Bare-Bones Meditation Quotes

“Meditation is a social and political act. Listening and not-doing are actions far more powerful than most of us have yet begun to realize.”
― Joan Tollifson, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

“Habit has two parts, Toni [Packer] says. There is the habit itself (finger biting, smoking, drinking, whatever), and there is the observer who wants to stop, who is also a habit. And there is the conflict, the battle between the desire to indulge, which is an escape from what is, and the desire to stop, which is also a movement away from what is.”
― Joan Tollifson, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

“We want the black-and-white picture, someone to blame. So we blame George Bush or Saddam Hussein, or black people or white people, or capitalism or communism, or the left or the right, or human nature, but reality is something else altogether. I could be any of those people. None of their behavior is anything I haven’t—on some scale—done myself. If you see that, and any real meditation work will reveal it to you beyond the shadow of a doubt, then you cannot possibly imagine that there is a “solution” to be found in fixing blame.”
― Joan Tollifson, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

“How complete, whole, undivided seeing comes about is a mystery. Any formulation or method we invent will eventually get in our way. It’s as if everything we learn must be instantly left behind.”
― Joan Tollifson, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

“The trick is not to make an idea or a system out of this openness, a new dogma.”
― Joan Tollifson, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

“So I’ve held on to Catholicism or Zen, as practices, as fantasy futures, as possible identities. But when I actually dare to lower myself down into this emptiness—no, that sounds entirely too dualistic and willful and “courageous”—but when this seeing suddenly happens and thought relaxes, Zen drops completely away, and something much deeper is contacted, some entirely other way of being.”
― Joan Tollifson, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

“I talked to my friend Frank on the phone that evening. Frank used to live in Vermont and would come to Springwater occasionally for retreats, and then he moved out to California to be a cook, which is where I met him. “I was at work chopping onions yesterday,” he says, “and suddenly I was filled with sadness … because here I am, I’ve got my dream, exactly what I wanted, I’m working at the restaurant I wanted to be at, I have a terrific place to live, and suddenly I was really sad because now I just have to chop the onions, you know?” Isn’t that exactly it? Chopping the onions.”
― Joan Tollifson, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

“The concentration of a baby is alive wonderment. It is to that kind of organic interest, or passion, and awareness that Toni [Packer] seems to be pointing: listening that is not rote or methodical in any way. The baby has no sense yet of self-image, of itself as an object—a person—who needs to be improved, and Toni will question any meditation practice that contributes to such a picture.”
― Joan Tollifson, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life