The whole of meditation practice can be essentialized into these 3 crucial points: Bring your mind home. Release. And relax!
Interpretation
Meditation involves focusing your thoughts, letting go of tension, and finding peace.
This quote by Sogyal Rinpoche emphasizes the fundamental aspects of meditation, which are to center your mind, let go of distractions or stress, and cultivate a state of relaxation. This practice encourages individuals to be present, easing the mind and body to achieve overall well-being and clarity.
In practice
In a meditation workshop, the instructor emphasized the importance of bringing your mind home, releasing stress, and relaxing.
Sit, then, as if you were a mountain, with all the unshakeable, steadfast majesty of a mountain. A mountain is completely natural and at ease with itself, however strong the winds that try to bother it, however thick the dark clouds that swirl around its peak. Sitting like a mountain, let your mind rise and fly and soar
Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth. Real devotion is rooted in an awed and reverent gratitude, but one that is lucid, grounded, and intelligent.
There would be no chance at all of getting to know death if it happened only once. But fortunately, life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death's pulses, death's heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to.
{While meditating} I sit quietly and rest in the nature of mind; I don't question or doubt whether I am in the "correct" state or not. There is no effort, only rich understanding, wakefulness, and unshakable certainty. When I am in the nature of mind, the ordinary mind is no longer there. There is no need to sustain or confirm a sense of being: I simply am.
We may idealize freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved.
Death is a vast mystery, but there are two things we can say about it: It is absolutely certain that we will die, and it is uncertain when or how we will die. The only surety we have, then, is this uncertainty about the hour of our death, which we seize on as the excuse to postpone facing death directly. We are like children who cover their eyes in a game of hide and seek and think that no one can see them.
OUTCOME, n. A particular type of disappointment . . . . judged by the outcome, the result. This is immortal nonsense; the wisdom of an act is to be juded by the light that the doer had when he performed it.
We must learn to separate need from greed...We must not allow our yearnings to exceed our earnings.
If it's painful, you become willing not just to endure it but also to let it awaken your heart and soften you. You learn to embrace it.
Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand.
Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.
Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day-if you live long enough-like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.
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