Rob Nairn > Quotes

“Pain represents 10 percent of the problem, while suffering, which is not wanting to feel the pain, represents 90 percent of the problem.”
― Rob Nairn, From Mindfulness to Insight: Meditations to Release Your Habitual Thinking and Activate Your Inherent Wisdom

“There is a natural progression in meditation from using a single support like sound or breath to stabilize our attention, to expanding our focus to include all our experience, both internal and external. At this stage, everything becomes the meditation. This is the practice we have called Resting in the Midst of Our Experience. In other mindfulness contexts, it is called “choiceless awareness,” and in Buddhist meditation practice it is called “calm abiding meditation without an object.” Resting in awareness is also often referred to as “open awareness meditation.”
― Rob Nairn, From Mindfulness to Insight: Meditations to Release Your Habitual Thinking and Activate Your Inherent Wisdom

“When you meditate you cannot clear your mind, you cannot stop thoughts, you cannot get rid of emotions,”
― Rob Nairn, Diamond Mind: A Psychology of Meditation

“our resistance to the inevitable pain of life is what really causes us to suffer, not the pain itself.”
― Rob Nairn, From Mindfulness to Insight: Meditations to Release Your Habitual Thinking and Activate Your Inherent Wisdom

“Once we see an inner pattern of mind clearly and bring to it mindful awareness and acceptance, this in itself initiates the process of self-liberation.”
― Rob Nairn, From Mindfulness to Insight: Meditations to Release Your Habitual Thinking and Activate Your Inherent Wisdom

“This is the order of things then: First, training ourselves to be present in the moment with what is there. Second, developing the attitude of self-acceptance so that whatever arises is OK, thus coming to terms with ourselves. Third, abandoning all goals.”
― Rob Nairn, Diamond Mind: A Psychology of Meditation

“wanting and enjoyment are separate pathways in the brain, and the stronger wanting becomes, the weaker our enjoyment of life is.”
― Rob Nairn, From Mindfulness to Insight: Meditations to Release Your Habitual Thinking and Activate Your Inherent Wisdom

“Fear of rejection can trigger deep fears within us, because as humans we have evolved to live in groups for our survival and in the distant past, exclusion from the group might have meant annihilation and death.”
― Rob Nairn, From Mindfulness to Insight: Meditations to Release Your Habitual Thinking and Activate Your Inherent Wisdom

“All traditions of Buddhism stress the importance of first practicing calm abiding meditation (shamatha) and then insight meditation (vipassana).”
― Rob Nairn, From Mindfulness to Insight: Meditations to Release Your Habitual Thinking and Activate Your Inherent Wisdom

“Another problem arises if we work with technique: we work with something which is manipulating the mind, whereas the purpose of meditation is to release the grasping action of the mind so that the inherently enlightened qualities can manifest.”
― Rob Nairn, Diamond Mind: A Psychology of Meditation

“By freeing the mind from its negative and neurotic patterns and liberating our inner potential, we experience a spontaneous response which will be helpful and beneficial to others.”
― Rob Nairn, Diamond Mind: A Psychology of Meditation

“When you feel confident in using the breath support, you can experiment with letting go of the support and just resting. In this way, you can try alternating between using the breath support and resting, and notice how this feels.”
― Rob Nairn, From Mindfulness to Insight: Meditations to Release Your Habitual Thinking and Activate Your Inherent Wisdom