Tara Brach Quotes

You will have to learn ways of relaxing in the present. Enlightenment is not an effort to achieve something. It is a state of effortlessness. It is a state of no-action. It is a state of tremendous passivity, receptivity. You are not doing anything, you are not thinking anything, you are not planning for anything, you are not doing yoga exercises, and you are not doing any technique, any method - you are simply existing, just existing. And in that very moment... the sudden realization that all is as it should be. That's what enlightenment is!

Listen to the silence. Listen to your life. Be present, not just think about what's going on next week, next month.

I try to just stay in the present moment as much as possible.

I've known for years that you're supposed to be present. I know that thinking about what's happened or thinking about what I want is not going to get me anywhere, but until I quit doing it I'm not present.

Before you find a way to channel your emotional energy, you must take time to be still and actually feel. Meditation is a simple tool for becoming present.

Meditation allows us to deal with life as it is rather than looking at it and comparing it with how we think it's supposed to be.

Meditation is a surrender, it is not a demand. It is not forcing existence your way, it is relaxing into the way existence wants you to be. It is a let-go.

When we sit down to meditate, we connect with something unconditional - a state of mind, a basic environment that does not grasp or reject anything. Meditation is probably the only activity that doesn't add anything to the picture. Everything is allowed to come and go without further embellishment. Meditation is a totally nonviolent, non aggressive occupation. Not filling the space, allowing for the possibility of connecting with unconditional openness - this provides the basis for real change.

When you are here and now, sitting totally, not jumping ahead, the miracle has happened. To be in the moment is the miracle.

The secret of awakening is to unconditionally accept this moment as it is.

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

The command is "Do no work." Just make space. Attend to what is around you. Learn that you don't have to DO to BE. accept the grace of doing nothing. Stay with it until you stop jerking and squirming.

If you ask why we meditate, I would say it's so we can become more flexible and tolerant to the present moment.

Meditation is how to drop knowledge. Meditation means how to become ignorant again. Meditation means how to become a child again, a rose bush, a rock. Meditation means how just to be and not to think.

Relax, let go. But remember only one thing: You are a witness.

Learn to become still, and take your attention away from what you don't want

Meditation is just being delighted in your own presence... where you are not doing anything. The moment doing enters, you become tense; anxiety enters immediately. How to do? What to do? How to succeed? How not to fail? You have already moved into the future.

Meditation is not doing something. But you cannot take a jump immediately into non-doing. So I suggest that you make your doing total. Move into it so deeply, and so totally that suddenly the doing drops, and you alone are left, just existing.

I live in the present moment.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.

I had a friend who introduced me to a meditation practice which involves a couple of half-hours a day of meditation, where essentially you try to achieve a stillness that allows you to just be there in the moment.

Everywhere I go, I still have time to meditate. People think meditating is sitting there, nobody bothering you, but you can even talk and still meditate.

I am only at home in the present.

Unending joy is actually closer to us than our own skin, and there is nothing we have to do or get or be to experience it. All we have to do is stop driving it away.

Buddhist practices offer a way of saying, 'Hey, come back over here, reconnect.' The only way that you'll actually wake up and have some freedom is if you have the capacity and courage to stay with the vulnerability and the discomfort.