On this, World Meditation Day, a few random thoughts on practice:
- You can’t do meditation wrong. There’s no success or failure.
- In practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal— quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is…
- Ordinary everyday life is meditation enough if we attend to it in the moment with simplicity, an open curious mind and without taking ownership of any of it.
- The only way one really gets any of the most important benefits of meditation practice is by giving up on the notion that there are any benefits to meditation practice.
- The heart of meditation is simply being interested in what is here now – being more interested in what is… rather than in what was, what will be, or what should be.
And finally…
What we’re really in the business of doing is helping people stay with the thoughts and feelings they are coming to meditation to escape.
— Ordinary Mind Zen teacher Barry Magid