soledad penadés

Apparently this is the number one book for "mindfulness meditation". And obviously I'd want to find out what the fuss is about...

And it has interesting bits, but I feel like there's a lot of fluff on it. It took me several months to go through this book because it just wasn't quite engaging to make me want to read it all the time, and perhaps it was the fluff's fault.

Anyway, making a note of the interesting bits so I don't have to re-read the book again in the future to get to them:

• "waking up" as "wisdom": seeing more deeply into cause and effect and the interconnected-ness of things. many paths lead to understanding and wisdom.
• MEDITATION as being yourself and knowing something about who that is.
  • Required: willingness to look deeply at ourselves, no matter what, with spirit of generosity, kindness toward oneself, and openness
  • mindfulness as art of conscious living.
  • paying attention in this way opens channels to deep reservoirs of creativity, intelligence, imagination, clarity, determination, choice, and wisdom within us.
  • it is the only intentional human activity which is not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but to realize where you already are.
  • try: reminding yourself: "this is it."
    • There's probably few things it cannot be applied to
    • Acceptance of the present moment has nothing to do with resignation. It simply means acknowledgment
• MINDFULNESS: To capture moments, pay attention. This cultivates mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.
  • 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.
• You Can't Stop the Waves But You Can Learn to Surf - Meditation is not a way to shut off the pressures of the world or of your own mind; it is seeing things clearly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.
  • there are many things in life over which we have little or no control
  • we don't have to be victims in the face of large forces in our lives. We can learn to work with them, understand them, find meaning in them, make critical choices, and use their energies to grow in strength, wisdom, and compassion. A willingness to embrace and work with what is lies at the core of all meditation practice.
  • See if you can sense the "spaces" through which you might move with no effort. If you can make some time early in the day for being, with no agenda, it can change the quality of the rest of your day.
  • Certain attitudes or mental qualities support meditation practice and provide a rich soil in which the seeds of mindfulness can flourish.
• PATIENCE: It amounts to behaving ethically, and patience as fundamental ethical attitude: if you cultivate patience, you almost can't help cultivating mindfulness
  • remembering that things unfold in their own time
  • peace, and a willingness to be patient in the face of enormous provocation and suffering, only come through inner cultivation and practice of compassion,
  • It's not that feelings of anger don't arise. But 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.
  • we cultivate the quality of patience every time we stop and sit and become aware of the flow of our own breathing.
• NON JUDGING: Stillness, insight, and wisdom arise only when we can settle into being complete in this moment, without having to seek or hold on to or reject anything.
  • Meditation means cultivating a non-judging attitude: witness whatever comes up in the mind or the body and to recognize it without condemning it or pursuing it
  • our judgments are unavoidable and limiting thoughts about experience
  • we'll act with greater clarity and be more balanced if we know that we are immersed in a stream of unconscious liking and disliking which screens us from the world
• TRUST: We may not always understand what is happening but if we trust ourselves, another, a process or an ideal, it can be a powerful stabilizing element
  • part of mindfulness practice is to cultivate a trusting heart
  • begin by looking deeply into what we can trust in ourselves
  • experiment with trusting the present moment, accepting whatever we feel or think or see because this is what is present now. If we can take a stand here, and let go into the full texture of now, we may find that this very moment is worthy of our trust.
• GENEROSITY: using cultivation of generosity as vehicle for deep self-observation and inquiry as well as exercise in giving.
  • Start with yourself: can you give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose?
  • Give more than you think you can, trusting that you are richer than you think. Celebrate this richness. Give as if you had inexhaustible wealth. This is called "kingly giving."
  • not talking solely of money or material possessions,
  • 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.
  • try: noticing the resistance to give, the worries about the future, the feeling that you may be giving too much, or the thought that it won't be appreciated "enough," or that you will be exhausted from the effort, or that you won't get anything out of it, or that you don't have enough yourself. Consider the possibility that none of these are actually true, but that they are just forms of inertia, constriction, and fear-based self-protection.
  • 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.
  • generosity is an inward giving, a feeling state, a willingness to share your own being with the world. Most important is to trust and honor your instincts but, at the same time, to take some risks as part of your experiment.
  • Initiate giving. Don't wait for someone to ask. See what happens—especially to you.
• YOU HAVE TO BE STRONG TO BE WEAK: if you're a strong-willed and accomplished person, you may give the impression that you are invulnerable to feeling inadequate or insecure or hurt. This can be very isolating and ultimately cause you and others great pain.
  • you do not have to have opinions about everything, to not appear invincible or unfeeling to others, but instead to be in touch with and appropriately open about your feelings. What looks like weakness is actually where your strength lies. And what looks like strength is often weakness, an attempt to cover up fear; this is an act or a facade, however convincing it might appear to others or even to yourself.
  • try: Recognizing the ways in which you meet obstacles with harshness. Notice any labels you attach to crying or feeling vulnerable. Let go of the labels. Just feel what you are feeling.
• VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY: the impulse frequently arises to squeeze another this or that into this moment.
  • practice voluntary simplicity to counter such impulses. It involves intentionally doing only one thing at a time and making sure I am here for it.
  • going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less to see more, doing less to do more, acquiring less to have more... It all ties in.
  • Slowing everything down. Tell mind and body to stay put
  • practice saying no to keep life simple. It's arduous, and well worth the effort. Yet it is also tricky. There are needs and opportunities to which one must respond. A commitment to simplicity in the midst of the world is a delicate balancing act.
