Great Throughts Treasury

"Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives. It's about seeing how we react to all these things. It's seeing our emotions and thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment, in this very room, on this very seat. It's about not trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness."

"Meditation is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss, or tranquility, nor is it attempting to become a better person. It is simply the creation of a space in which we are able to expose and undo our neurotic games, our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes."

"Meditation practice isn?t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It?s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That?s the ground, that?s what we study, that?s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest."

"Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, or unconditional friendliness, a simple, direct relationship with the way we are."

"Mindfulness is the ground; refraining is the path."

"My experience with forgiveness is that it sort of comes spontaneously at a certain point and to try to force it it's not really forgiveness. It's Buddhist philosophy or something spiritual jargon that you're trying to live up to but you're just using it against yourself as a reason why you're not okay."

"My moods are continuously shifting like the weather."

"Never give up on yourself. Then you will never give up on others."

"No matter what the size, color or shape is, the point is still to lean toward the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from it."

"No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear... the advice we usually get is to sweeten it up, smooth it over, take a pill, or distract ourselves, but by all means make it go away."

"No? big? deal. He wasn?t saying bad, and he wasn?t saying good. He was saying that these things happen and they can transform your life, but at the same time don?t make too big a deal of them, because that leads to arrogance and pride, or a sense of specialness. On the other hand, making too big a deal about your difficulties takes you in the other direction; it takes you into poverty, self-denigration, and a low opinion of yourself."

"None of us is ever OK, but we all get through everything just fine."

"Not being aggressive with our actions our speech or our minds. Learning not to cause harm to ourselves or other is a basic Buddhist teaching."

"Not causing harm obviously includes not killing or robbing or lying to people. It also includes not being aggressive?not being aggressive with our actions, our speech, or our minds. Learning not to cause harm to ourselves or others is a basic Buddhist teaching on the healing power of nonaggression. Not harming ourselves or others in the beginning, not harming ourselves or others in the middle, and not harming ourselves or others in the end is the basis of enlightened society."

"Nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. Perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched. Maybe the only enemy is that we don?t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast, but what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. If we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. It just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves."

"Nothing in its essence is one way or the other."

"Often peace is taught as the fourth mark of existence. This isn't the peace that's the opposite of war. It's the well-being that comes when we can see the infinite pairs of opposites as complementary."

"Often we get carried away. Without judging, without buying into likes and dislikes, we can always encourage ourselves to just be here again and again and again."

"On the journey of the warrior-bodhisattva, the path goes down, not up, as if the mountain pointed toward the earth instead of the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear."

"Once I had an opportunity to talk with Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, about the fact that I was not able to do my practice properly. I had just started the vajrayana practices and I was supposed to be visualizing. I couldn't visualize anything. I tried and tried but there was just nothing at all; I felt like a fraud doing the practice because it didn't feel natural to me... So he encouraged me by saying that as long as you have these kinds of doubts, your practice will be good."

"Once you create a self-justifying storyline, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples."

"One evening Milarepa returned to his cave after gathering firewood, only to find it filled with demons. They were cooking his food, reading his books, sleeping in his bed. They had taken over the joint. He knew about nonduality of self and other, but he still didn?t quite know how to get these guys out of his cave. Even though he had the sense that they were just a projection of his own mind?all the unwanted parts of himself?he didn?t know how to get rid of them. So first he taught them the dharma. He sat on this seat that was higher than they were and said things to them about how we are all one. He talked about compassion and shunyata and how poison is medicine. Nothing happened. The demons were still there. Then he lost his patience and got angry and ran at them. They just laughed at him. Finally, he gave up and just sat down on the floor, saying, I?m not going away and it looks like you?re not either, so let?s just live here together. At that point, all of them left except one. Milarepa said, Oh, this one is particularly vicious. (We all know that one. Sometimes we have lots of them like that. Sometimes we feel that?s all we?ve got.) He didn?t know what to do, so he surrendered himself even further. He walked over and put himself right into the mouth of the demon and said, Just eat me up if you want to. Then that demon left too."

"One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are."

"Only to the degree that we?ve gotten to know our personal pain, only to the degree that we?ve related with pain at all, will we be fearless enough, brave enough, and enough of a warrior to be willing to feel the pain of others. To that degree we will be able to take on the pain of others because we will have discovered that their pain and our pain are not different."

"Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity."

"Opening to the world begins to benefit ourselves and others simultaneously. The more we relate with others, the more quickly we discover where we're blocked."

"Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum and don?t interrupt our patterns slightly. When we feel betrayed or disappointed, does it occur to us to practice?"

"Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum. We don't interrupt our patterns even slightly. With practice, however, we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with the desire for revenge. Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears."

"Others will always show you exactly where you are stuck. They say or do something and you automatically get hooked into a familiar way of reacting?shutting down, speeding up, or getting all worked up. When you react in the habitual way, with anger, greed, and so forth, it gives you a chance to see your patterns and work with them honestly and compassionately. Without others provoking you, you remain ignorant of your painful habits and cannot train in transforming them into the path of awakening."

"Our habitual patterns are, of course, well established, seductive, and comforting. Just wishing for them to be ventilated isn?t enough. Mindfulness and awareness are key. Do we see the stories that we?re telling ourselves and question their validity? When we are distracted by a strong emotion, do we remember that it is part of our path? Can we feel the emotion and breathe it into our hearts for ourselves and everyone else? If we can remember to experiment like this even occasionally, we are training as a warrior. And when we can?t practice when distracted but know that we can?t, we are still training well. Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what?s going on."

"Our tendencies with their habitual story lines are described as seeds in the unconscious. When the right causes and conditions come together, these preexisting propensities pop up like flowers in the springtime. It?s helpful to contemplate that it?s these propensities and not what triggers them that are the real cause of our suffering."

"Our wish for all beings, including ourselves, is to live fearlessly with uncertainty and change. The warrior commitment involves understanding that there is nothing static about human beings."

"Patience has a quality of honesty and it also has a quality of holding our seat. We don?t automatically react, even though inside we are reacting. We let all the words go and are just there with the rawness of our experience."

"Patience is not learned in safety."

"Patience is the training in abiding with the restlessness of our energy and letting things evolve at their own speed."

"Peace isn?t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth; it?s an experience that?s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened."

"Perfection is like death. We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that's death. Seeking security or protection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn't have any fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we're going to have an experience we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, or somebody's going to spill tomato juice all over our white suit."

"Personal discovery and growth come from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy."

"Practicing compassionate inquiry into our reactions and strategies is fundamental to the process of awakening."

"Precision is a very important part of your meditation practice. You should be wakeful every minute. Mindfulness literally means being fully minded, so no activity permits you to take time off. Every activity during the day, such has eating a meal, is part of that mindfulness. So you?ll be right on the dot. Here being right on the dot just means to be there. Every waking moment you communicate with the sights, sounds, feelings, and temperatures around you. The point is to be in contact with reality as much as you can."

"Rather than going after our walls and barriers with a sledgehammer, we pay attention to them. With gentleness and honesty, we move closer to those walls. We touch them and smell them and get to know them well. We begin a process of acknowledging our aversions and our cravings. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to build the walls: What are the stories I tell myself? What repels me and what attracts me? We start to get curious about what?s going on."

"Rather than indulge or reject our experience we can somehow let the energy of the emotion, the quality of what we're feeling, pierce us to the heart. This is easier said than done, but it's a noble way to live. It's definitely the path of compassion- the path of cultivating human bravery and kindheartedness."

"Rather than realizing that it takes death for there to be birth, we just fight against the fear of death."

"Recognize impermanence and suffering and egolessness at the kitchen-sink level, and be inquisitive about your reactions. Find out for yourself about peace and whether or not it's true that our fundamental situation is joyful."

"Refraining is the method for getting to know the nature of this restlessness and fear. It's the method for settling into groundlessness. if we immediately entertain ourselves by talking, by acting, by thinking- if there's never any pause- we will never be able to relax."

"Refraining is the quality of not grabbing for entertainment the minute we feel a slight edge of boredom coming on. It's the practice of not immediately filling up space just because there's a gap."

"Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time- that is the basic message."

"Remember that this is not something we do just once or twice. Interrupting our destructive habits and awakening our heart is the work of a lifetime"

"Remind yourself, in whatever way is personally meaningful, that it is not in your best interest to reinforce thoughts and feelings of unworthiness. Even if you've already taken the bait and feel the familiar pull of self-denigration, marshal your intelligence, courage, and humor in order to turn the tide. Ask yourself: Do I want to strengthen what I'm feeling now? Do I want to cut myself off from my basic goodness? Remind yourself that your fundamental nature is unconditionally open and free."

"Self-improvement can have temporary results, but lasting transformation occurs only when we honor ourselves as the source of wisdom and compassion."