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The gift of learning to meditate is the greatest gift you can give yourself in this life. For it is only through meditation that you can undertake the journey to discover your true nature, and so find the stability and confidence you will need to live, and die, well; Meditation is the road to enlightenment.
It is not sufficient to pray diligently for guidance, but this prayer must be followed by meditation as to the best methods of action and then action itself... because prayers can only be answered through action and if someone's action is wrong, God can use that method of showing the pathway which is right.
Such a person needs meditation more than anyone else because they are headed for a crisis. If stress and anxiety are so great that you can't even imagine a calm clear mind, that indicates you are reaching your coping limits, and need to begin something like meditation just for the stress reduction benefits.
Choose one meditation and then put all your effort in it. That effort has to be very regular because will is created only out of regularity. It has to be very persistent and a continuity has to be maintained. Even to miss for one day is to destroy much - and at least one hour every day has to be given to it.
I am a trained hypnotherapist, yes, but it's more like a guided meditation. Most of the people I take under struggle with stress in their lives and have unbalanced sleeping patterns, so what I do enables my patients to regain energy and peacefulness on a subconscious level which affects their conscious mind.
The precise laziness is akin to letting your eyes blur or glimpsing what's at the corners in peripheral vision. Or those moments when you think you see something but you're not sure you actually saw it in the end. The way I get to these places is just practice, like a kind of meditation that shapes my brain.
Rigging is like Zen meditation. You must bend over the boat until your back is breaking, until your brain is filled with numbers and fractions of numbers, until you can accurately measure an oarlock's pitch without bothering to use the pitch meter. Only then will you see the way of eternal rigging happiness.
When thoughts are reduced, power of the mind and its subtlety increases, tunes with the Universe. Then you can see the realms beyond the common understanding. When the mind is pure and quiet it becomes one with the universal mind. That mind is like a mirror. The secrets of the Universe will be revealed there.
When you are in deep meditation you don't feel meditation, you feel bliss. When you are deep in meditation, when you are deep in awareness, you don't feel awareness, you feel bliss. When you begin to feel bliss, that means now you have begun to be aware. Awareness creates the situation in which bliss is felt.
Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.
Meditation is the art of living with yourself. It is nothing else than that, simply that: the art of being joyously alone. A meditator can sit joyously alone for months, for years. He does not hanker for the other, because his own inner ecstasy is so much, is so overpowering, that who bothers about the other?
My disciples are vegetarian not as a cult, not as a creed. They are vegetarians because their meditations make them more human, more of the heart, and they can see the whole stupidity of people killing living beings for their food. It is their sensitivity, their aesthetic awareness that makes them vegetarians.
The purpose of meditation is to make our mind calm and peaceful. If our mind is peaceful, we will be free from worries and mental discomfort, and so we will experience true happiness. But if our mind is not peaceful, we will find it very difficult to be happy, even if we are living in the very best conditions.
When I'm home on a break, I lock myself in my room and play guitar. After two or three hours, I start getting into this total meditation. It's a feeling few people experience, and that's usually when I come up with weird stuff. It just flows. I can't force myself. I don't sit down and say I've got to practice.
Swimming is probably the ultimate of burnout sports. It's ironic because millions of people who swim as their regular exercise love the meditation aspect of it; you don't wind up with any orthopedic injuries. But when you swim at a world class level for hours and hours - the loneness of the long distance runner.
As a freshman in college, I was having a lot of trouble adjusting. I took a meditation class to handle anxiety. It really helped. Then as a grad student at Harvard, I was awarded a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India, where my focus was on the ancient systems of psychology and meditation practices of Asia.
Meditation means a state of unconditioned mind. Meditation is the process of undoing the harm that every society goes on doing to every individual - communist or Catholic, Jaina or Jew, it does not matter. I am not talking about any particular conditioning that is wrong; I am saying conditioning AS SUCH is wrong.
