Meditation Practice Is Simply Moving From A

We Learn In Our Guts, Not Just In Our Brain, That A Life Of Joy Is Not In Seeking Happiness, But In Experiencing And Simply Being The Circumstances Of Our Life As They Are; Not In Fulfilling Personal Wants, But In Fulfilling The Needs Of Life.

Practice Can Be Stated Very Simply. It Is Moving From A Life Of Hurting Myself And Others To A Life Of Not Hurting Myself And Others. That Seems So Simple-except When We Substitute For Real Practice Some Idea That We Should Be Different Or Better Than We Are, Or That Our Lives Should Be Different From The Way They Are. When We Substitute Our Ideas About What Should Be (such Notions As "i Should Not Be Angry Or Confused Or Unwilling") For Our Life As It Truly Is, Then We're Off Base And Our Practice Is Barren.

Awareness Is Our True Self; It's What We Are. So We Don't Have To Try To Develop Awareness; We Simply Need To Notice How We Block Awareness With Our Thoughts, Our Fantasies, Our Opinions, And Our Judgments. We're Either In Awareness, Which Is Our Natural State, Or We're Doing Something Else.

When We Refuse To Work With Our Disappointment, We Break The Precepts: Rather Than Experience The Disappointment, We Resort To Anger, Greed, Gossip, Criticism. Yet It's The Moment Of Being That Disappointment Which Is Fruitful; And, If We Are Not Willing To Do That, At Least We Should Notice That We Are Not Willing. The Moment Of Disappointment In Life Is An Incomparable Gift That We Receive Many Times A Day If We're Alert. This Gift Is Always Present In Anyone's Life, That Moment When 'it's Not The Way I Want It!

Trust In Things Being As They Are Is The Secret Of Life. But We Don't Want To Hear That. I Can Absolutely Trust That In The Next Year My Life Is Going To Be Changed, Different, Yet Always Just The Way It Is.