“Like weeding a garden, dealing with obstacles is an ongoing aspect of meditation. Working with these challenges on the cushion is another way we build confidence and courage to go further. We can be grateful for obstacles, because they push us forward in our practice. After a while it is even possible to feel a spark of delight when we see an obstacle coming up, because we know it’s an opportunity to keep sharpening our minds. The more obstacles we face, the more confidence we feel to deal with them.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 86)
“From a Buddhist point of view, human beings aren’t intrinsically aggressive; we are inherently peaceful. This is sometimes hard to believe. When we’re angry or upset, our untrained mind becomes belligerent and we routinely strike out at others. We imagine that reacting aggressively to the object of our emotion will resolve our pain. Throughout history we have used this approach over and over again. Striking out when we’re in pain is clearly one way we perpetuate misery. With a trained mind, a stable mind, a mind with a larger motivation than its own comfort, we find another way to work with difficulties of daily life. When we’re in a difficult situation, we maintain our seat. Instead of perpetuating misery by acting out aggression, we learn to use the rough spots to spark the courage to proceed on our journey. Eventually we may actually be able to turn the mind of anger into the energy of love and compassion.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 26)
“It’s fine to take pleasure, to enjoy good food, and to listen to beautiful music. Becoming curious about how we suffer doesn’t mean that we can no longer enjoy eating ice cream. But once we begin to understand the bewilderment of our untrained mind, we won’t look to the ice cream and say, ‘That’s happiness.’ We’ll realize that the mind can be happy devoid of ice cream. We’ll realize that the mind is content and happy by nature.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 23)
“Suffering is the state of mind that regards itself as real. We can spend our whole life trying to create a solid, lasting self. We can spend our whole life looking outside ourselves for something to reflect this delusion of solidity, to be as real and lasting as we wish ourselves to be. Search though we will, it’s impossible to find what doesn’t exist, and the perpetual search causes suffering.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 14)
“True happiness is always available to us, but first we have to create the environment for it to flourish.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 6)
“If we want to undo our own bewilderment and suffering and be of benefit to others and the planet, we’re going to have to be responsible for learning what our own mind is and how it works, no matter what beliefs we hold. Once we see how our mind works, we see how our life works, too. That changes us.” ~ Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into An Ally (Page 5)
Turning The Mind Into An Ally [Book]
Book Overview: Strengthening, calming, and stabilizing the mind is the essential first step in accomplishing nearly any goal. Growing up American with a Tibetan twist, Sakyong Mipham talks to Westerners as no one can: in idiomatic English with stories and wisdom from American culture and the great Buddhist teachers. Turning the Mind Into an Ally makes it possible for anyone to achieve peace and clarity in their lives. “Our own mind is our worst enemy. We try to focus, and our mind wanders off. We try to keep stress at bay, but anxiety keeps us awake at night… We can create an alliance that allows us to actually use our mind, rather than be used by it. This is a practice anyone can do.” ~ Sakyong Mipham
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Post(s) Inspired by this Book:
“True salvation is fulfillment, peace, life in all its fullness. It is to be who you are, to feel within you the good that has no opposite, the joy of Being that depends on nothing outside itself. It is felt not as a passing experience but as an abiding presence. In theistic language, it is to ‘know God’ — not as something outside you but as your own innermost essence. True salvation is to know yourself as an inseparable part of the timeless and formless One Life from which all that exists derives its being.” ~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 146)
“Most human relationships consist mainly of minds interacting with each other, not of human beings communicating, being in communion. No relationship can thrive in that way, and that is why there is so much conflict in relationships. When the mind is running your life, conflict, strife, and problems are inevitable. Being in touch with your inner body creates a clear space of no-mind within which the relationship can flower.” ~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 127)
“Your life’s journey has an outer purpose and an inner purpose. The outer purpose is to arrive at your goal or destination, to accomplish what you set out to do, to achieve this or that, which, of course, implies future. But if your destination, or the steps you are going to take in the future, take up so much of your attention that they become more important to you than the step you are taking now, then you completely miss the journey’s inner purpose, which has nothing to do with where you are going or what you are doing, but everything to do with how. It has nothing to do with future but everything to do with the quality of your consciousness at this moment.” ~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 88)
“There is nothing wrong with striving to improve your life situation. You can improve your life situation, but you cannot improve your life. Life is primary. Life is your deepest inner Being. It is already whole, complete, perfect. Your life situation consists of your circumstances and your experiences. There is nothing wrong with setting goals and striving to achieve things. The mistake lies in using it as a substitute for the feeling of life, for Being. The only point of access for that is the Now.” ~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 86)
“Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don’t want the present. You don’t want what you’ve got, and you want what you haven’t got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don’t want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present.” ~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 86)
“Are you stressed? Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there,’ or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It’s a split that tears you apart inside. To create and live with such an inner split is insane. The fact that everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it any less insane. If you have to, you can move fast, work fast, or even run, without projecting yourself into the future and without resisting the present. As you move, work, run — do it totally. Enjoy the flow of energy, the high energy of that moment. Now you are no longer stressed, no longer splitting yourself in two. Just moving, running, working—and enjoying it. Or you can drop the whole thing and sit on a park bench. But when you do, watch your mind. It may say: ‘You should be working. You are wasting time.’ Observe the mind. Smile at it.” ~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 84)
“Are you resisting your here and now? Some people would always rather be somewhere else. Their ‘here’ is never good enough. Through self-observation, find out if that is the case in your life. Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.” ~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 82)
“See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.” ~ Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 82)
“You may find it hard to recognize that time is the cause of your suffering or your problems. You believe that they are caused by specific situations in your life, and seen from a conventional viewpoint, this is true. But until you have dealt with the basic problem-making dysfunction of the mind—its attachment to past and future and denial of the Now—problems are actually interchangeable. If all your problems or perceived causes of suffering or unhappiness were miraculously removed for you today, but you had not become more present, more conscious, you would soon find yourself with a similar set of problems or causes of suffering, like a shadow that follows you wherever you go. Ultimately, there is only one problem: the time-bound mind itself.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 61)