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“As you filled in all the brown areas, then the greens and the blues, a pleasing picture begins to emerge. Mindfulness practice is like that.”
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“I am a meditation teacher, and I live at a Zen monastery in Oregon. I’m also a pediatrician, a wife, a mother, and a grandmother, so I understand well how stressful and challenging daily life can become.”
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“You open the car door, search for your keys, back carefully out of the driveway, and . . . you pull into the parking garage at work. Wait a minute! What happened to twenty miles and forty minutes between house and job?”
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“Is that bad? It’s not bad in the sense of something you should feel ashamed or guilty about. If you are able to drive to work on autopilot for years without having an accident, that’s pretty skillful! We could say that it’s sad, though, because when we spend a lot of time with our body doing one thing while our mind is on vacation somewhere else, it means that we aren’t really present for much of our life.”
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“We all try over-the-counter remedies—food, drugs, sex, overwork, alcohol, movies, shopping, gambling—to relieve the pain of ordinary life as a human being.”
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“When we “check out,” our mind tends to go to one of three places: the past, the future, or the fantasy realm.”
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“We wouldn’t remind a child two hundred fifty times of a small mistake he or she made, but somehow we allow our mind to continue to call up the past and to inflict anger and shame upon our own inner small being.”
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“When we are unable to be present, we tend not to act wisely or “skillfully. We are more likely to do the very thing the mind worries we will do”
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“The most important way we can prepare for the unknown-to-come is to make a reasonable plan and then to pay attention to what is happening right now.”
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“We know that our body cannot function well without rest, so we give it at least a few hours to lie down and relax each night. We forget, though, that our mind needs rest, too. Where it finds rest “is in the present moment, where it can lie down and relax into the flow of events.”
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“The Buddha pointed out that when a wild elephant is first captured and led out of the jungle, it has to be tethered to a stake. In the case of our mind, that stake takes the form of whatever we attend to “in our mindfulness practice—for example, the breath, a mouthful of food, or our posture. We anchor the mind by returning it over and over to one thing. This calms the mind and rids it of distractions.”
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“ecological relationships are based upon energy exchange, and anxiety is an energy.”
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“a profound experience of intimacy is always accessible to us—all it requires is that we turn around and move toward life”
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“When we infuse one routine activity with mindfulness, then another and another, we are waking up to the mystery of each moment”
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“He explained that it didn’t matter if you succeeded with the task or not. Sometimes not doing the exercise could teach you more than doing it, because you got to look at why you didn’t do it”
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“It is so easy to skip meditation or prayer when our life gets hectic”
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“When we wash, dry, sweep, fold, and put away our things with mindfulness, it becomes an expression of gratitude for their silent service”
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“The sense of satisfaction from leaving no traces may be a reflection of our deep desire to leave the world at least no worse than when we entered it, and hopefully, to leave it a bit better.”
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“Final Words: First practice leaving no traces. Then practice leaving things better than you found them.”
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“Filler words also soften what we say, making it less definite or assertive. “So anyway, I, you know, think we should, basically, kind of go ahead with this project.” Are we afraid of provoking a reaction or of being wrong?”
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“When our mind is clear, we can speak in a straightforward way, with precision, and without insulting others.”
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“Only when we bring the light of awareness to a pattern of behavior do we begin to have some space to work to modify them.”
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“If we want to change ourselves, if we want to realize our potential, it takes kindness, determination, and steady, sustained practice.”
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“Final Words: “I think you’re all enlightened until you open your mouths.”—Zen master Suzuki Roshi”
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“When we see clearly into the unity of all existence, we see that all things are working together”
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“What if the most important gift we can give to the world is not any kind of product or present, but is, instead, our presence?”
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“When someone becomes part of the furniture of our life, we forget to notice what they do and it doesn’t occur to us to give them compliments.”
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“physical beauty, are serendipitous intersections of genes and current cultural norms”
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“Straight hair becomes popular for a few years, and girls with curly hair spend hours straightening it. Then curly hair comes into fashion.”
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“the best compliments are founded upon appreciation for how a person made you feel”
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“We adjust our posture to different situations. At a job interview or an interesting lecture, we sit up straight; watching TV, we slump on the couch.”
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“There is a Spanish saying, “You can tell a priest even in a bathing suit,” meaning that a religious person is distinguishable just by his or her outward demeanor, because this reflects an internal posture or alignment.”
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“Posture and concentration are related.”
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“Posture and mood are related as well. When you notice that your mood is sour, try changing your posture.”
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“What was behind it—laziness, old aversions, or just spacing out?”
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“Struggling to use the nondominant hand can awaken our compassion for anyone who is clumsy or unskilled”
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“Using the nondominant hand reveals our impatience. It can help us become more flexible and discover that we are never too old to learn new tricks.”
