Quotes About Awareness

push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.

That sticky feeling is shenpa.

The more we connect with a bigger perspective, the more we connect with energetic joy. Exertion is touching in to our appetite for enlightenment. It allows us to act, to give, to work appreciatively with whatever comes our way.

Dzigar Kongtrül has a sign on the front door of his retreat cabin that reads, "Don't believe everything you think." That's the basic idea here.

You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.

be free of suffering and the root of suffering.

Only with equanimity can we see that everything that comes into our circle has come to teach us what we need to know.

we don't have to obscure the joy and openness that is present in every moment of our existence.

THE OPPOSITE OF samsara is when all the walls fall down, when the cocoon completely disappears and we are totally open to whatever may happen, with no withdrawing, no centralizing into ourselves. That is what we aspire to, the warrior's journey.

strengthening habitual patterns of suffering. We begin to see this more and more clearly, and we begin to realize that we can do something different.

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.

How we regard what arises in meditation is training for how we regard whatever arises in the rest of our lives.

We can connect with that openness at any time. For instance, right now, for three seconds, just stop reading and pause. If

As Leonard Cohen once said about the benefits of many years of meditation, "The less there was of me, the happier I got.

when we harm another, we are harming ourselves.

Meditation is an invitation to notice when we reach our limit and to not get carried away by hope and fear.

We seem doomed to suffer simply because we have a deep-seated fear of how things really are.

Buddha nature, cleverly disguised as fear, kicks our ass into being receptive.

In any case, the point is not to try to get rid of thoughts, but rather to see their true nature. Thoughts will run us around in circles if we buy into them, but really they are like dream images. They are like an illusion—not really all that solid. They are, as we say, just thinking.

Anger is the spirits telling you that you are alive.

Remember, confrontation is about reconciliation and awareness, not judgement or anger.

He who fears alcohol MUST also fear ANGER, for anger is more powerful and dangerous than the alcohol.

God is always trying to give blessings to us, but our minds are usually too full to receive them.

When angry, count to Zen.