can always find space for some silence each day that helps us find peace in the situation as it is—and may even show us a new path out of the mess.
Giving our attention to a pleasant sound, it’s easy to feel more present and happy.
People talk nowadays about work-life balance. We tend to think of work as one thing and life as another, separate thing; but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Without mindfulness, you may think of walking as an imposition, a chore. With mindfulness, you see walking as life.
People who are fixated on separating life from work spend the majority of their lives not living.
People say it is a miracle to walk on air, on water, or on fire. But for me, walking peacefully on Earth is the real miracle.
If you feel lost, if you’re in the midst of a chaotic situation, or even if you’re just feeling a little bit lazy, don’t worry: you don’t need to make any effort to practice mindful breathing, sitting, or walking. The breathing itself is enough; the sitting is enough; the walking is enough. Let yourself become one with the action. Just be the walking.
We have a natural tendency to want to run away from suffering. But without any suffering, we can’t fully develop as human beings. When we approach suffering in that way, we actually end up suffering much less, and the suffering can transform itself more easily.
Quite often we avoid silence, thinking that we will thereby avoid suffering; but in truth, taking quiet time to come home to ourselves with awareness is the only thing that will help heal our suffering.
Natural and unnatural disasters happen daily around the globe—tsunamis, wildfires, famines, wars. Innocent children die every day due to the lack of clean water, or food, or medicine. We are connected to these sufferings, even if we don’t experience them directly. That little baby, that old woman, that young man or young woman—when they die, in some way it’s also we who are dying. And yet at the same time we are of course still living, so that means that they are somehow still living as well. This is a meditation. Understanding this deep truth can help us develop our volition, our desire to
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Walking, breathing, sitting, eating, and drinking tea in mindfulness—all these are concrete practices of taking refuge that you can enjoy many times every day. You have the seed of mindfulness in you; that seed is always there.
He collected bullets and bomb fragments from the area and forged them into a big bell, a bell of mindfulness. He hung it in his practice center and invited the bell to sound day and night. He wrote a poem in which he said: “Dear bullets, dear bombs, I have helped you come together in order to practice. In your former life you have killed and destroyed. But in this life you are calling out to people to wake up, to wake up to humanity, to love, to understanding.” He invited that bell every night and every morning. The bell’s very existence was a symbol of how transformation was possible.
To practice solitude is to practice being in this singular moment, not caught in the past, not carried away by the future, and most of all, not carried away by the crowd. You don’t have to go to the forest.
These are the two dimensions of solitude, and they are both important. The first is to be alone physically. The second is to be able to be yourself and stay centered even in the midst of a group.
All of us have blocks of habit energy inside us. Habit energy is the unconscious energy that causes us to repeat the same behavior thousands of times. Habit energy pushes us to run, to always be doing something, to be lost in thoughts of the past or the future, and to blame others for our suffering. It interferes with our ability to be peaceful and happy in the present moment.
“Don’t agonize over the past, because the past is gone. Don’t worry about the future, because the future is not yet here. There is only one moment for you to be alive, and that is the present moment. Come back to the present moment and live this moment deeply, and you’ll be free.”
There are two kinds of knots. The first consists of our notions and ideas, our concepts and knowledge. Everyone has notions and ideas; but when we get stuck in them, we’re not free, and we have no chance to touch the truth in life. The second kind of knot is our afflictions and habits of suffering, such as fear, anger, discrimination, despair, arrogance. They must be removed in order for us to be free.
When you read this book, when you meditate, it’s not for the purpose of getting notions and ideas. In fact, it is for releasing notions and ideas. Don’t just replace your old notions and ideas with a newer set. Stop chasing one notion of happiness after another, exchanging one idea for another.