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“When we develop a new skill, we realize that there are many other abilities lying dormant within us.”
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“Zen master Suzuki Roshi said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
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“To bring possibilities into your life, unfold beginner’s mind in all situations.”
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“Research conducted by Lywbomirsky shows that 40 percent of happiness is determined by our intentional activities.”
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“Listening practice is a potent way to quiet the mind.”
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“When we become intrigued by sounds, we want to listen more closely.”
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“To listen intently, we have to ask the voices in the mind to be quiet for a while.”
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“When you are frazzled after spending an entire day on your computer, step outside, open your awareness out into the darkness, and listen to the music of the evening.”
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“Each time a bell rang, all the humming of people’s activity just stopped. You could feel the energy in the room settle and reestablish itself in a place of more stability and presence.”
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“clear mind and open heart”
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“Instead of living fully in this moment, we are always moving forward, grabbing at the next minute, the next hour, the next day.”
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“We drag our state of mind, like a bag of garbage, from one encounter to the next.”
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“He treats each robe as the robe of the Buddha.”
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“When we stop being busy and productive and switch to just being still and aware, we ourselves will also feel support, intimacy, and happiness, even if no one else is around.”
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“We may love each other, but we forget to show it with our eyes.”
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“The mind has two functions, thinking and awareness. When we are newborn babies, we have no words in our mind. We live in pure awareness. When we learn to speak, words begin to fill our mind and mouth.”
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“The mind truly rests only when we are able to turn off its thinking function and turn on its awareness function.”
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“Before you walk through a door, pause, even for a second, and take one breath. Be aware of the differences you might feel in each new space you enter.”
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“This is one example of how we move through much of our day like sleepwalkers, navigating through the world while caught in a dream. This semiconscious state is a source of dissatisfaction (dukkha in Sanskrit), the persistent feeling that something is not right, that there is a gap between us and life as it is actually happening. As we learn to become present, bit by bit, the gap closes and life becomes more vivid and satisfying.”
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“Even in the city there are animals, birds, plants, and insects all around us. Within our bodies are billions of living beings, most of them beneficial.”
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“Their lives are intertwined with ours, and they are necessary to our health and we to theirs.”
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“When our mind closes down tightly on the worries of “I, me, mine,” we create loneliness.”
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“When we open our heart into awareness of all those beings we are connected to, our loneliness melts away.”
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“Tension is not necessary for most of the tasks of our life. It is a waste of energy.”
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“Not expressing opposition helps us to let go of self-centered views and see that our personal opinion is actually not so important after all.”
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“Even when our mind-state is cloudy and our emotions are raining, our Original Nature is always there, shining brightly within us and all things.”
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“Final Words: When you are unhappy, discover what you are clinging to and let it go.”
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“Looking up expands the size of our life to include many more beings (such as birds) and phenomena (such as rainbows) than before.”
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“When our vista is wider, our experience of self expands, too.”
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“We aren’t so trapped in the small box we call “me, my world, and my worries.”
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“We tend to make little safe nests wherever we go and then we defend them.”
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“Final Words: There is no thing called a self to defend, because in reality the self is a process of constantly changing sensations, including the sensations we call thoughts.”
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“We can be very alert to fragrance when our mind is quiet and input to the other senses is minimal.”
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“We live on automatic, trying to insulate ourselves against any discomfort before it even arrives.”
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“Then we lose the joy of potential discovery and the freedom of finding that we can investigate, and even be happy, within a greater range of experiences than we thought.”
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“We spend so much effort trying to make external conditions suit us. However, it is impossible for us to remain comfortable all the time, for the nature of all things is change.”
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“greed (or clinging), aversion (or pushing away), and delusion (or ignoring)”
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“When we focus our attention on the breath, we cannot attend to our list of things to worry about. That is how breath meditation can lower blood pressure and reduce stress.”
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“most of our attention is devoted to pursuing what gives us pleasure, avoiding what is potentially dangerous or unpleasant, and ignoring everything else. I will pursue the beautiful girl, avoid that homeless man, and ignore the person standing next to me in the checkout line.”
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“Final Words: For a pause that refreshes, at least once a day, stop trying to know and do. Open your awareness and simply sit in “not knowing.”
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“In his youth Zen master Yamada Mumon was very sick with tuberculosis. Doctors predicted his death and gave up treating him. He lived in isolation for several years, resigned to death, and his mind gradually became serene and still. One bright, clear summer day he saw some flowers in the garden blown by the wind and was deeply awakened to the existence of a great power. He realized that this vast energy had given life to him and to all beings, embracing him and living through him. He wrote the following poem, and soon afterward his fatal illness was cured:
All things are embraced
Within the universal mind
Told by the cool wind
This morning.
