Patience is the key. Patience. If you learn nothing else from meditation, you will learn patience. Patience is essential for any profound change.
Pain exists in the universe; some measure of it is unavoidable. Learning to deal with it is not pessimism, but a very pragmatic form of optimism.
Never mind what I have been taught. Forget about theories and prejudices and stereotypes. I want to understand the true nature of life.
Just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life that simply will not go away.
It is rather a healthy habit pattern that you have consciously and voluntarily chosen to impose upon yourself because you recognize its superiority to your present behavior.
Is this task or behavior really necessary or is it just a way to be busy?
If youfind your mind extremely active, then simply observe the nature and degree of thatactivity. It is just a part of the passing show within.
Both of them, alone, are limited. But when the disabled person climbs on the shoulders of the blind man, together they can travel and achieve their goals easily.
Protective cocoon. That is not living, but is premature death. The way to deal with danger is to know approximately how much of it there is, where it is likely to be found, and how to deal with it whe...
You can learn to perceive your life as an ever- flowing movement, a thing of great beauty like a dance or symphony. You can learn to take joy in the perpetual passing away of all phenomena. You can le...
With this ability, one sees things without condemnation or judgment.
We spend all of our energies trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to bury our fears, endlessly seeking security.
The Dhammapada, an ancient Buddhist text (which anticipated Freud by thousands of years), says: What you are now is the result of what you were. What you will be tomorrow will be the result of what yo...
Essentially, insight meditation is a practice of investigative personal discovery.
Don’t fight with these distracting thoughts. Don’t strain or struggle. It’s a waste. Every bit of energy that you apply to that resistance goes into the thought complex and makes it all the stronger....
Distractions are really paper tigers. They have no power of their own. They need to be fed constantly, or else they die. If you refuse to feed them by your own fear, anger, and greed, they fade.
Concepts and reasoning just get in the way. Don’t think. See.
Concentration holds an object before mindfulness. Mindfulness then pays close attention to it. Then investigation finds that it is constantly changing, thus showing the signs of unsatisfactoriness and...
We train ourselves to ignore the constant impulses to be more comfortable, and we dive into reality instead. The irony of it is that real peace comes only when you
Don’t get distracted by your expectations about the results.