Mindfulness
The practice of mindfulness is monitoring your mind all day and all night. It's enjoyable to just remove things that make you unhappy from your mind, to clarify your emotions.
Mindfulness is passive meditation. It is passive because your energy and your attention are divided between your actions and your practice, your meditation.
Mindfulness means that as we go through the day we learn to gain control of our mind, our emotions. We learn to conserve energy in a variety of simple and complicated ways that we learned in Buddhist practice.
Mindfulness is when you are engaged in activities but the mind is set into the meditative state all the time. Meditation is to be aware of many different levels. It's not just the absence of thought.
If you want to experience the unalloyed ecstasy of life, you can accomplish this through the twin Buddhist practices of meditation and mindfulness.
Be mindful, which is more of a passive meditation practice. It is passive when you are active. Then there is active meditation, when you are passive, sitting still.
Practicing zazen and mindfulness constantly and correctly, over a period of time, can bring strength and clarity to your finite mind and eventually give you access to your infinite mind.
It is as important to monitor your mind constantly as it is to sit down and practice meditation.
Our life interferes, our mind, our thoughts. Meditating is not just a practice of asserting will and learning to control the mind, it is also developing control of one's life and gaining wisdom.
To be in thousands of states of mind simultaneously as you perform simple physical tasks gives you a reverence for life. Each of these outer manifestations of life is God.
In your thoughts, you need to be selective. Thoughts are powerful vehicles of attention. Only think positive thoughts about yourself and your endeavors, and think well of the endeavors of others.
Gain control of the mind and make it still, initially just during periods of meditation, but then throughout the day and throughout the night.
There are parts of us that are miserable, that hate, that love, that are cruel, are kind, are reasonable, are unreasonable. You know, you live inside your own mind. Who are you kidding?
When you are not meditating, eliminate hate, doubt, fear, anxiety, negative thoughts and emotions that limit your consciousness, that bind you to a sense of self, of ego.
You have to look at your own thought forms. Are you sitting around and thinking a lot of negative thoughts? These injure the subtle body. When you hate, when you are angry, you bring that energy through you.
Every time you find yourself becoming angry, jealous or frustrated, stop and think the opposite thought.
If you can't hold a person in your mind with a good thought, it is better not to think about them at all.
When you find yourself dwelling on something negative, consciously use your willpower to remove your mind from that which is negative. Move your mind into the flow of something positive.
When you are just thinking a lot of silly thoughts and having a lot of worries, you waste a tremendous energy and power and you put yourself into very limited states of mind. You slow down your evolutionary process.
Power either goes up or down. Your thoughts are the harness of power. It is necessary to think positive thoughts, not just wait for them to occur, but to introduce them.
If you hold a negative thought, then it will become more powerful and not only will it send bad energy to the person, but it will crash your consciousness. All the hard work of meditating is sabotaged.
If you think of others in a jealous way or if you become angry, immediately pause for a moment. It's going to pull you down and send negative energy. At that moment, pause and correct yourself.
In every situation, feel before acting, just for a second. Look for a feeling.
Whenever you find yourself becoming angry or jealous, try to see good quality in the person. You will suddenly be thinking a higher thought and that will elevate you.
This is the process of mental analysis, sifting through the selves, sifting through your thoughts, practicing mindfulness, learning to control thought.
Spend time all day and all night monitoring your thoughts, constantly keeping them in a high plateau. Avoid places and people that pull your energy down.
It is necessary to learn how to do a systems analysis of your life, to learn about the effects of places, people, jobs. There are millions of things that go into the study of meditation.
Your ability to still your mind through the process of meditation and inner reflection and outer change brings a stillness to the mind all the time, even in the midst of the busiest activities.
If we try and direct our lives with only our limited rationalistic thoughts and our sense perceptions, then our actions and our activities will not be prefect.
In Zen we do everything perfectly. We feel that our outer actions are a reflection of our inner state. We call it mindfulness.
It is necessary to go through all the daily tasks and bring perfection to them.
When you do something half-heartedly, you don't get much of a result. When you do it fully, you get a great result.
You are moving in and out of different advanced states of mind through your practice of meditation and mindfulness. It's that level of excellence that gives you joy in life, not the fact that you won or lost.
Any area you slough off in your life will reflect in your meditation. Be happy when you could be depressed. Push jealous, fear, and anger out of your mind. Don't feel sorry for yourself.
We are trying to do our best to bring perfection into whatever we turn our attention to.