Witnessing can be called the seed and enlightenment can be called the flowers. But begin from witnessing, and then it starts growing. Go on nourishing it, go on caring for it, go on watering it, strengthen it in every possible way - and one day it is going to blossom. That day will be the greatest day of your life.
Initially I was very drawn to the Tao Te Ching, the Taoist philosophy. It was helping me deal with the balance of these external and internal issues with my chess life. Tai chi is the martial embodiment of Taoist philosophy. Initially, I had no intention of competing in the martial arts; it was just the meditation.
I learned a few years ago that balance is the key to a happy and successful life, and a huge part of achieving that balance is to instill rituals into your everyday life - a nutritious balanced diet, daily exercise, time for yourself through meditation, reading, journaling, yoga, daily reflection, and setting goals.
Before practicing meditation, we see that mountains are mountains. When we start to practice, we see that mountains are no longer mountains. After practicing a while, we see that mountains are again mountains. Now the mountains are very free. Our mind is still with the mountains, but it is no longer bound to anything.
A man of meditation functions differently. Whatever profession he chooses, it does not matter. He will bring to his profession some quality of sacredness. He may be making shoes, or he may be cleaning the roads, but he will bring to his work some quality, some grace, some beauty, which is not possible without samādhi.
The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral - whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love? I want to foster eulogy virtues when I'm in a yoga class or meditation session or any spiritual gathering. Especially if I'm lying in corpse pose. It just makes sense.
Dedicating some time to meditation is a meaningful expression of caring for yourself that can help you move through the mire of feeling unworthy of recovery. As your mind grows quieter and more spacious, you can begin to see self-defeating thought patterns for what they are, and open up to other, more positive options.
The one and only thing required is to free oneself from the bondage of mind and body alike, putting the Buddha's own seal upon yourself. If you do this as you sit in ecstatic meditation, the whole universe itself scattered through the infinity of space turns into enlightenment. This is what I mean by the Buddha's seal.
It turns out that our ability to connect with other people is driven by our ability to connect deeply with ourselves. And that can be just a few minutes sitting on your porch feeling the breeze against your face. That can be a few moments spent in meditation or in prayer or remembering three things you're grateful for.
Sleep is really important. You need to rest the physiology to be able to work weel and meditate well. When I don't get enough sleep, my meditations are duller. You may even dip into sleep at the beginning of your meditation, because you're settling down. But if you're well rested, you'll have a clearer deeper experience.
Meditation is not something you do once and you are done with. It is something that is like breathing, like blood circulating. It is not that once the blood has circulated it is finished, once you breathe there is no more need of it. No, you have to breathe and you have to go on meditating; every moment you will need it.
It is only when we begin to relax with ourselves that meditation becomes a transformative process. Only when we relate with ourselves without moralizing, without harshness, without deception, can we let go of harmful patterns. Without maitri (metta), renunciation of old habits becomes abusive. This is an important point.
We've all had at least a fleeting experience of a deep connection with the Divine in a meditation, in a moment of realization, or at a time when we felt blessed by the universe because everything was going our way. When we look through divine eyes, there is no judgment, no need to be righteous or to make ourselves wrong.
Meditation speaks. It speaks in silence. It reveals. It reveals to the aspirant that matter and spirit are one, quantity and quality are one, the immanent and the transcendent are one. It reveals that life can never be the mere existence of seventy or eighty years between birth and death, but is, rather, Eternity itself.
The relic from before birth Enters one's heart one day. Be as careful as if you were holding a full vessel, Be as gentle as if you were caressing an infant. The gate of earth should be shut tight, The portals of heaven should be first opened. Wash the yellow sprouts clean, And atop the mountain is thunder shaking the earth.
I know there's millions of problems in the world, but if you dwell on those, then you're going to be miserable. I think my meditation helps me to transcend and get beyond the grip of all the negativity and regenerate from within a more positive attitude, which comes in very handy when you're going to do 150 concerts a year.