  • voluntary simplicity keeps me mindful of what is important
  • You don't get to control it all. But choosing simplicity whenever possible adds to life an element of deepest freedom
• CONCENTRATION: a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable.
  • cultivated by attending to one thing, such as the breath, and limiting one's focus to that.
  • direct our energy solely toward experiencing this breath coming in, this breath going out, or some other single object of attention. With extended practice, the mind tends to become better and better at staying on the breath, or noticing even the earliest impulse to become distracted
  • A calmness develops with intensive concentration practice that has a remarkably stable quality to it. It is steadfast, profound, hard to disturb, no matter what comes up.
• SAMADHI: "single pointedness of mind," or concentrating the mind on a single sensation or thought-object to the point of absorption
  • Without some degree of samadhi, your mindfulness will not be very strong. You can only look deeply into something if you can sustain your looking without being constantly thrown off by distractions or by the agitation of your own mind. The deeper your concentration, the deeper the potential for mindfulness.
  • Concentration practice, however strong and satisfying, is incomplete without mindfulness to complement and deepen it.
  • Its characteristic energy is closed rather than open, absorbed rather than available, trance-like rather than fully awake. What is missing is the energy of curiosity, inquiry, investigation, openness, availability, engagement with the full range of phenomena experienced by human beings.
• VISION: it is virtually impossible, and senseless anyway, to commit yourself to a daily meditation practice without some view of why you are doing it and what its value might be
  • If mindfulness is deeply important to you, then every moment is an opportunity to practice.
  • 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. It helps us digest the anger, so that we can use it effectively, and in changing from an automatic reacting to a conscious responding, perhaps move beyond it
  • Our vision has to do with our values, and 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?
  • There is nothing glamorous about bucketing out a pond, or working at a hot forge, or in the sweltering vineyards, day after day, year after year. But repetitive inner work of this kind, coming to know the forces of one's own psyche, is its own initiation. It is a tempering process. Usually heat is involved. It takes discipline to tolerate the heat, to persevere. But 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.
• PRACTICE AS A PATH: In Buddhism, meditation practice is usually spoken of as the path of mindfulness, of right understanding, of the wheel of truth (Dharma).
  • Tao and Dharma also mean the way things are, the law that governs all of existence and non-existence. All events, whether we see them as good or bad, are fundamentally in harmony with the Tao. It is our job to learn to perceive this harmony, and to live and make decisions in accord with it.
  • Meditation is more rightly thought of as a "Way" than as a technique. It is a Way of being, of living, of listening, of walking along the path of life and being in harmony with things as they are. This means acknowledging that sometimes, often at crucial times, you have no idea where you are going or where the path lies. At the same time, you can very well know something about where you are now (even if it is knowing that you are lost, confused, enraged, or without hope).
  • it is useful at times to admit to yourself that you don't know your way and to be open to help from unexpected places. Doing this makes available to you inner and outer energies and allies that arise out of your own soulfulness and selflessness.
  • 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.
  • try: Seeing your own life this very day as a journey and as an adventure. Where are you going? What are you seeking? Where are you now? What stage of the journey have you come to? Are you stuck here in certain ways? Can you be fully open to all of the energies at your disposal? This journey is yours, no one else's. So the path has to be your own. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?
• NOT "POSITIVE THINKING": meditation
  • Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes use of thinking, honoring its value and its power. It's more like a vessel which can hold our thinking, helping us to see and know our thoughts as thoughts rather than getting caught up in them
  • The thinking mind can at times be severely fragmented. In fact, it almost always is. This is the nature of thought. Awareness is the pot which cradles all the fragments
  • Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself.
  • Practicing in this way, our thought patterns change by themselves in ways that nourish integration, understanding, and compassion in our lives, but not because we are trying to make them change by replacing one thought with another one that may be more pure. 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.
  • If we decide to think positively, that may be useful, but it is not meditation. It is just more thinking.
• GOING INSIDE: It is easy to come by the impression that meditation is about dwelling inside yourself. But "inside" and "outside" are limited distinctions.
  • Dwelling inwardly, we come to know something of the poverty of always looking outside ourselves for happiness, understanding, and wisdom.
  • our happiness, satisfaction, and our understanding will be no deeper than our capacity to know ourselves inwardly, to encounter the outer world from the deep comfort that comes from being at home in one's own skin, from an intimate familiarity with the ways of one's own mind and body.
  • Dwelling in stillness and looking inward for some part of each day, we touch what is most real and reliable in ourselves and most easily overlooked and undeveloped.
  • Not having to look elsewhere for something to fill us up or make us happy
  • try: the next time you feel a sense of dissatisfaction, of something being missing or not quite right, turn inward just as an experiment.
• THE HEART OF PRACTICE: What lies behind and before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
  • Sitting meditation is not a matter of taking on a special body posture, however powerful that may be.
  • Keep things simple and start with your breathing, feeling it as it moves in and out.
  • try: Setting aside a time everyday for just being.
  • Use the breath as an anchor to tether your attention to the present moment.
  • It helps to come to the cushion or chair with a definite sense of taking your seat.
  • with this attitude, you can sit anywhere in any posture and be at home. When your mind and body collaborate then you are truly sitting.
• DIGNITY: When we describe the sitting posture, the word that feels the most appropriate is "dignity."
  • If we slump, it reflects low energy, passivity, a lack of clarity. If we sit ramrod-straight, we are tense, making too much of an effort, trying too hard.
