Quotes About Meditation

slowly, meditation gives our amygdala a chance to make more calm and measured assessments of situations.

To turn mass time into a sacred concert, or a prayer meeting, to make it too lively and interesting, with things to do and rollicking songs, is a disservice. It is substituting for the effort of faith.

Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can't ever lose.

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things.

When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.

Spinoza writes, "A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death, but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and to preserve his being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own profit. He thinks, therefore, of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life.

Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.

A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death, but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and to preserve his being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own profit. He thinks, therefore, of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life.

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.

The Buddha said that responding to email and Twitter is like sweeping the sands from the banks of the Ganges River." "The Buddha said that?" "Well, maybe not. But the point remains the same. Some tasks are impossible, even if you are a Buddha. Even if you have eleven heads and a thousand arms.

Drawing my thoughts out of my mind and holding me down to earth at the same time.

and I could imagine myself searching for lost time under the tree ...

I was deep inside my mind, which is where I go when things get too intense.

My last thoughts, measured out in drops of ink.

Kannon, with her thousand arms and eleven heads, who could hear the voices of things crying out. I said I could totally relate to that, and when she told us that Kannon was the Buddhist saint of compassion

As I bathe myself I pray with all beings that we can purify body and mind and clean ourselves inside and out.

In case you don't know, it's an old tradition among Zen masters to write a final poem on their deathbeds

Jiko also says that to do zazen is to enter time completely.

Ruth had always been fascinated by the meandering currents of his mind

I don't know any prayers, so I just make them go round and round and say blessings in my head for all the things and people I love, and when I run out of things I love, I move on to the things I don't hate too much, and sometimes I even discover that I can love the things I think I hate.

gaté gaté, para gaté, parasam gaté, boji sowa ka . . . These words are actually in some ancient Indian language71 and not even Japanese, but Jiko told me they means something like this: gone gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, awakened, hurray . . . I

When I wash my feet May all sentient beings Attain the power of supernatural feet With no hindrance to their practice.   Of

And I still believe, to the core of my being, that when you pay attention, cooking becomes a kind of meditation.

It's a mystery how you know what to do, what to say, how to frame a prayer.