The moment that we realize our attention has wandered is the magic moment of the practice, because that's the moment we have the chance to be really different. Instead of judging ourselves, and berating ourselves, and condemning ourselves, we can be gentle with ourselves.
Interpretation
The key to personal growth is recognizing when our focus drifts, allowing us to respond with kindness rather than self-criticism.
This quote emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and self-compassion in our personal development. Sharon Salzberg suggests that the realization of a wandering mind is a pivotal moment that offers us the opportunity to approach ourselves with kindness and understanding, rather than harsh judgment. This shift in perspective can lead to significant personal transformation and a more positive relationship with oneself.
In practice
In a mindfulness workshop, to encourage participants not to be hard on themselves when their minds wander.
It doesn't matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn't matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years - we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on.
Patience doesn't mean making a pact with the devil of denial, ignoring our emotions and aspirations. It means being wholeheartedly engaged in the process that's unfolding, rather than ripping open a budding flower or demanding a caterpillar hurry up and get that chrysalis stage over with.
To be truly happy in this world is a revolutionary act...It is a radical change of view that liberates us so that we know who we are most deeply and can acknowledge our enormous ability to love.
The critical element in meditation practice is beginning again. Everyone loses focus at times, everyone loses interest at times, and everyone gets distracted over and over again. What is essential, and also incredibly transforming, is realizing that we have the ability to begin again, without blaming or judging ourselves, without thinking we have failed, without losing heart, we can, and need to, constantly be beginning again.
It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it.
Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.
I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with the greatest caution.
It's all about knowing that everybody that you see, everybody that you sit across from is a different aspect of yourself. So once you can accept yourself on every level, that's when everything opens up, that's when the party really begins.
The human mind cannot create anything. It produces nothing until having been fertilized by experience and meditation; its acquisitions are the germs of its production.
Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers.
As quickly as you can go 4-1, you can go 1-4. And the whole objective is not to get too high and not to get too low. It's one thing to tell somebody that and explain it, but it's another thing to really buy in, to have felt that and understand what it means to stay even-keel. That's what you have to be in this league.
No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.
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