If you haven't wept deeply, you haven't begun to meditate.
Interpretation
Deep emotional experiences are essential for true meditation.
This quote emphasizes that genuine meditation is not merely a practice of calming the mind, but a profound engagement with one's emotions. To truly meditate is to confront and understand our deepest feelings, including sorrow, allowing for a richer and more transformative experience in both meditation and life.
In practice
In a retreat, when discussing the role of emotions in mindfulness, this quote can be shared to illustrate the depth of experience in meditation.
Once you understand non-self, then the burden of life is gone. You'll be at peace with the world. When we see beyond self, we no longer cling to happiness and we can truly be happy. Learn to let go without struggle, simply let go, to be just as you are - no holding on, no attachment, free.
When sitting in meditation, say, "That's not my business!" with every thought that comes by.
To observe and watch one's own mind is something really interesting. The untrained mind will run and follow its old habit patterns. Because it has not been trained and taught, it will get lost in all kinds of stories and issues. Therefore we have to train our mind. The meditation practice in Buddhism is all about training one's own mind.
Meditation is like a single log of wood. Insight and investigation are one end of the log; calm and concentration are the other end. If you lift up the whole log, both sides come up at once. Which is concentration and which is insight? Just this mind.
The heart is just the heart; thoughts and feelings are just thoughts and feelings. Let things be just as they are.
Happiness and suffering do not depend on being poor or rich, they depend on having the right or wrong understanding in our mind.
Life will not, it will never, make sense to your mind. The secret is to see life from the soul's perspective; to add to the mind's experience the soul's wisdom, awareness, and total knowing.
And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.
It is not larger, cleaner cages that justice demands...but empty cages; not traditional animal agriculture but a complete end to all commerce in the flesh of dead animals; not more humane hunting and trapping, but the total eradication of these barbarous practices.
It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making.
We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.
The Three Wiseman: The weather has been awful, The countryside is dreary, Marsh, jungle, rock; and echoes mock, Calling our hope unlawful; But a silly song can help along Yours ever and sincerely: At least we know for certain that we are three old sinners, that this journey is much too long, that we want our dinners, and miss our wives, our books, our dogs, but have only the vaguest idea why we are what we are. To discover how to be human now Is the reason we follow this star.
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