What Mumon Roshi called “the universal mind” has been given many names. It “has no boundaries. It reaches everywhere, throughout space and time. And yet, it does not manifest as anything other than each small thing, each breath, each sound, each falling flower petal floating on the wind.”
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“The Buddhist term for joy is mudita. It means more than just appreciating what makes us feel good.”
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“The mind’s concern is protecting us from the negative, the dangerous.”
Nota: claro, pero la mente del “yo” fabricado.
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“Final Words: Maezumi Roshi always admonished us, “Appreciate your life!” (He meant both our everyday life and our One Great Life. They are not separate.)”
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“Final Words: Resting in this moment, we have no age”
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“Some people are never late, and they might try a different exercise. They could watch the mind of judgment about others who do arrive late. Or they could take on the task of deliberately arriving late and then see what arises within their body and mind!”
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“Travel abroad often brings the realization that time is a human construct, a convenience, a convention we created to make events and people coincide.”
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“There is no winning in the land of the Inner Critic. Its only job is to criticize, and it does this job well.”
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“One evening I visited a woman who was dying in middle age, from cancer. She had been a respected scholar, translating ancient Chinese texts about Buddhism. Now she was a skeleton covered in skin, lying in a huge white bed. She had only a few days to live. After we talked and I was preparing to leave she said wistfully, “I always thought I’d get around to actually practicing meditation later. Now there is no later.” Recalling her words often helps me to sort out what is important and not procrastinate.”
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“Final Words: If you were given a week to live, what would be the most important thing for you to do or say? Don’t put it off.”
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“The term aversion refers to our mistaken belief that if we could just get rid of something or someone, we would be happy.”
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“Fear of not enough time is also unrealistic because time is the creation of our own mind. When we are able to quiet our mind, enter pure awareness, and match the flow of events, time disappears. The tranquillity of the eternal opens, and we are at peace.”
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“Anxiety and planning are different things entirely. Anxiety is the suffering that our mind layers on top of planning. Anxiety actually interferes with good planning. Anxiety is self-centered and it makes us lose objectivity. Good plans arise from objectivity, not emotion.”
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“Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says,
A person who practices mindfulness can see things in a tangerine that others are unable to see. An aware person can see the tangerine tree, the tangerine blossoms in the spring, the sunlight and rain which nourished the tangerine. Looking deeply one can see the ten thousand things which have made the tangerine possible . . . and how all these things interact with each other.”
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“Buddha included light among the basic gifts one should give freely, along with water, food, clothing, shelter, and transportation”
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“our basic consciousness, the awareness behind our thoughts and emotions, has three inherent qualities—it is boundless, clear, and luminous or bright”
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“Some people confuse anxiety with hunger, because many of the sensations of those two experiences are the same”
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“When we apply mindfulness, we can separate what the stomach is telling us (“I’m still full and busy processing lunch”), from what the mind is telling us (“I’m anxious because we have to finish that report by five o’clock”), from what our heart is saying (“I’m feeling lonely because my sweetie is out of town for three days”).”
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“Only when we know which part of us is hungry can we nourish ourselves in a healthy way.”
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“The food we need might be a sandwich, but it might just as often be a phone call to someone we love.”
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“Our thoughts can never be about the present moment, because the present moment is an instant of pure physical sensation.”
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“The gap between us and everything else cannot be closed by adding intensity to our lives. It is our incessant thoughts that create that gap.”
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“When we move our “center of operations” from our mind to our hara, something happens. Extraneous thoughts settle, awareness opens up, and the uncomfortable sense of a gap between us and everything else dissolves. Try it!”
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“Final Words: Do loving-kindness practice for your body at least once a day, every day. It’s the best kind of alternative medicine.”
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“In all human cultures, smiles express happiness.”
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“Smiles are contagious. Often people who emerge from retreats are puzzled to find other people smiling at them, even strangers they encounter on the street or in a grocery store. Then they realize that their inner relaxed state has emerged as an outer smile, and that others are simply responding to that smile. The benefit is returned: when people smile back at us, our mood improves.”
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“Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”
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“We do have influence over what happens to us by virtue of our actions.”
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“When the individual mind, with all its memories and worries, is still, we have access to a deep stream of wisdom that can emerge as insights, powerful enough to change the course of our life.”
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“That emergence is called by various names: openings, awakening to Truth, the voice of the divine.”
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“We know that the body cannot function well without rest, so we give it at least a few hours to lie down and relax each night. We forget, though, that the mind needs rest too. Where it finds rest is in the present moment, where it can lie down and relax into the flow of events.”
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“Once we are able to apply the power of a concentrated, focused mind, anything, potentially all things, will reveal their true hearts to us. It is that heart-to-heart connection with ourselves, with our loved ones, and with the world itself that all of us so dearly long for.”
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Domingo, 24 octubre 2021
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