  • we just need little reminders from time to time that we are already dignified, deserving, worthy.
  • we didn't come to feel undeserving on our own. We were helped to feel unworthy. We were taught it in a thousand ways when we were little, and we learned our lessons well.
  • when we take our seat in meditation and remind ourselves to sit with dignity, we are coming back to our original worthiness.
  • try: Sitting with dignity for thirty seconds. Note how you feel. Try it standing with dignity. Where are your shoulders? How is your spine, your head? What would it mean to walk with dignity?
• POSTURE: When you sit with strong intentionality, the body itself makes a statement of deep conviction and commitment
  • Sometimes you feel in touch with it; other times you don't. Even when you feel depressed, burdened, confused, sitting can affirm the strength and value of this life lived now.
  • Mindful sitting meditation is not an attempt to escape from problems or difficulties into some cut-off "meditative" state. On the contrary, it is a willingness to go nose to nose with pain, confusion, and loss, and to stay with the observing over a sustained period of time, beyond thinking. You seek understanding simply through bearing the situation in mind, along with your breath, as you maintain the sitting posture.
  • sitting meditation first and foremost means sitting in such a way that your body affirms, radiates, broadcasts an attitude of presence, that you are committed to acknowledging and accepting whatever comes up
  • Practicing over and over again embodying dignity, stillness, an unwavering equanimity in the face of any mind state can provide a solid, reliable foundation for maintaining mindfulness and equanimity, even in periods of extreme stress and emotional turmoil. But only if you practice, practice, practice.
• WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR HANDS: Various energy pathways in the body have been mapped out, understood, and used in particular ways invoking qualities of elevation, massiveness, majesty, unmovingness, rootedness
  • we are speaking of becoming sensitive to the language of one's own body. That awareness can catalyze dramatic inner growth and transformation. In the yogic traditions, this field of knowledge concerns certain positions of the body known as mudras.
  • focus is primarily on the positioning of the hands and feet.
  • hand mudras all embody different energies, which you can experiment with yourself in meditation.
    • sitting with your hands palms down on your knees - quality of self-containment. Not looking for anything more, but simply digesting what is.
    • turn both palms up, being mindful as you do it; you may note a change in energy in the body. Sitting this way embodies receptivity, an openness to what is above, to the energy of the heavens (the Chinese say: "As above, so below"). It can be quite helpful at times, especially in periods of turmoil or confusion.
  • try: Being aware of subtle emotional qualities you may be embodying at various times of the day, as well as during your sitting practice. Pay particular attention to your hands. Does their position make a difference? See if you don't become more mindful by becoming more "bodyful."
• COMING OUT OF MEDITATION: mindfulness can become lax with the anticipation of finishing. How you handle this is important. It is precisely such transitions that challenge us to deepen our mindfulness and extend its range.
  • Toward the end of a period of formal practice, if you are not particularly attentive, before you know it you'll be off doing something else, with no awareness whatsoever of how the meditation came to an end. The transition will be a blur at best.
  • In your meditation practice, see if you can detect the very first impulse to quit, try looking into what is behind the impulse. Try lingering with whatever arises out of this inquiry, breathing with it for a few moments or longer.
  • Practicing like this can increase mindfulness in many different situations that involve closing or ending something and moving on to something else.
  • try: Bringing awareness to how you end your meditations. Whether they are lying down, sitting, standing, or walking, zero in on "who" ends it, how it ends, when it ends, and why. Don't judge it or yourself in any way—just observe, and stay in touch with the transition from one thing to the next.
• TIMING: meditation has little to do with clock time. Five minutes of formal practice can be as profound or more so than forty-five minutes. The sincerity of your effort matters far more than elapsed time
  • Forming the intention to practice and then seizing a moment— any moment—and encountering it fully in your inward and outward posture, lies at the core of mindfulness.
  • Long and short periods of practice are both good, but "long" may never flourish if your frustration and the obstacles in your path loom too large.
  • There is really and truly no one "right way" to practice, although there are pitfalls along this path too and they have to be looked out for.
  • try: Being aware of all the times in meditation when the thought comes up: "Am I doing this right?" "Is this what I should be feeling?" "Is this what is 'supposed' to happen?" Instead of trying to answer these questions, just look more deeply into the present moment.
• MY WAY: The truly interesting question here is, "What exactly is my way?", meaning my "Way" with a capital W. Rarely do we contemplate our life with this degree of probing. How frequently do we linger in such basic questions as "Who am I?", "Where am I going?", "What path am I on?", "Is this the right direction for me?", "What is my yearning, my path?", "What do I truly love?"
  • Contemplating "What is my Way?" is an excellent element to inject into our meditation practice. We don't have to come up with answers, nor think that there has to be one particular answer. Better not to think at all. Instead, only persist in asking the question, letting any answers that formulate just come of themselves and go of themselves.
  • The intention here is to remain open to not knowing, perhaps allowing yourself to come to the point of admitting, "I don't know," and then relaxing a bit into this not knowing instead of condemning yourself
  • As a human being, you are the central figure in the universal hero's mythic journey, the fairy tale, the Arthurian quest. For men and women alike, this journey is the trajectory between birth and death, a human life lived. No one escapes the adventure. We only work with it differently.
• MOUNTAINS: sacred places.
  • Rising above all else on our planet, they beckon and overwhelm with their sheer presence. Their nature is elemental, rock.