Why do everything perfectly? Isn't perfection just an illusion? Tell me if it's an illusion if they don't fix your car perfectly next time you bring it in.
You can just sweep the floor generally and gain nothing from it. Or you can figure out the best way to sweep the floor, put your power into it, use it as a concentration exercise, and be meditative.
If you are just spaced out and you have no purpose in life, you pick everything up. Everybody else's thoughts will come into your mind, everyone else's desires.
It doesn't matter what your work really is. It is exciting to do well at something. It empowers you.
Personal power, knowledge and fun come from how you approach something, not what you approach.
Sitting around idly contemplating doesn't produce much. In work you can discipline your attention, forget about your misery.
If President Bush does a lousy job, then he'll lose power. If the guy at McDonalds who's selling burgers does a great job, then he'll be much more powerful than President Bush.
There comes a time in life when you just buckle down and have a good time with what you're doing. It doesn't matter much what you're doing. What matters is how you do it.
What we do outwardly will only interrupt the flow of our perfect attention is it is not in harmony with the dharma.
Stop trying to be different. Just do what you are good at, and work really hard. You have to work hard to be chaos.
The best form of meditation is the sitting meditation. But work is next. Work is a great way to meditate.
If you are mindful in your work, if you put your best effort into it, then something comes back to you.
It is necessary to have a strong focus. Work will give you that focus.
Thought control is the ability to direct mind and attention anywhere.
There is no fanaticism in any of this. There is intensity. You have to make it happen. You have to put your will into perfecting your daily life, into monitoring your thoughts.
You don't have to do anything to meditate. That's what makes it so difficult. Everybody wants to do something.
If your intent is that athletics and sports are tools or devices to reach higher levels of mind, then your workout sessions become meditation.
Mindfulness is the ability to do physical things in a harmonious way; it is a way to remain centered in a physical world that is out of balance.
Begin to live in other levels of attention all the time whether you're at work, driving or running on the beach. When you begin to be in a more meditative state all the time you will find that it fits rather well with everything that you do.
Mindfulness is the direct application of Buddhist teachings to a physical event, a way of doing or accomplishing something, or a way of thinking and viewing something.
We are so absorbed in our thoughts that every thought that comes through is a reality. We have to start to detach ourselves from thought and become aware that there are things beyond thought.
In the state of emptiness, you are the action not the performer of the action. Allow an activity or event to take precedence over your own point of view.
Thinking is usually a waste of time and energy, since thinking is essentially a rehashing of what we already know. As a matter of fact, thinking is an easy way to confuse yourself. The more you think, the less you know.
When we practice mindfulness, our nonphysical side merges with the nonphysical side of that which we are experiencing.
Our actions and experiences will direct us. In other words, we will be guided by the inherent emptiness of the things we choose to interact with.
The unlimited mind, the diamond mind of the Buddha, is your mind, if you can get in touch with it. Stop thinking so much and tap into that psychic part of your being.
Think about what is in front of you, if you must think.
Stop worrying about tomorrow. Stop thinking about yesterday. Mindfulness is to be here now, in the moment. Focus on this moment.
Mindfulness is paying attention to what is going on. Just look at beauty. Not just the beauty of things you see with your eyes, but beautiful feelings, beautiful awareness. There is no such thing as reality. Reality is what you make it.
Look at how beautiful life is, and just keep looking until you see it. You don't see what is in front of you because you're so distracted by your thoughts.
Forget that you are anybody and just perform the activities around you. Look at them. Watch what you are doing, my God! Life is right in front of you, and it's great.
Just see beauty as you walk around through your day. Feel things. Unhook from your thoughts and all the busy things you are doing. Start to look at life. This is mindfulness.
Focus on this moment. Hold your hand and see what it feels like. Go look at some grass. Talk to a palm tree. Outrun a Ferrari. Experience life.
Slow down. Enjoy life. It's tough to slow down if your mind is going a million miles a second. It's tough to slow down if you think what these people do here matters.
No matter how many times you have failed you must keep going forward. Only when you have become humble will you begin to grasp the meaning of life.
None of this matters a bit. Yet, of course, it matters at that moment. So we try to be mindful of the moment; but it's fleeting.
Meditate on your own and refine your consciousness. Tighten up your life. Constantly examine your life and look for weak points. You know what's going on in your life.
See your life as not just your life but as eternity. Be so completely integrated in the experience of perception that there's no sense of a perceiver but just the fluid moment of ecstasy that is reality unfolding itself to itself.
