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Initiate giving. Don’t wait for someone to ask. See what happens—especially to you. You may find that you gain a greater clarity about yourself and about your relationships, as well as more energy rather than less.
What looks like weakness is actually where your strength lies. And what looks like strength is often weakness, an attempt to cover up fear;
Experiment with being soft when your impulse is to be hard, generous when your impulse is to be withholding, open when your impulse is to close up or shut down emotionally. When there is grief or sadness, try letting it be here.
Allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling.
Trust in your deepest strength of all: to be present, to be wakeful.
It has me unavailable to others at those times, missing the play of light on the table, the smells in the room, the energies of the moment, including arguments and disputes, as we come together before going our separate ways for the day.
such impulses and make sure nourishment comes at a deep level. It involves intentionally doing only one thing at a time and making sure I am here for it.
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.
not reacting to inner impulses to call someone who “needs calling” right in that moment,
choosing not to acquire new things on impulse, or even to automatically answer the siren call of magazines or television or movies on the first ring are all ways to simplify one’s life a little.
I practice saying no to keep my life simple, and I find I never do it enough.
The deeper your concentration, the deeper the potential for mindfulness.
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.
If you hope to bring meditation into your life in any kind of long-term, committed way, you will need a vision that is truly your own—one that is deep and tenacious and that lies close to the core of who you believe yourself to be, what you value in your life, and where you
see yourself going.
The vision we are
speaking of has to be renewed every day, has to be right out front all the time, because mindfulness itself requires this level of awareness of purpose, of intention. Otherwise, we might as well stay in bed.
It doesn’t mean trying to change or be different from how you are, calm when you’re not feeling calm, or kind when you really feel angry. Rather, it is bearing in mind what is most important to you so that it is not lost or betrayed in the heat and reactivity of a particular moment.
There is much to be said for the conscious expression of anger,
knowing that there must be something larger and more fundamental that you are forgetting in the heat of the emotion, then you can touch an awareness inside yourself which is not attached to or invested in the anger-fire.
Awareness sees the anger; it knows the depth of the anger; and it is larger than the anger.
Our vision has to do with our values, and with our personal blueprint for what is most important in life. It has to do with first principles, If you believe in love, do you manifest it or just talk a lot? If you believe in compassion, in non-harming, in kindness, in wisdom, in generosity, in calmness, in solitude, in non-doing, in being even-handed and clear, do you manifest these qualities in your daily life? This is the level of intentionality which is required
to keep your meditation practice vital, so that it doesn’t succumb to becoming purely a mechanical exercise, driven only by the forces of habit or belief.
Asking yourself why you meditate or why you want to meditate. Don’t believe your first answers. Just write down a list of whatever comes to mind. Continue asking yourself.
The beauty of meditative work is that it is possible to rely on the practice itself to guide us through the maze. It keeps us on the path, even in the darkest of moments, facing the most terrifying of our own mind states and external circumstances. It reminds us of our options. It is a guide to human development, roadmap to our radiant selves, not to the gold of a childhood innocence already past, but to that of a fully developed adult.
We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable.
Being open to the prince and the princess, the king and the queen, the giant and the witch, the wild man and the wild woman, the dwarf and the crone, and the warrior, the healer, and the trickster within yourself.
You just let the fragments stir while you hold them in awareness. Whatever comes up in mind or body goes into the pot, becomes part of the soup.
Rather, it is to understand the nature of our thoughts as thoughts and our relationship to them, so that they can be more at our service rather than the other way round.
Once you are sitting, there are many ways to approach the present moment. All involve paying attention on purpose, non-judgmentally. What varies is what you attend to and how.
Imagine the challenge of touching another person without automaticity, with no gaining idea, just presence and caring.
You can bring mindfulness to this process by being in touch with the
thoughts and impulses which tell you it’s time to stop.
The Master sees things as they are, without trying to control them. She lets them go their own way, and resides at the center of the circle.
Can you observe them without judging them or yourself for even brief periods? If you put the welcome mat out for them and investigate their qualities and let them be, you may learn a lot about what is strong and unwavering in yourself.
Watching my own, I am amazed at how many different places and ways I might put my foot down with each step,
There is built-in mindfulness here. Rough terrain brings it out in us. And if we do a trail ten times, we’ll each solve the problem of each footstep differently each time.
It is best to encounter each moment with freshness,
Inquiry takes on a life of its own after a while.
Can we be in touch with our own life unfolding? Can we rise to the occasion of our own humanity? Can we take on the challenges we meet, even seeking them out to test ourselves, to grow, to act in a principled way, to be true to ourselves,
However it appears, just sit and breathe with the image of this mountain, observing it, noting its qualities. When you feel ready, see if you can bring the mountain into your own body so that your body sitting here and the mountain of the mind’s eye become one.
Invite yourself to become a breathing mountain, unwavering in your stillness, completely what you are—beyond words and thought, a centered, rooted, unmoving presence.
By becoming the mountain in our meditation, we can link up with its strength and stability, and adopt them for our own.
mindfulness, equanimity, and clarity.
The weather of our own lives is not to be ignored or denied. It is to be encountered, honored, felt, known for what it is, and held in high awareness since it can kill us.
We have a vast range of potential at our disposal. We can see and feel. We can know and understand. We can learn; we can grow; we can heal; especially if we learn to listen to the inner harmony of things and hold the central mountain axis through thick and thin.
Try walking formally as well. Before or after you sit, try a period of walking meditation. Keep a continuity of mindfulness between the walking and the sitting.
But you will learn more and understand walking meditation more deeply if you challenge yourself to keep at it past your first or second impulse to stop.
All you need to do is lie here and feel different regions of your body and then let go of them.
One way to practice is to inwardly direct your breath in to and out from the various regions of your body as if you could breathe right in to your toes or your knee, or your ear, and breathe out “from” those places.
