Quotes About Meditation

While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just as useful as meditation in moving people toward this capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate.

Meditation means you don't have anything, any object to think about. You are just in a state of absolute aloneness. You don't have anything on which you can focus yourself - not a sutra, not a mantra, not any great value of life, just pure space all around you. Then you are in meditation. Meditation is never about something. Meditation is a state.

Meditation is totally different. When you concentrate you close your mind to everything else. Meditation means just an openness, a relaxed openness. It is not concentration. While listening to me you are listening to the birds singing in the trees too. The wind passing through the trees singing its song - you are open to it too. The aeroplane passing by, or the train - you are open to it too. This is meditation - you are simply open, available, conscious, available, all doors are open.

Just two small things: meditation and let-go. Remember these two key words: meditation and surrender. Meditation will take you in, and surrender will take you into the whole. And this is the whole of religion. Within these two words Buddha has condensed the whole essence of religion.

Meditation does not imply only the development of single-pointed concentration, sitting in some corner doing nothing. Meditation is an alert state of mind, the opposite of sluggishness; meditation is wisdom. You should remain aware every moment of your daily life, fully conscious of what you are doing and how you are doing it.

My first meditation teacher told me that there is no such thing as a bad meditation. He was right. During the difficult meditations you build up your strength, which creates meditation for peace.

There are five stages of meditation, each one leading gradually into the next: concentration, meditation, contemplation, illumination, and inspiration.

One of the main differences between silent meditation and chanting is that silent meditation is rather dependent on concentration, but when you chant, it's more of a direct connection with God.

There is a large difference between spacing out in the lower occult astral planes, weird, junky, fuzzy energy, and meditation. Meditation is sharp, clear, precise, perfect, luminous, shiny, happy, etheric, cosmic, and dissolute.

I have been meditating for many years now, but I think for quite a few years my relationship with meditation was very intellectual. I would do meditation for all the usual things that you would think about, to be more calm, be more productive, relieve stress.

I never really wanted to have a Guru, I was more interested in Buddhist philosophy and meditation, and had a psychological background in college, but he had so much love. To be with him, there was nowhere else to be and nothing else to do. Nothing he taught, philosophy or meditation, are the things I went to India to look for, or was interested in, but he sort of jumped into my heart and then pulled, he pried it open.

Millions of people miss meditation because meditation has taken on a wrong connotation. It looks very serious, looks gloomy, has something of the church in it, looks as if it is only for people who are dead, or almost dead, who are gloomy, serious, have long faces, who have lost festivity, fun, playfulness, celebration.... A really meditative person is playful: life is fun for him.... He enjoys it tremendously. He is not serious. He is relaxed.

Meditation - Before you learn how to meditate, you must unlearn what you think meditation might be.

Mind is the absence of meditation. The moment meditation arises in you, mind is found nowhere.

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.

I'm actually big into meditation, transcendental meditation, and that really helps create not only a sense of balance, but all the other stuff this is gonna sound cliché... serenity and kind of a calm state of mind. And not that I'm like that all the time, but it helps me deal with life's ups and downs, coming from more of a centered place. Also it helps with creativity.

Higher meditation is not taught through techniques or words. The real meditation experience is taught inwardly. You shift a person through different dimensional planes.

Walk aimlessly in the streets; this is a good meditation! Walk aimlessly in the forests; this is a good meditation!

In sitting on the meditation cushion and assuming the meditation posture, we connect ourselves with the present moment in this body and on this earth.

There are qualities which grow as meditation deepens. For example, you start feeling loving for no reason at all. Not the love that you know, in which you have to fall-not falling in love. But just a quality of lovingness, not only to human beings. As your meditation deepens, your lovingness will start spreading beyond humanity to animals, to trees, even to the rocks, to the mountains.

Meditation is not an escape. Meditation is the acceptance of life in its totality, with a view to transforming it for the highest manifestation of the divine Truth here on earth

The way we gain wisdom in meditation is not by explanation. If you go into the planes of light, you will come out of the meditation knowing things ... things that are inexpressible.

The kind of spirituality I value is one in which you get great joy out of contributing to life, not just sitting and meditating, although meditation is certainly valuable. But from meditation, from the resulting consciousness, I would like to see people in action creating the world they want to live in.

Meditation was invented as a way for the soul to venture inward, there ultimately to find supreme identity with Godhead. Whatever else it does, and it does many beneficial things, meditation is first and foremost a search for the God within.

