As you’re sitting here meditating you develop the skills you’re going to need as you approach death. Even as the body is weak, make sure that your habitual reaction to thoughts of worry is quick, skillful, and strong.

"You not only protect yourself as you’re sitting here meditating, but you also develop the skills you’re going to need as you approach death. At that point, what you’re facing in the future is going to be very worrisome: the fact that you’re going to leave this body and you don’t know where you’re going to go. It’s all too easy to start thinking about the unskillful things you’ve done in the past, which is precisely the wrong time to be thinking about those things. You may not have someone hovering around you to remind you of the good you’ve done, so you’ve got to learn how to hover around yourself, to remind yourself of how to pull out of this particular hindrance so that it has less and less power over the mind. Even as the body is weak, make sure that your habitual reaction to thoughts of worry is quick, skillful, and strong."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Restlessness & Anxiety" (Meditations11)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

You Don't Have to Be Afraid of Missing Out on Your Karmic Legacy

Buddhism is not saying that if you have anger you’re a bad person and it’s all your fault. Rather, it’s saying that the anger is the unskillful element in the equation of sensing that something should be done — and that’s what you want to deal with.

A lot of people are embarrassed to think about the fact that they may have committed some pretty bad karma in the past. But we’re all in that boat, simply that some people’s karma is showing now and other people’s is going to show later.