Stephan Bodian > Quotes

“Resist the temptation to be someone once again. Allow yourself to be no one; allow your mind to be empty of thought, unfurnished, until the identities gradually filter back in. Notice the space between your identities and the awareness of them. Notice if a similar gap appears at other times during the day, an empty space that you may have ignored before but can now lean into and prolong. Continue to open to the openness.”
― Stephan Bodian, Beyond Mindfulness: The Direct Approach to Lasting Peace, Happiness, and Love

“One instant is eternity eternity is the now. When you see through this one instant, you see through the one who sees. —Wu-men”
― Stephan Bodian, Infinite Awakening: A Guide to Nondual Wisdom and the Pathless Path

“Ultimately, your every desire—the desire for material things, relationships, career success, sexual gratification—is really the desire for the peace you experience for brief moments when you attain the object of your desire.”
― Stephan Bodian, Wake Up Now

“As in mindfulness practice, each moment of practicing awakened awareness offers a choice-point: Do I allow myself to become distracted and get seduced back into the drama? Or do I choose the openness, clarity, disidentification, and freedom that I discovered but keep forgetting?”
― Stephan Bodian, Beyond Mindfulness: The Direct Approach to Lasting Peace, Happiness, and Love

“Meditation increases awareness and sensitivity; as such, it can be an antidote to numbness and distraction.”
― Stephan Bodian, Meditation For Dummies (For Dummies

“Thoughts are the images, memories, beliefs, judgments, and reflections that float through your mind and often give rise to your feelings.”
― Stephan Bodian, Meditation For Dummies (For Dummies

“The fact is, for most people the initial awakening is just the first step on a lifelong journey of deepening, clarifying, and applying the awakened perspective to every circumstance we encounter. Rather than a one-and-done, we’re constantly awakening and reawakening as we find ourselves getting lost in new dreams and identities, then seeing through them into new levels of clarity and freedom.”
― Stephan Bodian, Infinite Awakening: A Guide to Nondual Wisdom and the Pathless Path

“I’m deeply rooted in the earth, yet open to the higher powers of the cosmos—independent, yet inextricably connected to all of life.”
― Stephan Bodian, Meditation For Dummies (For Dummies

“If you view your relationships as an awakening journey rather than a source of personal gratification, you’ll always have plenty of fuel for the fire of awakening. From the spiritual perspective, as the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa used to say, disappointment is extremely good news.”
― Stephan Bodian, Infinite Awakening: A Guide to Nondual Wisdom and the Pathless Path

“These four practices—concentration, receptive awareness, cultivation, and contemplation—constitute the major uses of awareness throughout the world’s great meditative traditions.”
― Stephan Bodian, Meditation For Dummies (For Dummies

“In my experience, anger generally arises in response to one of two deeper emotions: hurt or fear.”
― Stephan Bodian, Meditation For Dummies (For Dummies

“But awakening, once it occurs, tends to be ruthless and uncontrollable, like a wildfire that burns up everything in its path. “Spirituality isn’t child’s play,” warns Nisargadatta Maharaj. “My sentences will tear to pieces anyone who listens to them.” After all, what you awaken to is the truth, which shatters the illusion of who you’ve believed yourself to be. You might want to consider whether you’re ready to have your tidy little world torn to pieces or consumed in a conflagration before you set out to discover who you are. I’ve known many people whose lives were turned upside down by awakening and who spent years learning how to live in a completely new way.”
― Stephan Bodian, Wake Up Now

“Buddhists like to compare the mind to a monkey—constantly chattering and hopping about from branch to branch, topic to topic.”
― Stephan Bodian, Meditation For Dummies (For Dummies

“When I teach the School for Awakening, I generally end by expressing my hope that people leave knowing less than when they came. All knowledge is a form of ignorance, taught the great Indian sage Nisargadatta Maharaj. The most accurate map is still just a map, not the territory, just an image and not reality. Don’t become fixated on words and concepts and lose sight of the vibrant, mysterious, and inexpressible reality to which they merely point—and for which silence is ultimately the most accurate voice. In fact, my most fervent wish—and the wish of any true teacher —is that you’ll forget everything I’ve said and fall off the edge of knowledge into the ineffable.”
― Stephan Bodian, Infinite Awakening: A Guide to Nondual Wisdom and the Pathless Path

“of a thousand miles begins with a single step. In the case of meditation, this simple but essential step involves turning your mind away from its usual preoccupation with external events — or, just as often, with the story it tells you about external events — and toward your inner sensate experience. If you’re like most people, you’re so caught up with what’s happening around you”
― Stephan Bodian, Meditation For Dummies®, Mini Edition

“The realization “I am That” reveals that there is only That, not that there is only me. The first is called awakening; the second is called narcissism.”
― Stephan Bodian, Infinite Awakening: A Guide to Nondual Wisdom and the Pathless Path

“As in mindfulness practice, each moment of practicing awakened awareness offers s choice-point: Do I allow myself to become distracted and get seduced back into the drama? Or do I choose the openness, clarity, disidentification, and freedom that I discovered but keep forgetting?”
― Stephan Bodian, Beyond Mindfulness: The Direct Approach to Lasting Peace, Happiness, and Love

“Despite what some spiritual teachers may suggest, however, ego is not the enemy, and pitting ourselves against it in an attempt to eliminate it and become egoless just creates an inner conflict between parts of the ego that can’t be resolved. Rather, we can see it for what it is without trying to change it, while infusing it with the greater wisdom and love we discover as we awaken. When we realize our inseparability with all of life, ego devotes itself to aligning with rather than resisting what is and takes action based not on narrow self-interest but on the good of the larger Self we now know ourselves to be.”
― Stephan Bodian, Infinite Awakening: A Guide to Nondual Wisdom and the Pathless Path