Quotes from Tara Bennett-Goleman

To her lover a beautiful woman is a delight; / To a monk she's a distraction; / To a mosquito, a good meal. It makes the point well: how things seem depends on the lens or filter through which we look at them.

It has taken years and years, starting early in childhood, for the emotional brain to acquire its repertoire of habit. Schemas like perfectionism and deprivation become ingrained through innumerable repeated episodes. It naturally takes time to undo these emotional habits and to master a healthier response.

In a sense, our darker moments and most upsetting feelings are an opportunity for spiritual growth and uncovering our natural wisdom, for waking up—if we choose to use them that way. If so, our deepest insights can emerge from working directly—with awareness—with our own difficulties.

Emotional fixations are like that—if you see them clearly, unflinchingly, for what they really are, you take the power away from them. They no longer control you. Confusion dawns as clarity.

Everything changes—an insight that can help free us from the pull of pleasure and the aversion to pain.

Two qualities are essential to mindfulness: even-hovering attention and tenacity.

The key lies in staying with the experience through all its changes.

We let the schema define our experience.

go of these old familiar ways of being. Before we can turn to a more rational view, we need to empathize with our emotional needs—before we can change, we need to accept and be loving to ourselves.

order for mindfulness to work for us, we need to make an effort to strengthen our ability to be mindful.

This quality of seeing things freshly, as though for the first time, lies at the heart of mindfulness.

Mindfulness is not thinking about what we experience, but a direct, bare attention to the experience itself.

Mental noting can be especially helpful while you're aware of strong emotions and thoughts, particularly for habitual thoughts and feelings, which can pull you into their reality.

Mental noting can also be a help when you need to focus your wandering, confused, or scattered mind.

you can use the mental note "rising, falling" to track the sensations of breathing as your abdomen rises and falls with each breath.

The noting should be like a whisper in the mind, not like a mantra, or word to focus on. Keep it very soft and light. As an aid to practice, mental noting can help to clearly acknowledge with precision what is actually happening.

apply an antidote, a positive alternative to the mental habit of the afflictive emotion.

other people very clearly, especially the ways we perpetuate our own suffering, driven by habitual impulses and patterns but oblivious to their root causes.

In fact, less than one percent of all the information the mind takes in actually reaches our awareness. Likewise, most of how we react to that information remains outside our awareness;

mental noting may help you. Are you agitated? Note "agitation." Are you gripped in tension? Note "tension." Do you feel your pulse beating or your heart pounding? Just note it as such.

When we are free of self-concern or self-pity, free of inner preoccupations, compassion emerges as a spontaneous expression of our awareness

Equanimity is a profound quality of mindfulness that cultivates the ability to let go. With equanimity, we can acknowledge that things are as they are, even though we may wish otherwise.

We start to regulate an upsetting emotion the moment we become aware of it.

we are consciously aware of only a tiny portion of our perceptions and actions. To us, that small compartment appears to fill our whole mental cabinet.