Breath control is crucial to most of the contemplative traditions... Qur'anic reciters chant long phrases for meditation. It is natural for the audience to adjust their breathing too and find that this has a calming, therapeutic effect, which enables them to grasp the more elusive teachings of the text.

Karen Armstrong
Some Similar Quotes
  1. We must experience the Truth in a direct, practical and real way; this is only possible in the stillness and silence of the mind, and this is achieved by means of meditation. - Samael Aun Weor

  2. Yoga is the cessation of the movements of the mind. Then there is abiding in the Seer's own form. - Anonymous

  3. Sometimes it was during the breaks that the real meditation happened - moments when it was obvious that wisdom is not something you have, but a wave-length you tune in to. - Matt Padwick

  4. I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

  5. Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing. - Anonymous

More Quotes By Karen Armstrong
  1. Ibn al- Arabi gave this advice: Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and...

  2. Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs. fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our...

  3. When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is "really" there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience is stripped away, so you can never respond to the...

  4. Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true...

  5. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to...

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