  • Many people find the image of a mountain helpful: qualities of elevation, massiveness, majesty, unmovingness, rootedness, brought into posture and attitude.
  • The mountain image held in the mind's eve and in the body can freshen our memory of why we are sitting in the first place, and what it means, to dwell in the realm of non-doing.
  • It can be done in any posture, but I find it most powerful when I am sitting cross-legged on the floor, so that my body looks and feels most mountainlike, inside and out. Being in the mountains or in sight of a mountain is helpful but not at all necessary.
  • Picture the most beautiful mountain you know or can imagine, one whose form speaks personally to you. Focus on its image or feeling in your mind's eye, and notice its overall shape, the lofty peak, the base rooted in the rock of the earth's crust, the steep or gently sloping sides. Note as well how massive it is, how unmoving, beautiful—a beauty emanating from its unique shape and at the same time embodying universal qualities of "mountainness" transcending shape and form.
    • 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. Your head becomes the lofty peak; your shoulders and arms the sides of the mountain; your buttocks and legs the solid base rooted to your cushion on the floor or to your chair. Experience in your body the sense of uplift, the axial, elevated quality of the mountain deep in your own spine. Invite yourself to become a breathing mountain, unwavering in your stillness, completely what you are—beyond words and thought, a centered, rooted, unmoving presence.
    • As the light changes, as night follows day and day night, the mountain just sits, simply being itself. It remains still as the seasons flow into one another and as the weather changes moment by moment and day by day. Calmness abiding all change.
    • We can embody the same unwavering stillness and rootedness in the face of everything that changes in our own lives over seconds, hours, and years.
  • we experience constantly the changing nature of mind and body and of the outer world. We experience periods of light and dark, vivid color and drab dullness.
  • By becoming the mountain in our meditation, we can link up with its strength and stability, and adopt them for our own.
    • our thoughts and feelings, our preoccupations, our emotional storms and crises, even the things that happen to us are much like the weather on the mountain.
  • Yet, when all is said and done, the mountain meditation is only a device, a finger pointing us toward somewhere. We still have to look, then go. While the mountain image can help us become more stable, human beings are far more interesting and complex than mountains.
  • try: Keeping this mountain image in mind as you sit. Explore its usefulness in deepening your capacity to dwell in stillness; to sit for longer periods of time; to sit in the face of adversity, difficulties, and storms or drabness in the mind.
  • Images of trees, rivers, clouds, sky can be useful allies as well.
• A LAKE: Some people find the image of a lake particularly helpful. Because a lake is an expanse of water, the image lends itself to the lying-down posture, although it can be practiced sitting up as well. We know that the water principle is every bit as elemental as rock, and that its nature is stronger than rock in the sense that water wears down rock. Water also has the enchanting quality of receptivity. It parts to allow anything in, then resumes itself.
  • picture in your mind's eye a lake, a body of water held in a receptive basin by the earth itself.
  • water likes to pool in low places. It seeks its own level, asks to be contained.
  • With no wind, the surface of the lake is flat. Mirrorlike, it reflects trees, rocks, sky, and clouds, holds everything in itself momentarily. Wind stirs up waves on the lake, from ripples to chop. Clear reflections disappear. But sunlight may still sparkle in the ripples and dance on the waves in a play of shimmering diamonds. When night comes, it's the moon's turn to dance on the lake, or if the surface is still, to be reflected in it along with the outline of trees and shadows. In winter, the lake may freeze over, vet teem with movement and life below.
  • allow yourself to become one with the lake as you lie down on your back or sit in meditation, so that your energies are held by your awareness and by your openness and compassion for yourself in the same way as the lake's waters are held by the receptive and accepting basin of the earth herself.
  • allow your mind and your heart to be open and receptive, to reflect whatever comes near.
  • moments of complete stillness when both reflection and water are completely clear, and other moments when the surface is disturbed, choppy, stirred up, reflections and depth lost for a time.
  • In the lake meditation, we sit with the intention to hold in awareness and acceptance all the qualities of mind and body,
• WALKING MEDITATION:
  • In traditional monastic settings, periods of sitting meditation are interspersed with periods of walking meditation. They are the same practice. The walking is just as good as the sitting. What is important is how you keep your mind.
  • In formal walking meditation, you attend to the walking itself. You can focus on the footfall as a whole; or isolated segments of the motion such as shifting, moving, placing, shifting; or on the whole body moving. You can couple an awareness of walking with an awareness of breathing. In walking meditation, you are not walking to get anyplace. Usually it is just back and forth in a lane, or round and round in a loop. Literally having no place to go makes it easier to be where you are. What's the point of trying to be somewhere else on your walking path when it really is all the same? The challenge is, can you be fully with this step, with this breath?
  • can be practiced at any pace,
  • The practice is to take each step as it comes and to be fully present with it. This means feeling the very sensations of walking
  • things will come up which will pull your attention away from the bare experience of walking.
  • It's best to do formal walking meditation in a place where you won't become a spectacle to other people, especially if you are going to do it very slowly.
  • Informal walking meditation doesn't involve pacing back and forth or going around a loop, but just walking normally.
  • You simply remind yourself to be in this moment, taking each step as it comes, accepting each moment as it comes. If you find yourself rushing or becoming impatient, slowing the pace can help take the edge off your rushing
  • try: Bringing awareness to walking, wherever you find yourself. Slow it down a bit. Center yourself in your body and in the present moment. Appreciate the fact that you are able to walk, which many people cannot. Perceive how miraculous it is, and for a moment, don't take for granted that your body works so wonderfully. Know that you are ambulating upright on the face of Mother Earth. Walk with dignity and confidence, and as the Navaho
  • 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.
