Esalen retreat, mindfulness meditation, Buddhism at Big Sur, 2013
I have come to see meditation as a radical act of love, an inward gesture of benevolence and kindness toward ourselves and toward others, a gesture of the heart that recognizes our perfection even in our obvious imperfection, with all our shortcomings, our wounds, our attachments, our vexations, and our persistent habits of unawareness.
—Jon Kabat-Zinn
Buddha, prayer over water at Spirit Rock meditation retreat.
There is a spark of hope, a playful humor about the posture we take in meditation, which lies in the secret understanding that we all have the Buddha nature. So when you assume this posture, you are playfully imitating a Buddha, acknowledging and giving real encouragement to the emergence of your own Buddha nature. You begin to respect yourself as a potential Buddha. At the same time, you still recognize your relative condition. But because you have let yourself be inspired by a joyful trust in your own true Buddha nature, you can accept your negative aspects more easily and deal with them more generously and with more humor.
When you meditate, invite yourself to feel the self-esteem, the dignity, and the strong humility of the Buddha that you are. If you simply let yourself be inspired by this joyful trust, it is enough: Out of this understanding and confidence, meditation will naturally arise.
—Sogyal Rinpoche, from Glimpse of the Day
"Everything changes, nothing remains without change."
— The Buddha
Keeping time at Esalen, California
The only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment, because this is the only moment any of us ever gets.”
—Jon Kabat Zinn
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.”
—Buddha
If not now, when?”
—Eckhart Tolle
