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Intentionally slowing down your thoughts, words, and movements allows you to penetrate far more deeply into them than you otherwise could.

What you find there is utterly astonishing.

In the beginning, it is very difficult to keep this deliberately slow pace during most regular activities, but skill grows with time.

Profound realizations occur during sitting meditation, but also profound revelations can take place when we really examine our own inner workings in the midst of day-to-day activities.

This is the laboratory where we really start to see the mechanisms of our own emotions and the operations of our passions.

Here is where we can truly gauge the reliability of our reasoning and glimpse the difference between our true motives and that armor of pretense that we wear to fool ourselves and others.

We will find a great deal of this information surprising, much of it disturbing, but all of it useful.

Bare attention brings order into the clutter that collects in those untidy little hidden corners of the mind.

As you achieve clear comprehension in the midst of lifes ordinary activities, you gain the ability to remain rational and peaceful while you throw the penetrating light of mindfulness into those irrational mental nooks and crannies.

You start to see the extent to which you are responsible for your own mental suffering.

You see your own miseries, fears, and tensions as self-generated.

You see the way you cause your own suffering, weakness, and limitations.

And the more deeply you understand these mental processes, the less hold they have on you.

In seated meditation, our primary focus is the breath.

Total concentration on the ever-changing breath brings us squarely into the present moment.

The same principle can be used in the midst of movement.

You can coordinate the activity in which you are involved with your breathing.

This lends a flowing rhythm to your movement, and it smoothes out many of the abrupt transitions.

Activity becomes easier to focus on, and mindfulness is increased.

Your awareness thus stays more easily in the present.

The mind is not burdened with preoccupations or bound in worries.

Whatever comes up can be dealt with instantly.

When you are truly mindful, your nervous system has a freshness and resiliency that fosters insight.

problem arises, and you simply deal with it, quickly, efficiently, and with a minimum of fuss.

You dont stand there in a dither, and you dont run off to a quiet corner so you can sit down and meditate about it.

And in those rare circumstances when no solution seems possible, you dont worry about that.

You just go on to the next thing that needs your attention.

Your intuition becomes a very practical faculty.

The concept of wasted time does not exist for a serious meditator.

Little dead spaces during your day can be turned to profit.

Every spare moment can be used for meditation.

Bored, twiddling your thumbs at the bus stop, meditate on boredom.

Be mindful of exactly what is taking place right now, even if it is tedious drudgery.

Take advantage of moments when you are alone.

Take advantage of activities that are largely mechanical.

Use all the moments you can.

You should try to maintain mindfulness of every activity and perception through the day, starting with the first perception when you awake and ending with the last thought before you fall asleep.

This is an incredibly tall goal to shoot for.

Just take it slowly and let your abilities grow over time.

The most feasible way to go about the task is to divide your day up into chunks.

Some time during the day, you can set aside fifteen minutes or so to practice the observation of specific types of mental states pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings, for instance or the hindrances, or thoughts.

The idea is to get practice at spotting the various items, and to preserve your state of mindfulness as fully as you can throughout the day.

Your mind never stops chattering, except in the very deepest states of concentration.

If you seriously apply your meditation, you will never be at a loss for something worthy of your attention.

Your practice must be made to apply to your everyday living situation.

It provides the trials and challenges you need to make your practice deep and genuine.

Its the fire that purifies your practice of deception and error, the acid test that shows you when you are getting somewhere and when you are fooling yourself.

If your meditation isnt helping you to cope with everyday conflicts and struggles, then it is shallow.

If your day-to-day emotional reactions are not becoming clearer and easier to manage, then you are wasting your time.

And you never know how you are doing until you actually make that test.

The practice of mindfulness is supposed to be a universal practice.

You dont do it sometimes and drop it the rest of the time.

You do it all the time.

Meditation that is successful only when you are withdrawn in some soundproof ivory tower is still undeveloped.

The meditator learns to pay bare attention to birth, growth, and decay of all the phenomena of the mind.

She turns from none of it and lets none of it escape.

This includes thoughts and emotions, activities and desires, the whole show.

She watches it all and watches it continuously.

It matters not whether it is lovely or horrid, beautiful or shameful.

She sees the way it is and the way it changes.

No aspect of experience is excluded or avoided.

If you are moving through your daily activities and you find yourself in a state of boredom, then meditate on your boredom.

Find out how it feels, how it works, and what it is composed of.

If you are angry, meditate on the anger.

If you find yourself sitting in the grip of a dark depression, meditate on that depression.

That way you will be better able to cope with the next depression that comes along.

This kind of practice is extremely rigorous and demanding, but it engenders a state of mental flexibility that is beyond comparison.

meditator keeps his mind open every second.

He is constantly investigating life, inspecting his own experience, viewing existence in a detached and inquisitive way.

This is the state of mind you need for liberation.

It is said that one may attain enlightenment at any moment if the mind is kept in a state of meditative readiness.

Its not so important what is perceived as the way in which you attend to that perception.

It could happen to you right now if you are ready.

You could attain enlightenment right now, if you are ready.

Whats in It for You certain benefits from your meditation.

They run together from the simple to the sublime.

We will set forth some of them here.

Your own practice can show you the truth.

Your own experience is all that counts.

Those things that we called hindrances or defilements are more than just unpleasant mental habits.

The ego sense itself is essentially a feeling of separationa perception of distance between that which we call me and that which we call other.

This perception is held in place only if it is constantly exercised, and the hindrances constitute that exercise.

Greed and lust are attempts to get some of that for me hatred and aversion are attempts to place greater distance between me and that.

All the defilements depend upon the perception of a barrier between self and other, and all of them foster this perception every time they are exercised.

Mindfulness perceives things deeply and with great clarity.

It brings our attention to the root of the defilements and lays bare their mechanism.

It sees their fruits and their effects upon us.

Once you have clearly seen what greed really is and what it really does to you and to others, you just naturally cease to engage in it.

When a child burns her hand on a hot oven, you dont have to tell her to pull it back

she does it naturally, without conscious thought and without decision.

There is a reflex action built into the nervous system for just that purpose, and it works faster than thought.

By the time the child perceives the sensation of heat and begins to cry, the hand has already been jerked back from the source of pain.

Mindfulness works in very much the same way it is wordless, spontaneous, and utterly efficient.

Clear mindfulness inhibits the growth of hindrances continuous mindfulness extinguishes them.

Thus, as genuine mindfulness is built up, the walls of the ego itself are broken down, craving diminishes, defensiveness and rigidity lessen, you become more open, accepting, and flexible.

You learn to share your loving friendliness.

Traditionally, Buddhists are reluctant to talk about the ultimate nature of human beings.

But those who are willing to make descriptive statements at all usually say that our ultimate essence or buddha nature is pure, holy, and inherently good.

The only reason that human beings appear otherwise is that their experience of that ultimate essence has been hindered it has been blocked like water behind a dam.

The hindrances are the bricks of which that dam is built.