Quotes About Meditation

Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor. THICH NHAT HANH

She'd long ago given up trying to visualize God. There was no He or She. This was a Presence higher than gender, race or religion, transcending identity. All she would ever hope to do was follow the lamplit path into a place within and yet beyond her own heart and stay there and wait, patient and passive and without forced piety.

Every American who checks the spiritual-but-not-religious box or shuffles off to a meditation retreat is squarely in the Transcendentalist lineage. A surprising number of the people I interviewed, when recalling the origins of their interest in Eastern philosophy, named Emerson or Thoreau as a catalyst.

This is a good place for thinking about your life, a few days in this place.

For those who have not yet grasped the Way but are seeking the Way, I say: Emptiness, single-mindedness, and stillness—make these be your principles. If

Great thoughts, like great deeds, need No trumpet.

Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

Sometimes there is nothing quite

âgenouilles

Viciously, then, I lock my door. The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside Ushers in evening rain. Once more Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm; And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

For most people, whether religious or not, spirituality involves values and a principled lifestyle both of which are supported by specific spiritual practices including prayer or meditation.

When mind and action are separate, zen is lost.

I have also time on my hands to correct my opinions, and polish my periods;

A prayer in its simplest definition is merely a wish turned Godward.

If man is man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought," and "As a man thinketh, so he is.

Writing is… a descent into the self.

Falling silent should be cultivated, the way the woods fall silent in the snow. Messages you can't send any other way can be heard.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life," Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, "is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you." Or, as Annie Dillard, who sat still for a long time at Tinker Creek—and in many other places—has it, "I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life," Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, "is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.

Zen is what remains when words and ideas run out. · What we see and smell and hear is real, it reminds us; what we think about that is not. · In much the same spirit, the Japanese aesthetic is less about accumulation than subtraction, so that whatever remains is everything.

And it's only by going nowhere- by sitting still or letting my mind relax- that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.

Screens in a Zen meditation place are pulled back at dusk, to let the mosquitoes in. · A monastery, for St. Benedict, was "a school for charity." A Zen temple might be called a school for clarity. The challenge in either tradition is to see how one leads to the other.