Today’s Recommendation: From Mindfulness to Insight

From Mindfulness to Insight:
Meditations to Release Your Habitual Thinking
and Activate Your Inherent Wisdom
by Rob Nairn
★★★★★

Building on mindfulness and self-compassion practices, this step-by-step guide to secular insight meditation shows the way to freedom from deeply rooted thought patterns.

Discover joy within yourself and heartfelt connection with others by releasing the habitual thought patterns that cause suffering and alienation. Drawing on Buddhist wisdom as well as the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, this book provides you with the tools needed to recognize the habits of thinking that fuel anger, desire, jealousy, and pride. Building on mindfulness and self-compassion practice, it offers a step-by-step series of guided meditations that create the conditions for liberating insight and wisdom to naturally arise. Thousands of people in the last decade have benefited from practicing the exercises in this book, which were developed and taught as part of the curriculum at the Mindfulness Association, an organization founded to deliver training in mindfulness, compassion, and insight.

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Daily Insight: Alan Watts: Our Thoughts Are Not Our Own

“We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.”

― Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo
Against Knowing Who You Are

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Daily Insight: Eckhart Tolle: You Are Not the Thinker

“The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not “the thinker.” The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter – beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace – arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.”

― Eckhart Tolle, Practicing the Power of Now:
Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises
from the Power of Now

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Daily Insight: Eckhart Tolle: Voices in Your Head

“When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking.”

— Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks ^

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Daily Insight: Buddha: As We Think

“The thought manifests the word;
The word manifests the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character;
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let them spring forth from love
Born out of compassion for all beings.
As the shadow follows the body, as we think, so we become.”

― The Dhammapada

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Daily Insight: The Dhammapada: As We Think

“The thought manifests the word;
The word manifests the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character;
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let them spring forth from love
Born out of compassion for all beings.
As the shadow follows the body, as we think, so we become.”

― Dhammapada

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Daily Insight: Jon Kabat-Zinn on the Awareness of Thoughts

“We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. The incessant stream of thoughts flowing through our minds leaves us very little respite for inner quiet. And we leave precious little room for ourselves anyway just to be, without having to run around doing things all the time. Our actions are all too frequently driven rather than undertaken in awareness, driven by those perfectly ordinary thoughts and impulses that run through the mind like a coursing river, if not a waterfall. We get caught up in the torrent and it winds up submerging our lives as it carries us to places we may not wish to go and may not even realize we are headed for.

Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us rather than to tyrannize us.”

― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are:
Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

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Words of Wisdom for Dec. 30, 2019: Alan Watts: Our Thoughts Are Not Our Own

“We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.”

― Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo
Against Knowing Who You Are

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Words of Wisdom for Dec. 27, 2019: Eckhart Tolle: You Are Not the Thinker

“The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not “the thinker.” The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter – beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace – arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.”

― Eckhart Tolle, Practicing the Power of Now:
Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises
from the Power of Now

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Words of Wisdom for Nov. 11, 2019: David R. Loy on Intentional Actions

“Intentional actions, repeated over and over, become habits. Habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and reacting construct and compose my sense of of self: the Kind of person I am. The kind of person I am does not fully determine what occurs to me but strongly affects what happens and how I respond to it.”

― David R Loy

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