• STANDING: it's best learned from trees. Stand close to one, or, better still, in a stand of trees and just peer out in one direction. Feel your feet developing roots into the ground. Feel your body sway gently, as it always will, just as trees do in a breeze. Staying put, in touch with your breathing, drink in what is in front of you, or keep your eyes closed and sense your surroundings. Sense the tree closest to you. Listen to it, feel its presence, touch it with your mind and body. Use your breath to help you to stay in the moment. .. feeling your own body standing, breathing, being,
  • try: Standing like this wherever you find yourself, in the woods, in the mountains, by a river, in your living room, or just waiting for the bus. When you are alone, you might try opening your palms to the sky and holding your arms out in various positions, like branches and leaves, accessible, open, receptive. patient.
• LYING DOWN: is a wonderful way to meditate if you can manage not to fall asleep. And if you do fall asleep, your sleep may be more restful if you enter it through meditation.
  • Using the body as a whole as the object of your attention in lying-down meditation is a blessing. You can feel the body from head to toe, breathing and radiating warmth over the entire envelope of your skin. It's the whole body that breathes, the whole body that is alive. In bringing mindfulness to the body as a whole, you can reclaim your entire body as the locus of your being and your vitality, and remind yourself that "you," whoever you are, are not just a resident of your head.
  • You can also focus on different areas in either a free-flowing or a more systematic way
  • anybody can do the body scan. 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.
  • When you feel ready. on an outbreath you just let go of that region, allowing inviting it to dissolve in your mind's eve your imagination as the muscles themselves let go and you drop into stillness and open awareness before moving on and connecting with the next region of the body, which you would come to on another inbreath. As much as possible, allow all the breathing to be through your nose.
  • Lying-down meditation is a good way to get in touch with your emotional body, too. We possess a metaphorical, a mythical heart as well as a physical one. When we focus on the region of the heart, it can be helpful to tune in to any sensations of constriction in the chest, tightness, or heaviness, and be aware of emotions such as grief, sadness, loneliness, despair, unworthiness, or anger which may lie just beneath the surface of those physical sensations.
  • A number of specialized meditative practices such as loving kindness meditation are specifically oriented toward cultivating in oneself particular feeling states that expand and open the metaphorical heart. Acceptance, forgiveness, loving kindness, generosity, and trust all are strengthened by intentionally centering and sustaining attention in the heart region, and invoking such feelings as part of formal meditation practice.
  • The solar plexus has a sunlike, radiant quality and can help us to contact feelings of centeredness, lying as it does at the center of gravity of the body, and of vitality (digestive fires). The throat vocalizes our emotions and can be either constricted or open. Feelings can get "stuck in the throat" sometimes, even if the heart is open.
  • mindfulness of the throat region, it can put us more in touch with our speech and its tonal qualities—such as explosiveness, speed, harshness, volume, automaticity
  • to continue growing, we need to continuously activate, listen to, and learn from our emotional body. Lying-down meditations can help a lot with this
  • try: Tuning in to your breath when you find yourself lying down. Feel it moving in your entire body. Dwell with the breath in various regions of your body,
  • Try meditating on purpose lying down, not just around bedtime. Do it out of bed, on the floor, at different times of the day. Do it in fields and meadows on occasion, under trees, in the rain, in the snow.
  • Bring particular attention to your body as you are going to sleep and as you are waking up. Even for a few minutes, stretch yourself out straight, on your back if possible, and just feel the body as a whole breathing.
  • Keep your emotional body in mind. Honor "gut" feelings.
• Getting Your Body Down on the Floor at Least Once a Day: There is a particular feeling of time stopping when you get your body down on the floor, whether it's to practice a lying-down meditation such as the body scan or to systematically work the body gently but firmly toward its limits in first this direction, then that, as we do in mindful hatha yoga.
  • Just being low down in a room tends to clear the mind. Maybe it's because being on the floor is so foreign to us that it breaks up our habitual neurological patterning and invites us to enter into this moment through a sudden opening in what we might call the body door.
• YOGA: folds movement and stillness into one another. It is a wonderfully nourishing practice.
  • you are purposefully moving right up to the very limits of your body
  • You are exploring a terrain where there may be considerable intensity of sensation associated with stretching or lifting or maintaining your balance in unusual spatial configurations of limbs, head, and trunk. There you dwell, usually for longer than part of your mind would like, just breathing, just feeling your body.
  • try: Getting down on the floor once a day and stretching your body mindfully, if only for three or four minutes, staying in touch with your breathing and with what your body is telling you. Remind yourself that this is your body today. Check to see if you are in touch with it.
  • try: Noticing the difference in how you feel and how you handle stress in periods when you are into the discipline of daily meditation and yoga practice and in periods of your life when you are not.
  • See if you can become aware of the consequences of your more mindless and automatic behaviors, especially when they are provoked by pressures stemming from work or home life.
• LOVING KINDNESS - We resonate with one another's sorrows because we are interconnected. Being whole and simultaneously part of a larger whole, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. If I become a center of love and kindness in this moment, then in a perhaps small but hardly insignificant way, the world now has a nucleus of love and kindness it lacked the moment before. This benefits me and it benefits others.
