I would like to ofer some exercises that can help us use the Five Precepts to cultivate and strengthen mindfulness. It is best to choose one of these exercises and work with it meticulously for a week. Then examine the results and choose another for a subsequent week. These practices can help us understand and find ways to work with each precept. 1. Refrain from killing: reverence for life. Undertake for one week to purposefully bring no harm in thought, word, or deed to any living creature. Particularly, become aware of any living beings in your world (people, animals, even plants) whom you ignore, and cultivate a sense of care and reverence for them too.2. Refraining from stealing: care with material goods. Undertake for one week to act on every single thought of generosity that arises spontaneously in your heart.3. Refraining from sexual misconduct: conscious sexuality. Undertake for one week to observe meticulously how often sexual feelings arise in your consciousness. Each time, note what particular mind states you find associated with them such as love, tension, compulsion, caring, loneliness, desire for communication, greed, pleasure, agression, and so forth.4. Refraining from false speech: speech from the heart. Undertake for one week not to gossip (positively or negatively) or speak about anyone you know who is not present with you (any third party).5. Refraining from intoxicants to the point of heedlessness. Undertake for one week or one month to refrain from all intoxicants and addictive substances (such as wine, marijuana, even cigarettes and/or caffeine if you wish). Observe the impulses to use these, and become aware of what is going on in the heart and mind at the time of those impulses (88-89). Jack Kornfield
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
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Margaret Atwood
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
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Elie Wiesel
The world was collapsing, and the only thing that really mattered to me was that she was alive.
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Rick Riordan
When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love.
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J.k. Rowling
If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave.
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Unknown
More Quotes By Jack Kornfield
Wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people...
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not towisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
