Wake Up To Your Life Quotes

“The deepest level of obsession is obsession with a sense of self. A sense of self, generated as a reaction to non-referential space, lies at the core of every habituated pattern. A self is felt to be a permanent, independent unit. The feeling of permanence manifests in life as a feeling of dullness, of not being quite present. The illusion of independence arises as a feeling of separation. The feeling of being one thing arises as a feeling of incompleteness or dissatisfaction. Together, these three qualities obscure the mystery of being.”
― Ken McLeod, Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention – Essential Methods for Equanimity, Compassion, and Joy

“We don't die willingly. The more invested we are in the worlds projected by patterns, the stronger the denial, anger, and bargaining, and the despair of depression. Insight practice is inherently frustrating because you are looking to see where, at first, you are unable to see--beyond the world of the patterns.
Another way to look at insight practice is to see that the process has three stages: shock, disorganization, and reorganization.
The first stage starts when you see beyond illusion. You experience a shock. You react by denying that you saw what you saw, saying, in effect, "That makes no sense. I'll just forget about that." Unfortunately, or fortunately, your experience of seeing is not so easily denied. It is too vivid, too real, to ignore. Now you become angry because the illusion in which you have lived has been shattered. You know you can't go back, but you don't want to go forward. You are still attached to the world of patterns. You feel anxious, and the anxiety gradually matures into grief. You now know that you have to go forward. You experience the pain of separating from what you understood, just as the lama in the example experienced pain at the loss of his worldview.
You then enter a period of disorganization. You withdraw, become apathetic, lose your energy for life, become restless, and routinely reject new possibilities or directions. You surrender to the changes taking place but do nothing to move forward. A major risk at this stage is that you remain in a state of disorganization. You hold on to an aspect of the old world. parents who have lost a child in an accident or to violence, for example, have great difficulty in letting go. They may keep the child's bedroom just as it was. Their views and expectations of life have been shattered, and, understandably, they cling to a few of the shards. They may stay in the stage of disorganization for a long time.
The third stage of insight is reorganization. You experience a shift, and you let the old world go, even the shards. You accept the world that you see with your new eyes. What was previously seen as being absolute and real is now seen differently. The old structures, beliefs, and behaviors no longer hold, and you enter a new life.”
― Ken McLeod, Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention – Essential Methods for Equanimity, Compassion, and Joy

“When you have a fight with your husband or wife, dispense with concerns about who wins and who loses, cut the web, return to presence, and do what needs to be done. When you are aggressively pushing a business deal, cut the web, forget about driving the hardest bargain, and return to presence, knowing the place this business transaction has in your life. When you are confused in your meditation practice, cut the web, forget about achieving enlightenment or any other personal ambition, return to presence, and open to what you are experiencing right now.”
― Ken McLeod, Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention – Essential Methods for Equanimity, Compassion, and Joy

“When you engage in an activity, let go of any idea of achieving a goal or deriving a benefit from the activity. Be in the doing. Whether the task is peasant or unpleasant, make it an offering to awareness. If you jog, be in the jogging. Don't think about how you will do in an upcoming marathon. The effort to be present in the activity disrupts the way habituated emotional patterns take over the body. By staying present in the doing, you stop reinforcing projection and self-interest and move to the pure experience of the activity itself.”
― Ken McLeod, Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention – Essential Methods for Equanimity, Compassion, and Joy

“As we become adept in communication, we forget that the concepts and words that we use in language are abstractions. In other words, we fall asleep to what is real--actual experience-- and take concepts to be real.

As with language, so with every other aspect of experience. We forget that thoughts are thoughts, feelings are feelings, and sensations are sensations. We instead take the contents of thoughts to be real entities, feelings to be what we are, and sensations to be external objects.

Think of an elephant, for instance. If you forget that you are thinking about an elephant, then you take the elephant you are thinking about to be an actual elephant. 'Absurd!' you say, but isn't that exactly what happens when you are distracted in meditation? A thought of a dispute with a friend arises. You don't recognize it as a thought. In the next moment, you are engrossed in an argument with your friend. You forget not only your meditation practice but also where you are. Your world of experience has collapsed down to the dispute with your friend. You are completely obsessed with it. The only argument that is taking place, however, is the one in your mind.”
― Ken McLeod, Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention – Essential Methods for Equanimity, Compassion, and Joy

“By carrying the idea that everything you experience in your waking life is like a dream, you undermine the conditioned tendency to project an external reality onto sensory experiences. In effect, you move into a more intimate relationship with sensory experience. Your experience of sensations becomes clearer and more vivid, and you are less likely to project emotional reactions onto them.

This instruction is often interpreted to mean that we should not care so much about what happens and not take things too seriously--a dangerous misinterpretation. When we regard everything that arises as a dream, we actually pay more attention to what we are experiencing and how that experience is arising. Instead of automatically interpreting sensory experience as independent objects, we perceive sensory experience for what it is--sensory experience, neither more nor less. Habitually, we regard awareness and sensory experience as separate and different, but sensory experience cannot be separated from awareness. By cutting through the sense of separation with the instruction 'everything is a dream,' we cut through the conditioning, interpretation, and reactivity that are ordinarily set in motion.”
― Ken McLeod, Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention – Essential Methods for Equanimity, Compassion, and Joy

“When you imagine the worst possible case, you see that the statements 'I can't handle this' and 'This is too much' are expressions of feeling rather than fact. When push comes to shove, you will do what you have to do. You will handle the situation, one way or another. In the end, the worst case is just another experience. Even when the worst case leads to injury or even death, you see that your death is also an experience. Your concern for safety or survival leads you to ignore what is happening and prevents you from acting on what you truly value, that is, what you are willing to die for.”
― Ken McLeod, Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention – Essential Methods for Equanimity, Compassion, and Joy

“When you first suspect that your girlfriend or boyfriend does not love you, you feel nervous and anxious. When you find out that he or she really does not love you, you feel sick and nauseated. Dismantling beliefs about what we are and how we function is not threatening at the level of the body, but it is profoundly threatening to our feeling and conception of what we are and our relations with others. Nervousness arises when we begin to suspect or anticipate that things are not as we had thought. Nausea is a reaction to the realization that we have been emotionally attached to a fiction, the fiction of an autonomous volitional self.
Later you will feel ighter and clearer and emotionally alive. What you once resisted you now accept, often with a tinge of sadness because a cherished illusion has been shattered. Intellectual understanding does not have the same effects. While you may have a feeling of confidence in your comprehension, the emotional vitality is not present.
The intention of formal meditation practice is to develop sufficient attention to see into the operation of patterns and take them apart, but this is only half of the practice. The other half is to exercise attention in your daily life so that your actions arise from presence rather than from reactive patterns.”
― Ken McLeod, Wake Up To Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention – Essential Methods for Equanimity, Compassion, and Joy