Quotes About Meditation

FIVE PRINCIPLES for SCRIPTURAL PRAYER 1. What does God want me to learn from this passage? What truths is He teaching me? 2. What does God want me to become in light of these truths? 3. What does God want me to do in response to the lesson or the commandment found in this passage? 4. What promise does God want me to trust in? 5. What kind of prayer does this passage prompt?

I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end.

When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence,' he finally told me.

mind and went

Attention to the human body brings healing and regeneration. Through awareness of the body we remember who we really are.

Buddhist teachings are not a religion, they are a science of mind.

many people who come to spiritual practice are frightened by their feelings. They hope meditation will help them to transcend the messiness of the world and leave them invulnerable to difficult feelings. But this is a false transcendence, a denial of life. It is fear masquerading as wisdom.

Letting go does not mean not caring about things. It means caring for them in a flexible and wise way. In meditation, we pay attention to our body with care and respect.

The human mind has absolute freedom within its true nature. You can attain your freedom intuitively. Do not work for freedom, rather allow the practice itself to be liberation. When you wish to rest, move your body slowly and stand up quietly. Practice this meditation in the morning or in the evening, or at any leisure time during the day. You will soon realize that your mental burdens are dropping away one by one, and that you are gaining an intuitive power hitherto unnoticed.

wisdom? As the Zen texts explain, "To live in trusting

To meditate is to discover new possibilities, to awaken the capacities of us has to live more wisely, more lovingly, more compassionately, and more fully.

Through practice, gently and gradually we can collect ourselves and learn how to be more fully with what we do.

With mindfulness, we are learning to observe in a new way, with balance and a powerful disidentification.

The path of awakening begins with a step the Buddha called right understanding.

Meditation takes discipline, just like learning how to play piano. If you want to learn how to play the piano, it takes more than a few minutes a day, once a while, here and there. If you really want to learn any important skill, whether it is playing piano or meditation, it grows with perseverance, patience, and systematic training.

We note feelings and find that they last for only a few seconds. We pay attention to thoughts and find that they are ephemeral, that they come and go, uninvited, like clouds.

No amount of meditation, yoga, diet, and reflection will make all of our problems go away, but we can transform our difficulties into our practice until little by little they guide us on our way.

There are several different kinds of painful feelings that we might experience, and learning to distinguish and relate to these feelings of discomfort or pain is an important part of meditation practice, because it is one of the very first things that we open to as our practice develops.

The purpose of a spiritual discipline is to give us a way to stop the war, not by our force of will, but organically, through understanding an gradual training.

To understand ourselves and our life is the point of insight meditation: to understand and to be free.

If we are engaged in actions that cause pain and conflict to ourselves and others, it is impossible for the mind to become settled, collected, and focused in meditation; it is impossible for the heart to open.

Skill in concentrating and steadying the mind is the basis for all types of meditation.

Be rigorously mindful of the awareness of touch. We should be rigorously, ardently, intensively mindful. Do not rest when tired, scratch when itched, nor shift when cramped. We should keep our bodies and minds absolutely still and strive till the end. The uncomfortable truly is the norm; the comfortable will set us adrift on the current of illusion.

To begin to meditate is to look into our lives with interest in kindness and discover how to be wakeful and free.