Meditation

"You just have to knock on the door. I was lucky to find meditation. It’s all within. Understand what you are. It’s a matter of turning your consciousness inward in order to then realize that God is in there, and then you can see him outside too. It’s just a shift in attitude, really."  ~George Harrison

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"Meditation is not what you think. You sit in absolute silence and your mind starts going over all your movies. During that process, you become so familiar with the scripts you keep in your life that you end up getting sick of them. Then you realize that the person you think you are is nothing but a complicated script you spend most of your energy on. After a more thorough examination, you discover your personality disgusts you. And that’s because it’s not really you. If you feel terrified enough about that personality, you spontaneously allow it to fade away. And then, if you’re lucky, you can experience yourself without the distortion of that personality."  ~Leonard Cohen

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“To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.”  ~Ursula K. Le Guin

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"In our everyday lives, when we aren't attentive and mindful, we very often get swept up in a chain of associations and lose touch with what's happening in the here and now. The same thing can happen during meditation. Our objective when we meditate is to know what we're thinking as we're thinking it, and to know what we're feeling as we're feeling it instead of mentally ending up on another continent, wondering how we got there. When waves of memories, plans, and random thinking seem overwhelming, focus on breathing softly without forcing the breath. This will begin to settle your mind."  ~Sharon Salzberg