From daily messages sent out to those participating in our 30Day Meditation Challenge. This went out June 8.
Today we began our second week of practice, our 8th day of challenging ourselves to sit, to practice. Already it's not easy. Here, we have been gradually increasing our sitting time. Tonight we made it to 15 minutes. 15 minutes!!! It can seem so interminable...and yet in many ways, it seems like no more time than the 5 minutes we began with after the Dalai Lama's visit. 15 minutes is long enough to begin to glimpse something, a brief moment of not-thinking, not-planning, not-scheming. I'd say my practice tonight was about...14 minutes, 25 seconds of monkey mind, and 35 seconds of no-mind. Which is 35 seconds more than I'd had all day.
Here's a quote:
"We say: 'Everything comes out of emptiness.' One whole river or one whole mind is emptiness. When we reach this understanding we find the true meaning of our life. When we reach this understanding we can see the beauty of human life. Before we realize this fact, everything that we see is just delusion. Sometimes we overestimate the beauty; sometimes we underestimate or ignore the beauty because our small mind is not in accord with reality."
-from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Shunryu Suzuki
Talk to you tomorrow!
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