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March 17 - March 22, 2020
“Be a light unto yourself.”
A full life is painted with broad brush strokes. Many paths can lead to understanding and wisdom. Each of us has different needs to address and things worth pursuing over the course of a lifetime. Each of us has to chart our own course, and it has to fit what we are ready for.
Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.
feeling stuck and out of touch.
art of conscious living.
“Buddha” simply means one who has awakened to his or her own true nature.
systematic process of self-observation, self-inquiry, and mindful action.
We call the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment “practice” or “meditation practice.”
with the intention to understand rather than to judge,
Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.
It is about stopping and being present, that is all.
Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.
“being.”
“This is it,”
To use your breathing to nurture mindfulness just tune in to the feeling of it … the feeling of the breath coming into your body and the feeling of the breath leaving your body.
Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to being present. There is no “performance.
The spirit of mindfulness is to practice for its own sake, and just to take each moment as it comes—pleasant or unpleasant, good, bad, or ugly—and then work with that because it is what is present now.
“Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”
Gandhi was inspired by Thoreau.
Thoreau felt the need to go off on a solitary retreat for an extended period of time (he stayed two years and two months at Walden Pond) to do this. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Solitude is not a bad thing. Regular introspectional retreats are necessary fo personal growth.
Best to meditate without advertising it.
Tapasya should always be confidential .
A willingness to embrace and work with what is lies at the core of all meditation practice.
you can’t artificially suppress the waves of your mind, and it is not too smart to try. It will only create more tension and inner struggle, not calmness.
“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”
meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment.
formal meditation involves purposefully making a time for stopping all outward activity and cultivating stillness, with no agenda other than being fully present in each moment.
Let this or any time you practice be your time for letting go of all doing, for getting into the being mode, in which you simply dwell in stillness and mindfulness attending to the moment-to-moment unfolding of the present, adding nothing, subtracting nothing, affirming that “This is it.”
The joy of non-doing is that nothing else needs to happen for this moment to be complete. The wisdom in it, and the equanimity that comes out of it, lie in knowing that something else surely will.
Surrender to nature & time.
deep importance of contemplation and of non-attachment to any result other than the sheer enjoyment of being, all “far better than any work of the hands would have been.”
The only way you can do anything of value is to have the effort come out of non-doing and to let go of caring whether it will be of use or not.
Gita 2.47
There is no exertion of the will, no small-minded “I,” “me,” or “mine” to lay claim to a result, yet nothing is left undone.
Non-doing simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way. Enormous effort can be involved, but it is a graceful, knowledgeable, effortless effort, a “doerless doing,” cultivated over a lifetime.
Action then becomes a pure expression of art, of being, of letting go of all doing—a merging
of mind and body in motion.
we practice to grasp and realize (make real for ourselves) the fact that things already are perfect, perfectly what they are.
It is a remembering that things unfold in their own time.
Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly, is anger. It’s the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it.
Am I angry? Is this the reason that I sulk so often?
That degree of selfless compassion is based on what Buddhists call “right mindfulness” and “right understanding.” It doesn’t just spring up spontaneously. It needs to be practiced, cultivated. It’s not that feelings of anger don’t arise. It’s that the anger can be used, worked with, harnessed so that its energies can nourish patience, compassion, harmony, and wisdom in ourselves and perhaps in others as well.
We know that things unfold according to their own nature. We can remember to let our lives unfold in the same way.
I exist as I am, that is enough, If no other in the world be aware I sit content, And if each and all be aware I sit content. One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait. WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass
Letting go means just what it says. It’s an invitation to cease clinging to anything—whether it be an idea, a thing, an event, a particular time, or view, or desire. It is a conscious decision to release with full acceptance into the stream of present moments as they are unfolding. To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking.
Meditation means cultivating a non-judging attitude toward what comes up in the mind, come what may.
What we are interested in in meditation is direct contact with the experience itself—whether it is of an inbreath, an outbreath, a sensation or feeling, a sound, an impulse, a thought, a perception, or a judgment.
cultivate a trusting heart.
self-cherishing,
generosity is an inward giving, a feeling state, a willingness to share your own being with the world.
Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more.
Small is beautiful.
Slowing everything down is a big part of this.
less may actually be more.
Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable.
concentration as the capacity of the mind to sustain an unwavering attention on one object of observation. It is cultivated by attending to one thing, such as the breath, and just limiting one’s focus to that.
