I have lived with several Zen masters -- all of them cats.

Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.

You can marry the Buddha, and after a few months you will find on the human form the Buddha, too, has his limitations. There may be things that the mind reacts to and irritates you about the Buddha. "Why is he sitting over there in meditation?"

"Getting away from it all," many people want that, and of course ultimately the only way to get away from it all is to go within, now.

To meet everything and everyone through stillness instead of mental noise is the greatest gift you can offer the universe.

The mental suffering you create is always some form of non-acceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgement. The intensity of the suffering depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment.

Stillness is your essential nature.

If your mind is still... You can sense the peace that emanates from the earth.

I do not put much emphasis on periods of meditation - if you do meditation, it's fine - but the important thing is to bring the awareness into everyday life, into every little action that you do, into the varied challenges of everyday life.