Quotes About Mindfulness

Overstimulated, we seek out constrained worlds.

I notice things.

Seeing things through your eyes has reminded me how important it is to stop and find the joy in living again.

To the wise advice that we live every day as though it will be our last, we do well to add the admonition to live every day as though we will be on this earth forever.

You can make it all right if you will only be satisfied to remain small,' I told myself. I had to keep saying it over and over to myself. 'Be little. Don't try to be big. Work under the guns. Be a little worm in the fair apple of life.' I got all of these sayings at my tongue's end, used to go through the streets of Chicago muttering them to myself.

Japanese tea ceremony

There's nothing better than doing nothing.

Every moment you can meet your difficult feelings with kindness is a moment of peace.

Deep belly breathing is one of the most commonly recommended on-the-spot practices to calm your nervous system and, thus, anxiety. The reason for this is that when you breathe deeply, pushing your belly out all the way like a balloon, your vagus nerve is activated in such a way that it calms your amygdala, the emotional response center deep within your brain.

Does one really have to fret About enlightenment? No matter what road I travel, I'm going home.

you can dramatically extend life—not by multiplying the number of your years, but by expanding the fullness of your moments.

Five decades ago, some very kind people in Japan slipped me the secret: you can dramatically extend life—not by multiplying the number of your years, but by expanding the fullness of your moments.

Such a Zen dialogue is basically a contest, but it's really an anti-contest. It's a kind of reverse or paradoxical contest. It works like this: two people talk, and the first one who speaks from the ego loses. The one who wants to win is certainly going to lose.

There are two reasons why I currently teach within the framework of mindfulness. The first is that mindfulness is the least culture-bound of the three Buddhist practice traditions. It is relatively easy to extract it from the cultural and doctrinal matrix within which it arose and to present it as an evidence-based, secular, and culturally neutral process. The second reason is that the general method of mindfulness shares some features with the general method of modern science. I

The relative rest states—a blank mental screen, a defocused external gaze, physical relaxation, emotional neutrality, physical silence, mental quiet—may begin to pervade your sensory experience as the result of noticing vanishings.

You forget about all those things—you're just dominated by the vanishing-ness of things. It's just Gone, Gone, Gone. That, once again, leads to a figure-ground reversal. You are about to become Gone. Good, go with that.

You simply notice which part of your void-triggered bum-out is emotional body sensation, which part is mental images, and which part is mental talk. Keep those clearly delineated.

The medicine for that is to remember that the main goal in meditation is not to get to certain good states, but rather to eliminate what gets in the way of those good states. If you do that, those good states will be available any time you wish.

He then said something even more mind-boggling. "As a general principle, any positive state that you experience within the context of silent sitting practice, you must try to attain in the midst of ordinary life.

meditation elevates a person's base level of focus. By focus, I mean the ability to attend to what's relevant in a given situation.

I learned that impermanence is not merely something that you experience in your sensory circuits. It also informs your motor circuits. It's a kind of effortless energy that you can "ride on" in daily life. It imparts a bounce to your step, a flow to your voice, and a vibrancy to your creative thought. I also learned about the expansion-contraction paradigm for how consciousness works.

Often meditation works this way: we measure its value in terms of the suffering that would have happened but didn't—thanks to the fact that we have a practice.

Is meditation really that valuable? Yes it is, because a person's base level of concentration is, in a sense, the most valuable thing that they have. Anything a person may want will be more easily attained if they are functioning from a high level of effortless focus. The entire range of human endeavors relies on concentration, and if your base level of concentration is elevated through practice, it means that you can function from a continuous state of extraordinary focus every day.

On one hand, deeper and deeper meditative states become available. On the other, you are able to maintain those states throughout more and more complex activities of life. We might refer to the first dimension of growth as depth and the second dimension of growth as breadth.