Stephan Bodian Quotes

Ultimately, your every desire—the desire for material things, relationships, career success, sexual gratification—is really the desire for the peace you experience for brief moments when you attain the object of your desire.

As in mindfulness practice, each moment of practicing awakened awareness offers a choice-point: Do I allow myself to become distracted and get seduced back into the drama? Or do I choose the openness, clarity, disidentification, and freedom that I discovered but keep forgetting?

Resist the temptation to be someone once again. Allow yourself to be no one; allow your mind to be empty of thought, unfurnished, until the identities gradually filter back in. Notice the space between your identities and the awareness of them. Notice if a similar gap appears at other times during the day, an empty space that you may have ignored before but can now lean into and prolong. Continue to open to the openness.

As in mindfulness practice, each moment of practicing awakened awareness offers s choice-point: Do I allow myself to become distracted and get seduced back into the drama? Or do I choose the openness, clarity, disidentification, and freedom that I discovered but keep forgetting?

But awakening, once it occurs, tends to be ruthless and uncontrollable, like a wildfire that burns up everything in its path. “Spirituality isn’t child’s play,” warns Nisargadatta Maharaj. “My sentences will tear to pieces anyone who listens to them.” After all, what you awaken to is the truth, which shatters the illusion of who you’ve believed yourself to be. You might want to consider whether you’re ready to have your tidy little world torn to pieces or consumed in a conflagration before you set out to discover who you are. I’ve known many people whose lives were turned upside down by awakening and who spent years learning how to live in a completely new way.

I’m deeply rooted in the earth, yet open to the higher powers of the cosmos—independent, yet inextricably connected to all of life.

In my experience, anger generally arises in response to one of two deeper emotions: hurt or fear.

Meditation increases awareness and sensitivity; as such, it can be an antidote to numbness and distraction.

These four practices—concentration, receptive awareness, cultivation, and contemplation—constitute the major uses of awareness throughout the world’s great meditative traditions.

Buddhists like to compare the mind to a monkey—constantly chattering and hopping about from branch to branch, topic to topic.

Thoughts are the images, memories, beliefs, judgments, and reflections that float through your mind and often give rise to your feelings.

of a thousand miles begins with a single step. In the case of meditation, this simple but essential step involves turning your mind away from its usual preoccupation with external events — or, just as often, with the story it tells you about external events — and toward your inner sensate experience. If you’re like most people, you’re so caught up with what’s happening around you