Quotes About Practice

Fasting is meant to take you, temporarily, out of the realm of the physical and focus your attention heavenward; as one Jewish guide to fasting puts it, 'at the heart of this practice is a desire to shift our attention away from our immediate needs and to focus on more spiritual concerns.

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for the merchants and chandlers of the Canaries, practiced

One of the best means by which change occurs is through repeating an act or experiencing a spiritual feeling: for example, repeating certain religious prayers, creeds, or rituals.

Guides will give various practices, but rarely do Murids perform them and even more rarely with any kind of consistency. Many people run around from Sheikh to Sheikh or therapist to therapist, trying to get answers. Often the problem is that these people never truly put into effect the answers they have already been given. Rather than always looking for more, more, more, they should use what they have already been given.

Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.

O]f all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I'm sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

I'm learning that I have to practice forgiveness, and sometimes it feels as if I have to do it moment by moment. Whenever the trigger gets pulled or the cloud of shame descends, I'm learning to see it as an invitation to forgive. My negative reaction means I'm aware of my lack of releasing my grudge or pain against them. It also means I can learn to let go of the hurts they caused.

One of the problems of spiritual searching is that we tend to feel that we can help ourselves purely by reading a lot and practicing by ourselves, not associating ourselves with a particular lineage. Without a teacher to surrender to, without an object of devotion, we cannot free ourselves from spiritual materialism.

The practice of meditation is to see the transparency of this shield. But we cannot immediately start dealing with the basic ignorance itself; that would be like trying to push a wall down all at once. If we want to take this wall down, we must take it down brick by brick; we start with immediately available material, a stepping-stone. So the practice of meditation starts with the emotions and thoughts, particularly with the thought process.

But meditation is a life's work. You cease to sit and meditate in this life when the last breath runs out of your body on your deathbed.

The practice of meditation is not so much concerned with the hypothetical attainment of enlightenment, but with leading a good life. In order to learn how to lead a good life, a spotless life, you need continual awareness that relates with life constantly, directly, and very simply.

The sitting practice of meditation is regarded as one of the most profound and fundamental disciplines you could ever achieve. By doing this practice, you find that you become less crazy. You begin to develop more humor, more relaxation, and ultimately, more mindfulness.

We have to relate with our mental gossip and our emotions simply and directly, without philosophy. We have to use the existing material, which is ego's hang-ups and credentials and deceptions, as a starting point. Then we begin to realize that in order to do this we must actually use some kind of feeble credentials. Token credentials are necessary. Without them we cannot begin. So we practice meditation using simple techniques; the breath is our feeble credential.

It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego.

So vipashyana experience and practice is absolutely necessary for a person who follows the Buddhist path and really wants to understand the dharma.

When you begin to enjoy the discipline of warriorship, when it begins to feel natural, even though it may still feel very imperfect, that is the time to let go.

Aloneness seems to be the heart of discipline [...] You cannot develop yourself properly unless you give up your need for companionship. Once you give up your search for companionship, you can make friends with your loneliness. At that point, you become a genuine practitioner.

Then you have to apply a technique or antidote to overcome it.

I would like to devote myself to the dharma completely and fully.

Meditation practice is not an exotic or out-of-reach approach. It is immediate and personal, and it involves an intimate relationship with ourselves. It is getting to know ourselves by examining our actual psychological process without being ashamed of it.

There is something to do, but at the same time whatever you are doing is only related to the moment rather than being related to achieving some goal in the future, which brings us back to the practice of meditation. Meditation is not a matter of beginning to set foot on the path; it is realizing that you are already on the path—fully being in the nowness of this very moment—now, now, now. You do not actually begin because you have never really left the path.

I was taught that only about 25 percent of your concentration should be put on the breath when you're meditating. This is just a rough estimate, so please don't fixate on the percentage. The point is that in this approach, working with breath is just touching the highlights of the breathing. You don't remain completely one with it all the time.

In vajrayana practice, students identify with the different styles of awakened energy by visualizing themselves as deities. These visualizations arise out of and dissolve back into emptiness.