Quotes from Tara Bennett-Goleman

compassion is a great tranquilizer.

Inner peace is the key: if we have inner peace we will be able to deal with situations with calmness and reason.

A great Tibetan teacher of mind training once remarked that one of the mind's most marvelous qualities is that it can be transformed.

if you're interested in learning more about his schema model, read Reinventing Your Life).

We see how our reactions to our emotions can keep us at a distance from ourselves.

But when emotions enter the picture, our mind's selective attention can be less useful: we can avoid noticing something not because it's irrelevant but because it might disturb us.

In the Dalai Lama's words, "One of the deepest human desires is to be known and understood.

Try not to get locked into your conceptual mind—it interferes with what's happening naturally. Just let go of the schema thoughts with a mindful presence. Just stay connected to awareness and try to be mindful whenever the schema appears. Try not to be concerned about what needs to happen; healing happens by itself, if you let it, with the soothing effect of awareness.

Jon Kabat-Zinn reminds us, "There is far more right with us than wrong with us." Mindfulness gives us a way to reconnect with that basic rightness, even at times when "what's wrong" looms large.

the more turbulent the emotions expressed on paper, the greater the improvement in their immune function.

Becoming aware of our emotional patterns gives us an idea of where our attachments—and so our clinging and misperception—are especially thick.

But the abandonment need not have been real; a symbolic one, like moving all the time or having an unstable, unreliable, or emotionally distant parent, can have the same kind of emotional impact.

That schema builds up the perception of danger by exaggerating any hint of a threat, so that small squalls become major hurricanes in the mind. The island woman had the opposite understanding: real danger may come, so you do everything you can to prepare, but once you've done what you can, just relax.

put the least effort into dealing with a disturbing feeling that will do the job.

For the vulnerability pattern, that philosophy offers a corrective for the distorted perception of the schema lens, which panics about everything, including what cannot be changed.

Alchemy is accepting everything in the pot without trying to reject or correct it—seeing that even the negative is part of the learning and healing.

We can change habits at any of four levels: our thoughts, our emotions, our behavior, and our relationships.

A brief act of noticing the disturbing thoughts and feelings, just an acknowledgment, like an inner nod—rather than a mental conversation with them—can sometimes suffice.

left. If you drive to work or school along the same route every day, intentionally vary the way you go, exploring different streets and unfamiliar territory. This sounds simple, almost innocuous. But when we do a familiar task in a novel way, we stir a fresh awareness.

This gives us an added anchor in the mind to resist the tide of those thoughts and to help us determine how active the schema seems to be. Mindfulness teacher Joseph Goldstein points out that one reason it is so important to make our thoughts the object of mindfulness is that "if we remain unaware of thoughts as they arise, it is difficult to develop insight" into them.

simply noting the disturbance may be enough to dislodge it from the mind.

breaking free from a habit, no matter how seemingly trivial, can bring a shift in our awareness, inspiring a fresh attitude: beginner's mind, seeing things as if for the first time. And that fresh look gives us the option of doing things differently.

Mindfulness means seeing things as they are, without trying to change them. The point is to dissolve our reactions to disturbing emotions, being careful not to reject the emotion itself. Mindfulness can change how we relate to, and perceive, our emotional states; it doesn't necessarily eliminate them.

Meditating on thoughts—being mindful of them—as he defines it, means "simply to be aware, as thoughts arise, that the mind is thinking, without getting involved in the content: not going off on a train of association, not analyzing the thought and why it came, but merely to be aware at the particular moment [that] 'thinking' is happening. If we fail to do this, to see our thoughts as such, they remain the unconscious filters on our perception.