Quotes About Mindfulness

The payoff of living in the past or the future is you never have to do your work in the present.

I was thirty years old before I had an actual thought. Everything up till then was either what Buddhists call "monkey-mind" chatter or the reflexive regurgitation of whatever my parents or teachers said, or whatever I saw on the news or read in a book, or heard somebody rap about, hanging around the street corner.

The sword master stepping onto the fighting floor knows he will be facing powerful opponents. Not the physical adversaries whom he will fight (though those indeed serve as stand-ins for the enemy). The real enemy is inside himself. The monk in meditation knows this. So does the yogi. So do the film editor and the video-game creator and the software writer.

The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications, and a million reasons why we can't/shouldn't/won't do what we know we need to do.

We glide about in a daze, disconnected from our reason.

Have you ever meditated? Then you know what it feels like to shift your consciousness to a witnessing mode and to watch thoughts arise, float across your awareness, and then drift away, to be replaced by the next thought and the thought after that. These are not thoughts. They are chatter.

In this book, when I say "Don't think," what I mean is: don't listen to the chatter. Pay no attention to those rambling, disjointed images and notions that drift across the movie screen of your mind.

I have conquered the need to conquer the world

If you want inner peace, find it in solitude, not speed, and if you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go.

Success to him meant having the time to do nothing.

The job of the conscious is to make the unconscious conscious.

Almighty God, help me to be a good listener to Your voice speaking to my heart. I don't want to drown it out with the noise and busyness of life. Help me to take every thought captive in obedience to Your Word. Keep me from entertaining unrighteousness in my thought life. Enable me to be diligent in not allowing anything into my mind that does not glorify You.

Free-will is not just the ability to choose between things; it is the ability to choose what you are.

You cannot release being judgmental whilst you remain in judgment of it.

Ideally, only 10 percent of Taijiquan movement is expressed externally, as 90 percent of the true functioning occurs internally and is unseen by others.

boredom is a self-inflicted wound. Heal thyself.

Don't be a complainer, and always think before you speak. Stay away from gossip, offensive language, or off-color jokes.

Unplug yourself often and you risk losing touch with your feelings altogether.

Jack Kornfield offers a beautiful image for our new understanding: "We can let ourselves be carried by the river of feeling—because we know how to swim.

I remember thinking how often we look, but never see…we listen, but never hear…we exist, but never feel. We take our relationships for granted. A house is only a place. It has no life of its own. It needs human voices, activity, and laughter to come alive. —Erma Bombeck

Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long.

My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it's the other way round.

The world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don't swat. Don't even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee's temper. Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.

The whole problem with people is...they know what matters, but they don't choose it.