Quotes About Mindfulness

That daydreaming mode turns out to be restorative. It's like hitting the reset button in your brain. And you don't get in that daydreaming mode typically by texting and Facebooking. You get in it by disengaging.

You don't meditate once and suddenly your life turns around. What it does is it lets you train your brain to be able to become more stable in an action-oriented way.

I like to have the first hour of my day without looking at my phone, the news, the TV or anything. I put on some music, have a shower, have a coffee with oat milk, set my intentions for the day before I do all of that.

When I attack a role, be it TV, film or stage, the first thing I say is, I don't want to know anything. If it's good I don't want to hear it; if it's bad I don't want to hear it. The only thing either thing can do is distract me. I like to stay focused.

What bothers me about TV is that it tends to take our minds off our minds.

Never, ever exercise in front of a TV or while reading. You lose 50 percent of the benefit of the exercise by not hearing and feeling your heart rate, your sweat and the pain levels that need to be encountered in fitness training.

Right before I decided to come out, I went on a spiritual retreat called 'Changing the Inner Dialogue of Your Subconscious Mind.' I'd never been to anything like it before, and all my friends were taking bets on how long I'd last with no TV, no radio, no phone. But for me that was the beginning of paying attention to all the little things.

You can binge a TV series or watch a reality show, and they're not innocent. They take a lot of room in your brain, and you don't have any space left for your own thoughts. They give you a scripted reality. It's an ideological tool.

They all matter to me, whether I'm working on a Sam Jackson film for a week or I'm the star of my own TV series - I take it all very seriously, and I have a healthy respect for the work in general, despite the role.

We start caring way too much about that new TV show or how many likes we're getting on Facebook or what our mother will think of our new house plant. These are bad values that turn us into frivolous people.

Mindfulness means being aware of how you're deploying your attention and making decisions about it, and not letting the tweet or the buzzing of your BlackBerry call your attention.

We need to be smarter than our smart phones and realize the people we are with are more important than the people we aren't with, and way more important than the strangers we hope will tweet and like and share and Instagram whatever we're sending out into the cybersphere.

I don't really think before I tweet.

I don't tweet.

People tweet before they think, and it becomes obsessive.

Read each tweet about 95 times before you send it. Look at every Instagram post about 95 times before you send it.

I will count to 10 before tweeting.

No more than a surgeon can operate while tweeting can you reach your potential with one ear in, one ear out. You actually have to reacquaint yourself with concentration. We all do.

Under the deluge of minute-to-minute text conversations, emails, relentless exchange of media channels and passwords and apps and reminders and tweets and tags, we lose sight of what all this fuss is supposed to be about in the first place: ourselves.

Americans cannot realize how many chances for mental improvement they lose by their inveterate habit of keeping six conversations when there are twelve in the room.

In the beginning of my twenties, I started transcendental meditation. For years, I did nothing else. Every holiday, I went to courses. Meditation is a real simple instrument. You don't need a long beard or a sari. It's meant to bring you to yourself. It's as easy as that.

If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.

I was about twenty and the Beatles were meditating and I heard about it and they had a center in New York and I came to the center and I learned about it.

It's only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day.