Quotes About Practice

We don't sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we'll be more awake in our lives.

Tonglen means taking in and sending out. This meditation practice is designed to help ordinary people like ourselves connect with the openness and softness of our hearts. Instead of shielding and protecting our soft spot, with tonglen we could let ourselves feel what it is to be human.

IN practicing meditation, we're not trying to live up to some kind of ideal—quite the opposite.

As we practice moving into the present moment this way, we become more familiar with groundlessness, a fresh state of being that is available to us on an ongoing basis. This moving away from comfort and security, this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted, and shaky—that's called liberation.

The painful thing is that when we buy into disapproval, we are practicing disapproval. When we buy into harshness, we are practicing harshness. The more we do it, the stronger these qualities become. How sad it is that we become so expert at causing harm to ourselves and others. The trick then is to practice gentleness and letting go.

Practicing loving-kindness toward ourselves seems as good a way as any to start illuminating the darkness of difficult times.

In this very brief time that we have on earth, we have to ask ourselves how we're going to spend our time. Will we keep increasing and strengthening our neurotic habits in our vain quest for some kind of lasting comfort and pleasure? Or will we make it a practice to step out into the learning zone?

Once I had an opportunity to talk with Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, about the fact that I was not able to do my practice properly. I had just started the vajrayana practices and I was supposed to be visualizing. I couldn't visualize anything. I tried and tried but there was just nothing at all; I felt like a fraud doing the practice because it didn't feel natural to me. (...). So he encouraged me by saying that as long as you have these kinds of doubts, your practice will be good.

In sitting meditation, our practice is to watch our thoughts arise, label them thinking, and return to the breath.

In order to work with difficult outer circumstances, we need to gather our inner strength. If even ten or twenty minutes of meditation a day helps us to do this, let's go for it!

EMBARKING on the spiritual journey is like getting into a very small boat and setting out on the ocean to search for unknown lands. With wholehearted practice comes inspiration, but sooner or later we will also encounter fear.

For an aspiring bodhisattva, the essential practice is to cultivate maitri, or loving-kindness.

The way to reunite with bodhichitta is to lighten up in your practice and in your whole life. Meditation

Hour after hour we sit here and just come back to the present moment as much as we can, acknowledge what's going on in our minds, come back to the present moment as much as we can, acknowledge what's going on in our minds, follow the out-breath, label our thoughts "thinking," come back to the present moment, acknowledge what's going on in our minds.

Can we feel the emotion and breathe it into our hearts for ourselves and everyone else? If we can remember to experiment like this even occasionally, we are training as a warrior.

If we can practice when we're jealous, resentful, scornful, when we hate ourselves, then we are well trained.

We can use meditation to reinforce our false beliefs: it will protect us from discomfort; it will fix us; it will fulfill our hopes and remove our fears. This happens because we don't properly understand why we are practicing.

What I have realized through practicing is that practice isn't about beng the best horse or the good horse or the poor horse or the worst horse.

When you refrain from habitual thoughts and behavior, the uncomfortable feelings will still be there. They don't magically disappear. Over the years, I've come to call resting with the discomfort "the detox period," because when you don't act on your habitual reactions, it's like giving up an addiction. You're left with the feelings you were trying to escape. The practice is to make a wholehearted relationship with that.

Meditation practice is how we discover basic goodness and learn to cultivate bodhichitta. With this view, practice, and activity, even the most mundane situation becomes a vehicle for awakening.

Yes, ruling by fooling, is a great British art with great Irish fools to practice on.

One becomes a beginner after 1000 days of training. One becomes a master after 10,000 days of practice.

As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.

Salesmanship, too, is an art; the perfection of its technique requires study and practice.