More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Mindfulness has to do above all with attention and awareness,
Meditation is the process by which we go about deepening our attention and awareness, refining them, and putting them to greater practical use in our lives.
Fundamentally, mindfulness is a simple concept. Its power lies in its practice and its applications.
Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. This kind of attention nurtures greater awareness, clarity, and acceptance of present-moment reality.
A diminished awareness of the present moment inevitably creates other problems for us as well through our unconscious and automatic actions and behaviors, often driven by deepseated fears and insecurities.
It is the direct opposite of taking life for granted.
I like to think of mindfulness simply as the art of conscious living.
Buddhism is fundamentally about
being in touch with your own deepest nature and letting it flow out of you unimpeded.
In fact, the word “Buddha” simply means one who has awakened to his o...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
This may include encountering deep emotions—such as grief, sadness, woundedness, anger, and fear—that we might not ordinarily allow ourselves to hold in awareness or express consciously.
Mindfulness can also help us to appreciate feelings such as joy, peacefulness, and happiness which often go by fleetingly and unacknowledged.
Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us rather than to tyrannize us.
By being with yourself … by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than to judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies.
But meditation is not just about sitting, either. It is about stopping and being present, that is all.
A good way to stop all the doing is to shift into the “being mode” for a moment. Think of yourself as an eternal witness, as
timeless. Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?
By taking a few moments to “die on purpose” to the rush of time while you are still living, you free yourself to have time for the present.
Die to having to have anything be different in this moment; in your mind and in your heart, give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are.
something. But meditation is different. From the perspective
When we let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment, we are taking a profound step toward being able to encounter what is here now. If we hope to go anywhere or develop ourselves in any way, we can only step from where we are standing. If we don’t really know where we are standing—a knowing that comes directly from the cultivation of mindfulness—we may only go in circles, for all our efforts and expectations. So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all. *
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, This is the best season of your life.
Remind yourself that acceptance of the present moment has nothing to do with resignation in the face of what is happening. It simply means a clear acknowledgment that what is happening is happening.
You will find that to cultivate mindfulness you may have to remember over and over again to be awake and aware.
Just feeling the breath. Breathing and knowing that you’re breathing.
Staying with one full inbreath as it comes in, one full outbreath as it goes out, keeping your mind open and free for just this moment, just this breath.
Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to being present. There is no “performance.” There is just this moment. We are not trying to improve or to get anywhere else. We are not even running after special insights or visions.
Rather, we are simply inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.
There are nothing but golden fish in this stream. All we need to see them clearly is the lens of awareness.
One practical way to do this is to look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them. Sometimes our thoughts act like dream glasses.
We can live in a dream present for a dream future.
But, meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel.
meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment.
The joy of non-doing is that nothing else needs to happen for this moment to be complete.
He is, to this day, continually pointing out, for anyone willing to listen, the 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.
If someone hits you with a stick, you don’t get angry at the stick or at the arm that swung it; you get angry at the person attached to the arm. But if you look a little deeper, you can’t find a satisfactory root cause or place for your anger even in the person, who literally doesn’t know what he is doing and is therefore out of his mind at that moment.
Peace, and a willingness to be patient in the face of such enormous provocation and suffering, can only come about through the inner cultivation of compassion, a compassion that is not limited to friends, but is felt equally for those who, out of ignorance and often seen as evil, may cause you and those you love to suffer.
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.
Letting go really refers to choosing to become transparent to the strong pull of our own likes and dislikes, and of the unawareness that draws us to cling to them.
To be transparent requires that we allow fears and insecurities to play themselves out in the field of full awareness.
Letting go is only possible if we can bring awareness and acceptance to the nitty-gritty of just how stuck we can get, if we allow ourselves to recognize the lenses we slip so unconsciously between observer and observed that then filter and color, bend and shape our view. We can open in those sticky moments, especially if we are able to capture them in awareness and recognize it when ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
See for yourself whether letting go when a part of you really wants to hold on doesn’t bring a deeper satisfaction than clinging.
Imagine how it might feel to suspend all your judging and instead to let each moment be just as it is, without attempting to evaluate it as “good” or “bad.” This would be a true stillness, a true liberation.
The tack we take in meditation is simply to witness whatever comes up in the mind or the body and to recognize it without condemning it or pursuing it, knowing that our judgments are unavoidable and necessarily limiting thoughts about experience.
A non-judging orientation certainly does not mean that you cease knowing how to act or behave responsibly in society, or that anything anybody does is okay. It simply means that we can act with much greater clarity in our own lives, and be more balanced, more effective, and more ethical in our activities, if we know that we are immersed in a stream of unconscious liking and disliking which screens us from the world and from the basic purity of our own being.
A good place to start is with yourself. See if you can give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose.
what is being suggested here is that you practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.
By practicing mindfulness of generosity, by giving, and by observing its effects on ourselves and others, we are transforming ourselves, purifying ourselves, discovering expanded versions of ourselves.
Above all, generosity is an inward giving, a feeling state, a willingness to share your own being with the world.