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.... In the beginner's mind there is no thought, 'I have attained something.' All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. We can really learn something.
You have to rise up to that state of thoughtless awareness where you grow spiritually. If you are not in thoughtless awareness, you cannot grow in your spirituality. So it's very important to see where is your attention. Where are you putting your attention? If the attention could be controlled then things will be all right.
I visualise what I want through meditation. The process of meditating is a great way of making sure I have my priorities sorted. It's not about money - I focus on my career and the kind of film projects I want to do. Film-making is a passion for me, and my mantra is that you should do what you love, and the money will follow.
I'll take transformational change any way it comes. One way to look at meditation is as a kind of intrapsychic technology that's been developed over thousands of years by traditions that know a lot about the mind/body connection. To call what happens 'the placebo effect' is just to give a name to something we don't understand.
Meditation is a teaching which offers you the possibility of breaking free of this egoic state of consciousness and coming into a whole new realization of who and what you truly are. And all this starts with the willingness to question. To pause for just a moment and realize that maybe you aren't who you imagine yourself to be.
The way to develop inner peace through meditation begins with the recognition that the destroyer of inner peace is not some external foe, but is within us. Therefore, the solution is within us too. However, that inner change does not take place immediately in the way that we switch on a light, but takes weeks, months and years.
We experience happiness as a series of pleasing moments. They come and go like clouds, unpredictable, fleeting, and without responsibility to our desires. Through honest self-work, reflection, and meditation, we begin to string more of these moments together, creating a web-like design of happiness that drapes around our lives.
I think people hear the words 'transcendental meditation' and 'paganism,' and that's almost worse because it's real. Those are real things. Those are absolute energies. Satanism is like Halloween. Transcendental meditation and having a realization of how we really are - whether we want to be or not - we live in a pagan culture.
It is not a question of sitting silently, it is not a question of chanting a mantra. It is a question of understanding the subtle workings of the mind. As you understand those workings of the mind a great awareness arises in you, which is not of the mind. That awareness arises in your being, in your soul, in your consciousness.
On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are... culminating in Courbet at his mightiest (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion).
I don't see any Stoic practice as problematic or risky, but I would advise to engage in extreme versions of the negative visualization exercise only if you are an advanced practitioner. The negative visualization is a meditation during which you visualize, slowly and deliberately, something bad or discomforting happening to you.
The way to freedom is through service to others. The way to happiness is through meditation and being in tune with God... break the barriers of your ego, shed selfishness, free yourself from the consciousness of the body, forget yourself, do away with this prison house of incarnations, melt your heart in all, be one with creation.
I intend 'Dämmerung' to be an ironic meditation on the financial rewards of poetry and a tragicomic lament on the passing of time and the changes in literary taste. The other poets mentioned are my poetic cohort from the U.K. I wrote the piece in situ, as it were, while making a television documentary about World War I in Germany.
If you are angry you will share anger, if you are greedy you will share greed, if you are full of lust you will share your lust. We can share only that which we have, we cannot share that which we don't have. This has to be the fundamental thing to be remembered; hence the first step is meditation and the second step is compassion.
I used to be really into traditional meditation, but I found that creating new music is the best meditation. When I'm able to get into that space, nothing else matters, and I'm just a vessel for whatever the message is; I feel like I'm not in control. It's like this organic communication, and I feel like that is the quiet, in a way.
The more meditation goes deep, the more you will become master of your own thoughts. You will say, "Stop!" and the mind stops. You will say, "Move!" and the mind begins to move. Once this capacity comes to you, you will not fall down again. Unless this is achieved, if you discontinue meditation, soon every result will be washed away.
We are slaves of what we don't know;of what we know we are masters.Whatever vice or weakness in ourselves we discoverand understand its cause and workings,we overcome it by the very knowing.The primary purpose of meditation is to become more consciousand familiar with our inner life.The ultimate purpose is to reach the source of life.