Natalie Goldberg Quotes

I consider writing a legitimate Zen practice.

If you think you will get something from practicing zazen, already you are involved in impure practice.

For me, writing is a way of thinking. I write in a journal a lot. I'm a very impatient person, so writing and meditation allow me to slow down and watch my mind; they are containers that keep me in place, hold me still.

Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.

You can't learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can't learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can't learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.

The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. Zen practice is to open up our small mind.

Let your ears hear without trying to hear. Let the mind think without trying to think and without trying to stop it. That is practice.

In the last five years I used to go to Zen practice once a month, but since I assumed the post of prime minister it's been much harder.

It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.

When we cultivate mystical awareness or transcendent identity--which is a natural outgrowth of meditation and other practices--what happens is that we begin to take a witness position on our own lives, and that includes our minds. We break the illusion that we think our own thoughts, which is not always the case. Some ideas just arrive in our heads.

I've been meditating as part of my yoga practice for so long, I can't remember when I started.

From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive.

Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.

The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

I don't think it is possible to give tips for finding one's voice; it's one of those things for which there aren't really any tricks or shortcuts, or even any advice that necessarily translates from writer to writer. All I can tell you is to write as much as possible.

Writing is a combination of being alert to your outer surroundings and alive to your inner reality.

I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river.

In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.

The only thing I can say that is not bullshit is that you do have to learn to write in a way that you would learn to play the violin. Everybody seems to think that you should be able to turn on the faucet one day and out will come the novel. I think for most people it's just practice, practice, practice, that sense of just learning your instrument until - when you have an idea on the violin, you don't have to translate it into violin-speak anymore - the language is your own. It's not something you can think your way into, or outsmart. you've just got to do it.

While you are continuing this practice, week after week, year after year, your experience will become deeper and deeper, and your experience will cover everything you do in your everyday life. The most important thing is to forget all gain ing ideas, all dualistic ideas. In other words, just practice zazen in a certain posture. Do not think about anything. Just remain on your cushion without expecting anything. Then eventually you will resume your own true nature. That is to say, your own true nature resumes itself.

Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think - the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.

It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.

Zazen practice and everyday activity are one thing. We call zazen everyday life, and everyday life zazen.

Zen aims at freedom but its practice is disciplined.

Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.