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March 17 - March 22, 2020
Samadhi is developed and deepened by continually bringing the attention back to the breath every time it wanders.
The experience of deep samadhi is very pleasant. In attending to the breath with onepointed concentration, everything else falls away—including thoughts, feelings, the outside world. Samadhi is characterized by absorption in stillness and undisturbed peacefulness.
Concentration can be of great value, but it can also be seriously limiting if you become seduced by the pleasant quality of this inner experience and come to see it as a refuge from life in an unpleasant and unsatisfactory world. You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom.
Very important
Meditation practice is hardly romantic. The ways in which we need to grow are usually those we are the most supremely defended against and are least willing to admit even exist, let alone take an undefended, mindful peek at and then act on to change.
If its energy can be transmuted to forcefulness and wisdom, without the smoke and fire of self-absorption or self-righteousness, then its power multiplies, and so does its capacity to transform both the object of the anger and the source.
The pot of awareness helps us cradle the anger and see that it may be producing more harmful effects than beneficial ones, even if that is not our aim.
changing from an automatic reacting to a conscious responding,
Keep in mind that these deities are not gods in the usual sense. Rather, they represent different mind states, each with its own kind of divine energy which has to be faced, honored, and worked with if we are to grow and develop our true potential as full human beings, whether men or women.
what comes of keeping at it is mastery and non-naivete, attainment of an inward order unattainable without the discipline, the heat, the descent into our darkness and fear. Even the interior defeats we suffer serve us in this tempering.
Result of mindfulness
There is a blindness that comes from self-furthering agendas that leaves us thinking we know when actually we don’t know as much as we think.
Exactly what happened during UPSC preparation.
getting caught up in the normal human tendencies of self-cherishing and arrogance, and ignoring the larger order of things, will ultimately lead to an impasse in your life in which you are unable to go forward, unable to go back, and unable to turn around.
Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes use of thinking, honoring its value and its power. Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thoughts as thoughts rather than getting caught up in them as reality.
Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself. The watching is the holding.
In cultivating mindfulness we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantagepoint in a cave or depression in the rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.
When we can be centered in ourselves, even for brief periods of time in the face of the pull of the outer world, not having to look elsewhere for something to fill us up or make us happy, we can be at home wherever we find ourselves, at peace with things as they are, moment by moment.
Mindfulness entails obviation of the need of someone other to complete you.
non-attachment and unwavering stability,
Meditation practice is the slow, disciplined work of digging trenches, of working in the vineyards, of bucketing out a pond. It is the work of moments and the work of a lifetime, all wrapped into one.
medication
Meditation
“develop a mind that clings to nothing.
Mindfulness needs to be kindled and nurtured, protected from the winds of a busy life or a restless and tormented mind, just as a small flame needs to be sheltered from strong gusts of air.
Ultimately, walking is stillness in motion, flowing mindfulness.
walk in beauty, wherever you are.
Forgetting or neglecting to be mindful can teach you a lot more than just being mindful all the time.
epidemic of low self-esteem.
self-loathing and inadequacy.
Maybe we are overdeveloped outwardly and underdeveloped inwardly. Perhaps it is we who, for all our wealth, are living in poverty.
Can you cultivate forgiveness of yourself, if not of others?
problems we so often make for ourselves or compound for ourselves through our own fear and forgetfulness.
“Why, what could she have done, being what she is?”
When you can love one tree or one flower or one dog or one place, or one person or yourself for one moment, you can find all people, all places, all suffering, all harmony in that one moment.
“Bubble gum for the eyes,”
TV
Just witnessing the dawn each day is a wake-up call in itself.
One of the principal virtues of a daily discipline is an acquired transparency toward the appeals of transitory mood states.
it is possible to embody a perspective of constancy, wisdom, and inner peace as you face any conditions that present themselves.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
Mindful inquiry can heal low self-esteem, for the simple reason that a low self-estimation is really a wrong calculation, a misperception of reality.
Our esteem problems stem in large part from our thinking, colored by past experiences. We see only our shortcomings and blow them out of all proportion. At the same time, we take all our good qualities for granted, or fail to acknowledge them at all. Perhaps we get stuck in the often deep and still bleeding wounds of childhood, and forget or never discover that we have golden qualities too.
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Too often, our lives cease working because we cease working at life, because we are unwilling to take responsibility for things as they are, and to work with our difficulties. We don’t understand that it is actually possible to attain clarity, understanding, and transformation right in the middle of what is here and now, however problematic it may be. But it is easier and less threatening to our sense of self to project our involvement in our problems onto other people and the environment.
Is this my ailment?
You can even blame yourself for it all and, in the ultimate escape from responsibility, run away feeling that you have made a hopeless mess of things, or that you are damaged beyond repair. In either case, you believe that you are incapable of true change or growth, and that you need to spare others any more pain by removing yourself from the scene.
Out of fear and yearning for someone special to help them to see dearly, people sometimes fall into unhealthy dependency relationships with meditation teachers, forgetting that no matter how good the teacher, ultimately you have to live the inner work yourself, and that work always comes from the cloth of your own life.
There is no successful escaping from yourself in the long run, only transformation.
you must be willing to let life itself become your teacher.
The challenge of mindfulness is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in—no matter how unpleasant, how discouraging, how limited, how unending and stuck they may appear to be—and to make sure that you have done everything in your power to use their energies to transform yourself before you decide to cut your losses and move on. It is right here that the real work needs to happen.
You have to work here itself.
So why not let go and admit that you might as well be at home wherever you are?
Right in that moment, you touch the core of your being and invite mindfulness to enter and heal.
“the precision and openness and intelligence of the present.” The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.
reminding myself that there is really no place I have to go and nothing I have to get that can’t wait another moment for the sake of being fully in this one.
This is the crux of all efforts.
We are at risk of never realizing our uniqueness—at least as long as we remain in the shadow cast by our thought habits and conditioning.