You cannot force meditation, you can only create the situation. And if the situation is created rightly, then meditation happens automatically.

Yoga is more a state than a methodology. A state where there is nothing missing. You don't feel like you have to grab this or grab that in order to be complete or full. From wringing out the body and the mind, from sitting in meditation, from studying scripture, from selfless service.

The point of Buddhist meditation is not to stop thinking, for cultivation of insight clearly requires intelligent use of thought and discrimination. What needs to be stopped is conceptualisation that is compulsive, mechanical and unintelligent, that is, activity that is always fatiguing, usually pointless, and at times seriously harmful.

I'm a firm believer in slowing down to improve my state of mind when I'm training, and yoga and meditation have been paramount to my success in this way.

Ultimately, meditation can allow us to have happiness independent of conditions and that is one heck of an awesome claim

"The flowers have appeared in our land: the time of pruning is come: the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land." When the soul, like the solitary turtle-dove, retires and recollects itself in meditation to converse with God, then the flowers, that is, good desires, appear; then comes the time of pruning, that is, the correction of faults that are discovered in mental prayer.

I just have to do prayers and meditation and affirmations to myself as I go throughout the day, and that's the only way I'm able to make it through some days.

That's what you need for your writing - to learn how to be present, learn how to be calm. So take that nap, do that meditation.

Meditation is not contemplation because it is not thinking at all - consistent, inconsistent, crazy, sane. It is not thinking at all; it is witnessing. It is just sitting silently deep within yourself, looking at whatsoever is happening inside and outside both. Outside there is traffic noise, inside there is also traffic noise - the traffic in the head. So many thoughts - trucks and buses of thoughts and trains and airplanes of thoughts, rushing in every direction. But you are simply sitting aloof, unconcerned, watching everything with no evaluation.

When we cultivate mystical awareness or transcendent identity--which is a natural outgrowth of meditation and other practices--what happens is that we begin to take a witness position on our own lives, and that includes our minds. We break the illusion that we think our own thoughts, which is not always the case. Some ideas just arrive in our heads.

Bow and offer your meditation to Eternity, as you would offer a Flower to your lover.

Real winning and losing all takes place at the meditation table. This is where the battles are. Winning is stopping thought. Losing is sitting there and being subjected to all kinds of ridiculous thoughts

When you drive, you are doing several things at once. You are using your eyes, ears, hands, your mind. If you have meditated for many years and have reached a lofty height in your meditation, as I have, you can meditate while running and cycling and painting.

I think meditation helps greatly with creativity. If it's a pure expression of yourself no matter what it is or what medium, it's going to shine. It's going to resonate.

The true practice to meditation is to sit as if you where drinking water when you are thirsty.

Perception without the word, which is without thought, is one of the strangest phenomena. Then the perception is much more acute, not only with the brain, but also with all the senses. Such perception is not the fragmentary perception of the intellect nor the affair of the emotions. It can be called a total perception, and it is part of meditation.

[Thich Nhat Hanh] the one that revolutionized Buddhism. Instead of being monks just engaged in meditation, it was active Buddhism. You went out and felt the ills of the community around you. Instead of retreating to a monastery, you were out in the streets working. And he's been a great help to me, just reading his book, so I don't feel helpless about what I can do about all the violence around me.

Meditation is not something you do once and you are done with. It is something that is like breathing, like blood circulating. It is not that once the blood has circulated it is finished, once you breathe there is no more need of it. No, you have to breathe and you have to go on meditating; every moment you will need it.

The advanced student of meditation takes an active part in supporting the work of their teacher. They happily work more hours or do whatever is necessary to help out more.

Meditation means getting out of the mind, looking at the mind from the outside. That`s exactly the meaning of the word `ecstasy`: to stand out. To stand out of the mind makes you ecstatic, brings bliss to you. And great intelligence is released. When you are identified with the mind you cannot be very intelligent because you become identified with an instrument, you become confined by the instrument and its limitations. And you are unlimited - you are consciousness.

There are different things one can do to establish and hasten the peace process. Meditation is one way.

I have been sought out by a number of people who would have felt uncomfortable coming to a large public meditation. They don't want people to come up and ask for autographs.

Meditation makes you innocent, it makes you childlike. In that state, miracles are possible. That state is pure magic.

Golf is a search for perfection, for balance. It's about meditation and concentration. You have to use hand and brain.