Quotes About Meditation

In Buddhism there is one word for mind & heart: chitta. Chitta refers not just to thoughts and emotions in the narrow sense of arising from the brain, but also to the whole range of consciousness, vast & unimpeded.

May my practice be dedicated to your well-being.

You can access the forces of mindfulness and lovingkindness at any moment, without anyone knowing you're doing it. You don't have to walk excruciatingly slowly down the streets of a major metropolis alarming everyone around you (in fact, please don't);

The breath is the first tool for opening the space between the story you tell yourself about love.

That's life: starting over, one breath at a time.

Open Awareness The Angle of Vision Leadership Openness Getting Out of The Way Possibilities MEDITATION:

When your attention is diffuse, it's like a broad, weak beam of light that doesn't reveal much. Concentration brings the weak beam down to a single, sharply focused, supremely bright, exponentially more illuminating point.

Beginning again and again is the actual practice, not a problem to be overcome so that one day we can come to the real meditation.

The mind is like the ocean ... no matter what the surface conditions are like, whether it's smooth or choppy ... deep in the ocean it's tranquil and serene. From the depth of the ocean, you can look toward the surface and simply notice the activities there, just as from the depth of the mind you can look upward toward ... all that activity of mind—the thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories.

The first time a meditation teacher encouraged me to practice mindfulness—which

Much of our day we are pushed around by unhelpful habits such as being distracted or disconnected, holding on too long when circumstances have already changed, or not being wholehearted in pursuing an opportunity. Meditation can open us to alternative responses such as focus, awareness, and productive questioning and that leads to more fulfillment and better work.

Famed basketball coach Phil Jackson, a meditator himself, arranged to have his players—first the Chicago Bulls, and then the L.A. Lakers—learn meditation as a way to improve their focus and teamwork. Jackson finds that mindfulness assists players in paying attention to what's happening on the court moment by moment. Such precise training in attention has paid off during tense playoffs; Jackson has led more teams to championships than any coach in NBA history. Meditation

Any time we find ourselves relying on the ideas of an absolute, frozen state of right and wrong—or fairness versus unfairness—that we are used to, we can compare the habit to distraction during meditation.

But to take delight in our generosity helps us immeasurably in our spiritual practice.

We can use meditation as a way to experiment with new ways of relating to ourselves, even our uncomfortable thoughts.

Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment.

Every time we forget to breathe or our minds wander or we're hijacked by feelings or sensations, we gently bring ourselves back to the breath, again and again.

Each opportunity to interrupt the onslaught of thoughts and return to the object of meditation is, in fact, a moment of enlightenment

The more we practice mindfulness, the more alert we become to the cost of keeping secrets.

Moreover, a mind that is saturated by lovingkindness cannot be overcome by fear; even if fear should arise, it will not overpower such a mind.

Meditation] trains us to be with a painful experience in the moment, without adding imagined distress and difficulty. If we look closely at it, the pain is bound to change, and that's as true of a headache as it is of a heartache: the discomfort oscillates; there are beats of rest between moments of unpleasantness. When we discover firsthand that pain isn't static, that it's a living, changing system, it doesn't seem as solid or insurmountable as it did at first.

The manifestation of the free mind is said to be lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

Several performers have told me that they do the following brief lovingkindness meditation if they have stage fright: Standing in front of an audience, before they start acting, playing music, or reciting a poem, they send out wishes for the well-being of everyone in the room. 'When I do that,' one singer told me, 'I no longer have a sense of the audience as a group of hostile people out there waiting to judge me. I feel, okay, here we all are together.

Human beings, to me, are rather like electrical appliances that need to be charged regularly, and prayer is a way of plugging into that charge.