  • Can you cultivate forgiveness of yourself, if not of others? Is it even possible to invite yourself to be happy in this moment? Is it okay for you to feel okay? Is the basis of happiness present in this moment at all?
  • Start by centering yourself in your posture and in your breathing. Then, from your heart or from your belly, invite feelings or images of kindness and love to radiate until they fill your whole being. Allow yourself to be cradled by your own awareness as if you were as deserving of loving kindness as any child.
  • Let yourself bask in this energy of loving kindness, breathing it in and breathing it out
  • Invite feelings of peacefulness and acceptance to be present in you.
  • "May I be free from ignorance. May I be free from greed and hatred. May I not suffer. May I be happy." But the words are just meant to evoke feelings of loving kindness. They are a wishing oneself well—consciously formed intentions to be free now, in this moment at least, from the problems we so often make for ourselves
  • Having established a radiant center in your being, you can let loving kindness radiate outwardly and direct it wherever you like. You might first direct it toward the members of your immediate family.
  • You can direct loving kindness toward your parents
  • If you feel capable of it and it feels healthy to you, and liberating, finding a place in your own heart to forgive them for their limitations,
  • there's no need to stop here. You can direct loving kindness toward anybody, toward people you know and people you don't.
  • You can also practice directing loving kindness toward whole groups of people—toward all those who are oppressed, or who suffer, or whose lives are caught up in war or violence or hatred,
  • And you can extend loving kindness to the planet itself, its glories and its silent suffering, to the environment, the streams and rivers, to the air, the oceans, the forests, to plants and animals, collectively or singly.
  • It is an ongoing, ever-expanding realization of interconnectedness. It is also its embodiment. 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.
  • Practicing in this way is not trying to change anything or get anywhere, although it might look like it on the surface. What it is really doing is uncovering what is always present.
  • By invoking such feelings in our practice, we are stretching against the edges of our own ignorance, just as in the yoga we stretch against the resistance of muscle, ligament, and tendon, and as in that and all other forms of meditation, against the boundaries and ignorance of our own minds and hearts.
  • in the stretching, painful as it sometimes is, we expand, we grow, we change ourselves, we change the world.
  • try: Touching base with feelings of loving kindness within yourself at some point in your meditation practice. See if you can get behind any objections you may have to this practice, or behind your reasons for being unlovable. Then play with directing it toward others and out into the world. You are not trying to help anybody else or the planet. Rather, you are simply holding them in awareness, honoring them, wishing them well, opening to their pain with kindness and compassion and acceptance.
• TIME FOR BEING: Life gives us scant time for being nowadays, unless we seize it on purpose. We no longer have a fixed time when we have to stop what we are doing because there's not enough light to do it by . . . we lack that formerly built-in time we had every night for shifting gears, for letting go of the day's activities. We have precious few occasions nowadays for the mind to settle itself in stillness by a fire.
  • We submit ourselves to constant bombardment by sounds and images that come from minds other than our own, that fill our heads with information and trivia, other people's adventures and excitement and desires.
  • we don't have to succumb to the addictive appeals of external absorptions in entertainment and passionate distraction. We can develop other habits that bring us back to that elemental yearning inside ourselves for warmth, stillness, and inner peace. When we sit with our breathing, for instance, it is much like sitting by fire.
  • As the popular bumper sticker says, "Shit happens." The trouble is, too often we are unwilling see our role in it. There are definite risks to disdaining the harmony of things.
  • Nature's harmony is around us and within us at all times. Perceiving it is an occasion for great happiness; but it is often only appreciated in retrospect or in its absence. If all is going well in the body, it tends to go unnoticed.
  • try: Drawing back the veil of unawareness to perceive harmony in this moment. Can you see it in clouds, in sky, in people, in the weather, in food, in your body, in this breath?
  • The virtues of getting up early have nothing to do with cramming more hours of busyness and industry into one's day. Just the opposite. They stem from the stillness and solitude of the hour, and the potential to use that time to expand consciousness, to contemplate, to make time for being, for purposefully not doing anything. The peacefulness, the darkness, the dawn, the stillness—all contribute to making early morning a special time for mindfulness practice.
  • If you can begin your day with a firm foundation in mindfulness and inner peacefulness, then when you do have to get going and start doing, it is much more likely that the doing will flow out of your being.
  • One of the principal virtues of a daily discipline is an acquired transparency toward the appeals of transitory mood states. A commitment to getting up early to meditate becomes independent of wanting or not wanting to do so on any particular morning.
  • Discipline provides a constancy which is independent of what kind of a day you had yesterday and what kind of a day you anticipate today.
  • By grounding yourself in mindfulness early in the morning, you are reminding yourself that things are always changing, that good and bad things come and go, and that it is possible to embody a perspective of constancy, wisdom, and inner peace as you face any conditions that present themselves.
  • To overcome such totally predictable opposition from other corners of the mind, vou need to decide the night before that you are going to wake up, no matter what your thinking comes up with. This is the flavor of true intentionality and inner discipline. You do it simply because you committed to yourself to do it, and vou do it at the appointed time, whether part of the mind feels like it or not. After a while, the discipline becomes a part of you. It's simply the new way you choose to live. It is not a "should," it doesn't involve forcing yourself. Your values and your actions have shifted.
  • use the very moment of waking up, no matter what time it comes, as a moment of mindfulness, the very first of the new day. Before you even move, try getting in touch with the fact that your breath is moving. Feel your body lying in bed.
  • Can I see today as an adventure? Can I see right now as filled with possibilities?"
