Chogyam Trungpa Quotes

Meditation is not the pursuit of an invisible path leading to some imaginal bliss. The meditative mind is seeing, watching, listening, without the word, without comment, without opinion, attentive to the movement of life in all its relationships throughout the day.

What is meditation? It is not your character, it is not what you do. It is what you are. It is not the character, it is the consciousness that you bring to whatsoever you do. The doing is irrelevant. Whether you are doing it consciously or not is the question, whether moral or immoral. Are you alert? If you are alert, meditation happens. If you are not alert, you live in sleep.

Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.

Meditation allows us to directly participate in our lives instead of living life as an afterthought.

Practice moment to moment non-judgemental awareness.

We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.

Meditation cannot be taught, it can only be caught. I am meditation. If you are available you can catch it.

Meditation is not concentration. It is simple awareness. You simply relax and watch the breathing. In that watching, nothing is excluded. The car is humming - perfectly okay, accept it. The traffic is passing - that's okay, part of life. The fellow passenger snoring by your side, accept it. Nothing is rejected. You are not to narrow down your consciousness.

We call the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment ‘practice’ or ‘meditation practice.’

Meditation is nothing but a way to learn how to do a thing totally - once you have learnt, make your whole life a meditation, forget all about meditations, let the life be the only law, let the life be the only meditation. And then time disappears.

Meditate. Breathe consciously. Listen. Pay attention. Treasure every moment. Make the connection.

Meditation is not an act, it is a quality. Meditation is not something that you do - it is something that you become.

The science of meditation: it brings you to the present, it brings you to this moment. The past is a thought; it disappears when thoughts disappear. The future is also a thought; it disappears when you drop thinking. When you are in a state of no-thought - there is no past, no future, there is only the present - in that state of no-thought you are ONE, in tune with God. And suddenly the flood is there: you are flooded with light, with love, with grace. You are no more a man, you are divine. You have surpassed humanity. Humanity is in a state of deep sleep.

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.

We tend to think of meditation in only one way. But life itself is a meditation.

The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment.

There are certain ways in which I cultivate awareness, both through mindful yoga and taking care of my body and taking time to actually drop as deeply as possible into stillness, into whatever is unfolding in the present moment.

Mindfulness is a quality that's always there. It's an illusion that there's a meditation and post-meditation period, which I always find amusing, because you're either mindful or you're not.

What I've learnt is to be in the now. It's something my mum has always said to me, and when I read a book called 'The Power of Now' by Eckhart Tolle, I realised just how important it is.

There isn't anything except your own life that can be used as ground for your spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is your life, twenty-four hours a day.

When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

Go deep into meditation. and be meditation I mean silence, awareness, witnessing. You can meditate any time of the day, you can meditate working, walking, doing things. Meditation is not something separate from life; it should not be separate, otherwise it remains a little artificial. Meditation should be spread all over life. You should walk in meditation, you should sit in meditation; that means silently, fully aware. Slowly slowly it becomes your very flavour, then the bridge is created.

It's helpful to remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing with whatever arises, without picking and choosing.

The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. Zen practice is to open up our small mind.

Let your ears hear without trying to hear. Let the mind think without trying to think and without trying to stop it. That is practice.