“There’s nothing in sitting except maintaining awareness. Our ability to do that grows over time. You can call that progress if you want, but basically we are just returning to what we’ve alway been. There’s really nothing special about it. So any idea that there’s something special about sitting, that we have to get into some spiritual state, or some wonderful state, that’s not it.
As you’re sitting, if you really maintain awareness, which you probably won’t, but if you do, it feels so different from what we ordinarily do that we may think we’ve done something special, but we haven’t really.
I want to emphasize that sitting is not about shutting out your thoughts, its about seeing them as thoughts of no importance whatsoever. But I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t think his or her thoughts are of some importance, including me sometimes. We definitely don’t see our thoughts as little energy blips that for whatever reason are set off.
When we take thoughts seriously, we create false emotion. If we don’t understand that our life gets ruled by false emotion and we don’t get around to living at all. When your husband says, if you ask him to do something: “I dont feel like doing that, i want to watch the football game,” off we go, it doesn’t take much. “Well, this marriage is supposed to be about 50/50, and here he is, selfish he’s going to watch the football game.”
See, that’s when we’re gone. It takes that much. How long do we stay gone, folks? Sometimes when you’ve been practicing a long time ten seconds, sometimes two days. In the meantime the atmosphere stays cool, all because we haven’t seen a thought as a thought, producing an emotion. If you’re married, i’m not saying to never talk things over, I’m talking about the false emotion that poisons life.”
excerpt from: dharma talk on youtube: ‘sitting practice’