  • try: Making a commitment to yourself to get up earlier than you otherwise might.
• REALITY: We all carry around ideas and images of reality, frequently garnered from other people
  • As a result, we often see our thoughts, or someone else's, instead of seeing what is right in front of us or inside of us.
  • we don't even bother to look or check how we feel because we think we already know and understand. So we can be closed to the wonder and vitality of fresh encounters. If we are not careful, we can even forget that direct contact is possible. We
  • We can live in a dream reality of our own making without even a sense of the loss, the gulf, the unnecessary distance we place between ourselves and experience. Not knowing this, we can be all the more impoverished, spiritually and emotionally. But something wonderful and unique can occur when our contact with the world becomes direct.
  • try: Thinking that your life is at least as interesting and miraculous as the moon or the stars. What is it that stands between you and direct contact with your life? What can you do to change that?
  • encourage people to become their own authorities, to take more responsibility for their own lives, their own bodies, their own health. I like to emphasize that each person is already the world authority on him- or herself, or at least could be if they started attending to things mindfully.
  • What is required to participate more fully in our own health and well-being is simply to listen more carefully and to trust what we hear, to trust the messages from our own life, from our own body and mind and feelings.
  • It's not a replacement for expert medical care, but it is a necessary complement to it
  • 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.
  • There is no successful escaping from yourself in the long run. only transformation.
  • There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation has been faced completely and vou have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges. In other words, you must be willing to let life itself become vour teacher.
  • This is the path of working where vou find yourself, with what is found here and now.
  • try: To use ordinary, repetitive occasions in your own house as invitations to practice mindfulness.
    • Why does your response time have to be so fast that it pulls you out of the life you were living in the preceding moment?
    • Can these transitions become more graceful? Can you be more where you find yourself, all the time? Also, try being present for things like taking a shower, or eating. When you are in the shower, are you really in the shower? Do you feel the water on your skin, or are you someplace else, lost in thought, missing the shower altogether? Eating is another good occasion for mindfulness practice. Are you tasting your food? Are you aware of how fast, how much, when, where, and what you are eating? Can you make your entire day as it unfolds into an occasion to be present or to bring yourself back to the present, over and over again?
• MY JOB - ''What is my job on the planet?" is one question we might do well to ask ourselves over and over again. Otherwise, we mav wind up doing somebody else's job and not even know it.
  • "What is it on this planet [which he referred to as Spaceship Earth] that needs doing that I know something about, that probably won't happen unless I take responsibility for it?"
  • "What is my job on the planet with a capital J?", or, "What do I care about so much that I would pay to do it?" If I ask such a question and I don't come up with an answer, other than, "I don't know," then I just keep asking the question.
  • Interconnect-edness is a fundamental principle of nature. Nothing is isolated. Each event connects with others. Things are constantly unfolding on different levels.
  • Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. . . . Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.
• INTERCONNECTEDNESS - it is the climb itself which is the adventure, not just standing at the top. First we learn what it's like at the base. Only later do we encounter the slopes, and finally, perhaps, the top. But you can't stay at the top of a mountain. The journey up is not complete without the descent, the stepping back and seeing the whole again from afar. Haying been at the summit, however, you have gained a new perspective, and it may change your way of seeing forever.
  • This has to happen in order for that to happen. Nothing comes from nothing. Everything has antecedents.
  • These relationships are not always simple and linear. Usually things are embedded in a complex web of finely balanced interconnections.
  • What is more, everything is in flux.
  • This awareness might truly enhance our appreciation of impermanence and help us to take things and circumstances and relationships less for granted while they are around.
  • things and other people, and even places and circumstances, are only here temporarily.
  • nothing is ever isolated and needs reconnecting. It's our way of seeing which creates and maintains separation.
  • Mindfulness practice is simply the ongoing discovery of the thread of interconnectedness.
  • is not quite correct to say that we are doing the threading. It's more like we become conscious of a connectedness which has been here all the time.
  • it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable.
  • Ahimsa: "If I can't do anything useful, at least I would like to do as little harm as possible."
    • You can start practicing in ahimsa s gentleness on yourself and in your life with others in any moment.
    • It is easy to relate with ahimsa to someone who doesn't threaten you. The test is in how you will relate to a person or situation when you do feel threatened.
    • Non-harming requires that you see your own fears and that you understand them and own them.
  • Without a daily embodiment in practice, lofty ideals tend to succumb to self-interest.
  • Karma: this happens because that happened.
    • Overall, when we speak of a person's karma, it means the sum total of the person's direction in life and the tenor of the things that occur around that person, caused by antecedent conditions, actions, thoughts, feelings, sense impressions, desires.
    • it is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma. It is always possible to change your karma. You can make new karma.
  • When you sit, you are not allowing your impulses to translate into action. For the time being, at least, you are just watching them. Looking at them, you quickly see that all impulses in the mind arise and pass away, that they have a life of their own, that they are not you but just thinking, and that you do not have to be ruled by them. Not feeding or reacting to impulses, you come to understand their nature as thoughts directly. This process actually burns up destructive impulses in the fires of concentration and equanimity and non-doing.
  • Without mindfulness, we are all too easily stuck in the momentum coming out of the past, with no clue to our own imprisonment, and no way out.
  • it is our mindlessness that imprisons us. We get better and better at being out of touch with the full range of our possibilities, and more and more stuck in our cultivated-over-a-lifetime habits of not-seeing, but only reacting and blaming.
