Quotes About Mindfulness

I struggle with my life because instead of just doing what needs to be done, I fight the underlying fear; I try to unlock the door. Paradoxically, the only way to unlock the door is to forget the door. Instead of obsessing about the locked door, we need to be going about our lives, which means cleaning up the house, taking care of the baby, going to work, whatever.

That's essentially what Zen practice is about: functioning from moment to moment.

When I watch my mind and stay with my body, out of that comes some course of action.

Living Zen is nothing special: life as it is. Zen is life itself, nothing added.

There's nothing wrong with conceptualization per se; but when we take our opinions about any event to be some kind of absolute truth and fail to see that they are opinions, then we suffer. That's false suffering.

The minute we have even a passing thought of judging another person, the red light of practice should go on.

In practice, we return over and over again to perception, to just sitting. Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling.

At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see.

So there are two kinds of suffering. One is when we feel we're being pressed down; as though suffering is coming at us from without, as though we're receiving something that's making us suffer. The other kind of suffering is being under, just bearing it, just being it.

Doing one thing at a time and giving oneself wholly to doing it is the most efficient way one can possibly live, because there's no blockage in the organism whatsoever. When we live and work in that way, we are extremely efficient without being rushed. Life is very smooth.

Who knows how you should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.

103When we try to be something that we are not, we become the slave of a rigid, fixed mind, following a rule about how things have to be. The violence and the anger in us remain unnoticed, because we are caught in our pictures of how we should be.

Take the experience of having been hurt. When we've been criticized or treated unfairly, it's important to note the thoughts we have and move into the cellular level of being hurt, so that our awareness becomes simply raw sensation: our trembling jaw, the contraction in our chest, whatever we may be feeling in the cells of our body. This pure experiencing is zazen.

Our thoughts are not to be relied on. They just come and go. Are they important? No, they're not important. But until we know our thoughts a little bit, we believe them.

Awareness is our true self; it's what we are.

Changing the pictures on the wall from greed, anger, and ignorance into ideals (that we should not be greedy, angry, or ignorant) improves the decoration, perhaps—but leaves us without freedom.

In practice, we work with the complex of physical sensation and thought that is "I feel hurt." If we totally experience the sensations and thought, then the "feeling hurt" evaporates. I never would say that we shouldn't feel what we feel.

Every day People straighten up the hair, why not the heart?

Treat yourself the way you treat the person you love most in the world. Get on your own team.

Sleep is my friend and is the only place in this world where I don't get into fights with other people

Just because some people are fueled by drama doesn't mean you have to attend the performance.

After all, I want to live my life, not rush through it.

You will be with you longer than anyone else on the planet, so why not make it a good relationship?

when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.