Jack Kornfield Quotes About Meditation
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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.
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Meditation is a vehicle for opening to the truth of this impermanence on deeper and deeper levels.
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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.
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There are many good forms of meditation practice. A good meditation practice is any one that develops awareness or mindfulness of our body and our sense, of our mind and heart.
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In sitting on the meditation cushion and assuming the meditation posture, we connect ourselves with the present moment in this body and on this earth.
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In Buddhist practice, the outward and inward aspects of taking the one seat meet on our meditation cushion.
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Two qualities are at the root of all meditation development: right effort and right aim—arousing effort to aim the mind toward the object.
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Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control.
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When we take the one seat on our meditation cushion we become our own monastery. We create the compassionate space that allows for the arising of all things: sorrows, loneliness, shame, desire, regret, frustration, happiness.
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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.
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To learn to concentrate we must choose a prayer or meditation and follow this path with commitment and steadiness, a willingness to work with our practice day after day, no matter what arises.
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It only take a few minutes of meditation to directly realize we are a river of sensations, feelings, thoughts, perceptions. How can we navigate this evanescent river of life wisely? With mindful awareness and love it becomes clear. You can fight against the river of change, or use its wisdom to teach you how to graciously move and create and flow with the full measure of joy and sorrow, gain and loss, praise and blame that make up every human incarnation.
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Meditation practice is neither holding on nor avoiding; it is a settling back into the moment, opening to what is there.
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One day Mara, the Buddhist god of ignorance and evil, was traveling through the villages of India with his attendants. He saw a man doing walking meditation whose face was lit up in wonder. The man had just discovered something on the ground in front of him. Mara's attendants asked what that was and Mara replied, "A piece of truth." "Doesn't this bother you when someone finds a piece of the truth, O evil one?" his attendants asked. "No," Mara replied. "Right after this they usually make a belief out of it."
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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.
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The focusing of attention on the breath is perhaps the most universal of the many hundreds of meditation subjects used worldwide.
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Breathing meditation can quiet the mind, open the body, and develop a great power of concentration.
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To understand ourselves and our life is the point of insight meditation: to understand and to be free.
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The best of modern therapy is much like a process of shared meditation, where therapist and client sit together, learning to pay close attention to those aspects and dimensions of the self that the client may be unable to touch on his or her own.
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Skill in concentrating and steadying the mind is the basis for all types of meditation.
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