Breathing is central to every aspect of meditation training. It's a wonderful place to focus in training the mind to be calm and concentrated.

Meditation is really a non-doing. It is the only human endeavor I know of being where you already are.

There are a lot of different ways to talk about mindfulness, but what it really means is awareness.

Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely, the path that is your life. Meditation may help us see that this path we call our life has direction; that it is always unfolding, moment by moment; and that what happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next.

Societal transformation isn't going to happen in one month, one year, or even one lifetime. But we see it happen person by person in front of us, and we don't have to worry about the future if we're taking care of the present. In some sense, that's the best insurance policy we can have.

This is something called "walking meditation." The goal is to learn to be aware of each and every movement and feeling. I know it seems ridiculous, but it does change the way you experience walking.

I thought it was a stroke of genius that Hans Selye used the word stress, because it's true that if you don't know how to be in wise relationship to life, certain health consequences are bound to happen. If you stand up 12 hours a day on an assembly line, or constantly tell yourself life is not worth living, the body will respond in certain somewhat predictable ways.