Meditation for Beginners

Letting go does not mean not caring about things. It means caring for them in a flexible and wise way. In meditation, we pay attention to our body with care and respect.

But forgiveness is the act of not putting anyone out of your heart, even those who are acting out of deep ignorance or out of confusion and pain.

The problem with the “wanting mind” is that even if you get what you think you want, it does not stop. It says, “All right, I have got the nice car, but now I need more money.” It is always something that we do not have in the present moment—something that we want to obtain in order to satisfy our longing.

To meditate is to discover new possibilities, to awaken the capacities of us has to live more wisely, more lovingly, more compassionately, and more fully.

For instance, the near enemy of love is attachment. It masquerades as love, it feels like love, but it is essentially different.

The root of the problem is that everyone has to first discover the root of anger and hatred inside themselves before they can understand how it operates in the outside world.

Right before anger arises, there is often a sense of hurt or fear or loss. When you can feel that, you can notice how little compassion or kindness you have for yourself and others. When we feel fear or when we feel pain or when we feel hurt, our response is often anger, but what is most healing is to acknowledge the anger and to notice what causes it, and to hold that in our attention.

You will begin to see desire’s impermanent nature, and you will also realize that you do not have to act on every thought or desire. You will learn that you can choose from the many possibilities of how to respond to desire when it arises, and you can discover a new kind of freedom, where you do not have to follow your desires, but can choose to behave in new ways in response to your desires.

The truth is that things change whether we want them to or not. Becoming attached to things as they are or pushing things away that we do not like does not stop them from changing. It only leads to further suffering.

Trying to hold onto “how it was” will only create suffering and disappointment, because life is a river and everything changes.

We have so many ideas and beliefs about ourselves. We told ourselves story about what we want and who we are, smart or kind. Often these are the unexamined and limited ideas of others that we have internalized and then gone on to live out

Meditation takes discipline, just like learning how to play piano. If you want to learn how to play the piano, it takes more than a few minutes a day, once a while, here and there. If you really want to learn any important skill, whether it is playing piano or meditation, it grows with perseverance, patience, and systematic training.

The way to work with desire in meditation is the same way we worked with body sensations. It is not very useful to suppress it, because when you do it comes out in some other way. On the other hand, you do not want to act on it either. If you are like me and you acted on all of your desires, they would lock you up. So you do not want to suppress your desires, and you also do not want to act all of them out.

A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, an echo, a rainbow, a phantom, and a dream.” The more quietly you sit, the more closely you observe, the more you realize that everything you can see is in a state of change.

The word “buddha” means one who is awake.

psychology—that life is an array of constantly changing sensations, some of them pleasant, some of them unpleasant, and some of them neutral. Our unconscious response is to grasp after the pleasant and to try to resist the unpleasant, so that we are always at war with the basic transience of our experience. We cannot really come to rest with things as they arise and depart.

Then one day you will be sitting and fear will arise, and you will feel it and recognize it and think, “Oh, this is fear, I recognize you. Welcome back.” Then it is as if the fear becomes one of your friends.

As you acknowledge desire or wanting, you can begin to see that your mind acts a little like a child at Disneyland: “I want that candy and I want to go on that ride and I want that stuffed toy.

The art of living ... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past ... on the other. It consists in being completely sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.

There are many good forms of meditation practice. A good meditation practice is any one that develops awareness or mindfulness of our body and our sense, of our mind and heart.

When we take time to quiet ourselves, we can all sense that our life could be lived with greater compassion and greater weakness.