Quotes About Meditation

Note that an individual thought does not last long. It is impermanent. If it comes, it will go.

Every time you get a strong impulse to talk about meditation and how wonderful it is, or how hard it is, or what it's doing for you these days, or what it's not, or you want to convince someone else how wonderful it would be for them, just look at it as more thinking and go meditate some more. The impulse will pass and everybody will be better off—especially you.

The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. PETER MATTHIESSEN, The Snow Leopard

La méditation consiste à s'éveiller de cet état de rêve.

Le mot bouddha signifie celui ou celle qui s'est éveillé à sa propre nature.

Mindfulness has to do above all with attention and awareness, which are universal human qualities. But in our society, we tend to take these capacities for granted and don't think to develop them systematically in the service of self-understanding and wisdom. Meditation is the process by which we go about deepening our attention and awareness, refining them, and putting them to greater practical use in our lives.

You certainly have to be ready for meditation. You have to come to it at the right time in your life, at a point where you are ready to listen carefully to your own voice, to your own heart, to your own breathing—to just be present for them and with them, without having to go anywhere or make anything better or different. This is hard work.

Le miracle de la succession des saisons est dans notre souffle; nos parents et nos enfants sont contenus dans notre souffle; notre esprit et notre corps sont notre souffle.

In this regard, cultivating mindfulness is not unlike the process of eating. It would be absurd to propose that someone else eat for you. And when you go to a restaurant, you don't eat the menu, mistaking it for the meal, nor are you nourished by listening to the waiter describe the food. You have to actually eat the food for it to nourish you. In the same way, you have to actually practice mindfulness in order to reap its benefits and come to understand why it is so valuable.

We live immersed in a world of constant doing. Rarely are we in touch with who is doing the doing, or, put otherwise, with the world of being.

The Tibetans sometimes describe thoughts as writing on water, in essence empty, insubstantial, and transient.

But meditation is not just about sitting, either. It is about stopping and being present, that is all. Mostly we run around doing. Are you able to come to a stop in your life, even for one moment? Could it be this moment? What would happen if you did?

New Yorker cartoon: Two Zen monks in robes and shaved heads, one young, one old, sitting side by side cross-legged on the floor. The younger one is looking somewhat quizzically at the older one, who is turned toward him and saying: "Nothing happens next. This is it.

immersed in a seemingly never-ending stream of thoughts, coming willy-nilly one after another in rapid succession.

Bhavana translates as "development through mental training." To me, this strikes the mark; meditation really is about human development.

However, when we start paying attention a little more closely to the way our own mind actually works, as we do when we meditate, we are likely to find that much of the time our mind is more in the past or the future than it is in the present.

The only way you can do anything of value is to have the effort come out of non-doing and to let go of caring whether it will be of use or not.

It involves intentionally doing only one thing at a time and making sure I am here for it.

In fact, the word "Buddha" simply means one who has awakened to his or her own true nature.

Praying is holy act.

How could we have forsaken the reading of the Holy Bible?

When you silence your mind, faith walks in.

Writing is how I process the cacophony of each day. Prayer is how God makes sense out of my scribbles.

Spend some personal time with Jesus and he will reveal himself to you on a deeper level.