  • Everything has consequences, whether we know it or not, whether we are "caught" by the police or not.
  • what Buddhists call "unawareness," or ignorance. It is ignorance of how unexamined impulses, especially those colored by greed or hatred, however justified, rationalized, or legal, can warp one's mind and one's life.
  • We can all be imprisoned by incessant wanting, by a mind clouded with ideas and opinions it clings to as if they were truths.
  • with that decision to sit, you are already breaking the flow of old karma and creating an entirely new and healthier karma. Herein lies the root of change, the turning point of a life lived.
  • The very act of stopping, of nurturing moments of non-doing, of simply watching, puts you on an entirely different footing vis-a-vis the future. How? Because it is only by being fully in this moment that any future moment might be one of greater understanding,
  • Sitting still or lying still, in any moment we can reconnect with our body, transcend the body, merge with the breath, with the universe, experience ourselves as whole and folded into larger and larger wholes.
  • interconnectedness brings deep knowledge of belonging, a sense of being an intimate part of things, a sense of being at home wherever we are.
  • Knowing our wholeness directly in the meditation practice, we may find ourselves coming to terms with things as they are,
  • When we perceive our intrinsic wholeness, there is trulv no place to go and nothing to do. Thus, we are free to choose a path for ourselves. Stillness becomes available in doing and in non-doing.
  • there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or to heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known. The particulars count
• INQUIRY AND SELFING - The spirit of inquiry is fundamental to living mindfully.
  • Inquiry doesn't mean looking tor answers, especially quick answers which come out of superficial thinking. It means asking without expecting answers, just pondering the question, carrying the wondering with you, letting it percolate, bubble, cook, ripen. come in and out of awareness, just as everything else comes in and out of awareness.
  • inquiry and mindfulness are one and the same thing, come to from different directions.
  • Inquiry is not so much thinking about answers, although the questioning will produce a lot of thoughts that look like answers.
  • "I," "me/' and "mine" are products of our thinking.
  • The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self - Albert Einstein
  • "selfing," that inevitable and incorrigible tendency to construct out of almost everything and every situation an "I," a "me," and a "mine," and then to operate in the world from that limited perspective
  • If you look deeply for a stable, indivisible self, for the core "you" that underlies "your" experience, you are not likely to find it other than in more thinking. You might say you are your name, but that is not quite accurate. Your name is just a label. The same is true of your age, your gender, your opinions, and so on. None are fundamental to who you are.
  • The "I" just appears as a construct which is known by its attributes, none of which, taken singly or together, really makes up the whole of the person.
  • The "I" tends to feel good when outside circumstances are supporting its belief in its own goodness, and bad when it runs into criticism, difficulties, and what it perceives as obstacles and defeats.
  • stop trying so hard to be "somebody" and instead just experience being, perhaps we would be a lot happier and more relaxed.
  • everything is interdependent and that there is no isolated, independent core "you."
  • who you are is not your name, your age, your childhood, your beliefs, your fears. They are part of it, but not the whole.
  • everything is interconnected and that while our conventional sense of "having" a self is helpful in many ways, it is not absolutely real or solid or permanent.
  • taking things a little less personally. When something happens, try to see it without the self-orientation, just for fun. Maybe it just happened. Maybe it's not aimed at you. Watch your mind at such times.
  • There is a price we pay for being attached to a narrow of being "right."
  • I observe the anger as it starts rising in me.
  • experimenting with my reactions at the kitchen sink by watching them very closely without acting on them.
  • try: Watching your reactions in situations that annoy you or make you angry. Notice how even speaking of something "making" you angry surrenders your power to others. Such occasions are good opportunities to experiment with mindfulness as a pot into which you can put all your feelings and just be with them, letting them slowly cook, reminding yourself that you don't have to do anything with them right away, that they will become more cooked, more easily digested and understood simply by holding them in the pot of mindfulness.
  • If you follow the life-long path of mindfulness practice, the biggest potential obstacle at points along your journey will undoubtedly be your thinking mind.
  • you might go around thinking, maybe even saying, that you have gotten somewhere, that the meditation practice "works." The ego wants to lay claim and take credit for this special feeling or understanding, whatever it is. As soon as this happens, you are no longer into meditation but into advertising.
  • you're caught, you cease seeing clearly.
  • all colorations of "I," "me," and "mine" are just currents of thinking that are liable to carry you away from your own heart and the purity of direct experience.
  • There is nothing wrong with feelings of boredom or staleness, or of not getting anywhere, just as there is nothing wrong with feeling that you are getting somewhere
  • It's when you get attached to your experience that the practice arrests, and your development along with it.
  • try: Whenever you find yourself thinking you are getting somewhere or that you're not getting where you are supposed to be, it can be helpful to ask yourself things like: "Where am I supposed to get?"; "Who is supposed to get somewhere?";
  • These questions can help you cut through those moments when self-involved feeling states, mindless habits, and strong emotions dominate your practice. They can quickly bring you back to the freshness and beauty of each moment as it is. Perhaps you forgot or didn't quite grasp that meditation really is the one human activity in which you are not trying to get anywhere else but simply allowing yourself to be where and as you already are.
  • Perhaps ultimately, spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that in- dividuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous.
• Buddhist tradition, especially Zen, emphasizes coming full circle, back to the ordinary and the everyday, what they call "being free and easy in the marketplace." This means being grounded anywhere, in any circumstances, neither above nor below, simply present, but fully present.