Quotes from Tara Bennett-Goleman

Fortunately, even if we can't control the circumstances that lead to such thoughts, we have the ability to free our minds from their hold.

The act of challenging schemas can take on the warrior spirit of wrathful compassion

Thoughts have no power except the power we give them.

mindfulness fills much of our attention with something other than the mental tape loops that activate our schemas.

Of course I'm anxious now—my schema fears are making me assume I'm going to be abandoned or left out.

Mindfulness helps to derail schema thoughts by focusing our awareness on the here and now, simply noting what we experience without getting caught up in our thoughts or our reactions to them.

It is not things themselves that trouble us," wrote Epictetus, a first-century Greek philosopher, "but our thoughts about those things.

Realizing that these thoughts are just projections of the mind helps counter the disturbing emotions they provoke.

One method—mental noting, where we label familiar thoughts as such without getting pulled into them—is quite helpful in working with our schemas.

Don't put your purpose before your connection.

Thoughts have no solidity, but merely the appearance of solidity because of the power we give them.

Challenge those thoughts. Remind yourself that they distort the way things really are.

The more often we repeat a mental pattern, the more likely it becomes in the future;

If you stay mindful as thoughts appear in your awareness, they reveal their empty nature and eventually dissolve. Let them vanish on their own, without adding to them in any way.

Emotions add the qualities of pleasantness or unpleasantness to what the mind perceives.

Mindfulness is a meditative awareness that cultivates the capacity to see things just as they are from moment to moment

In any turmoil or with any problem, as Tulku Thondup says, "The greatest source of help and strength is our minds.

Greater contentment is to be found in letting go of our hopes and fears than in any clinging. These reflections on the natural laws that affect us can inspire us to turn toward spiritual practice as a refuge.

equanimity offers a great inner resource: a sense of nonreactivity, of patience and acceptance.

In Buddhist psychology, compassion is seen as a direct antidote to aggression.

A pithy Zen aphorism goes like this: 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.

A mental state can last for but a moment, until another state rises to the top of the mind's hierarchy, or it can become a habitual frame of mind.

Change is ceaseless.

get to a point where we've observed our mind long enough to become more aware of its repetitive cycles, playing the same tapes over and over, in endless variations.