Quotes About Mindfulness

To my surprise, I had not just doodled, I had prayed (I drew new shapes and names of each friend and focused on the person whose name stared at me from the paper). I had though OF each person as I drew but not ABOUT each person. I could just sit with them in a variation on stillness. I could hold them in prayer.

Those obsessed with health are not healthy; the first requisite of good health is a certain calculated carelessness about oneself.

The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.

If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?

we know nothing of tomorrow, our business is to be good and happy today

Many in this world run after felicity like an absent man hunting for his hat, while all the time it is on his head or in his hand.

Mindfulness meditation doesn't change life. Life remains as fragile and unpredictable as ever. Meditation changes the heart's capacity to accept life as it is.

The responses of friendliness, compassion, and appreciation that I felt ...--all situational permutations of basic goodwill--depended on my mind's being relaxed and alert enough to notice both what was happening around me and what was happening as my internal response. [p.50]

although I knew what issues had been most difficult for me in my life, I may not have known the depth of the feeling I had about them. ... When those stories, with their feelings, returned ... I paid attention to them. What I tell people now it, 'Try to keep your mind hospitable. This needs to visit for a while. Don't be afraid.' [p. 122]

Right Understanding means feeling terrible, remembering pain is finite, and taking some solace from that remembering. And, when things are pleasant, even splendidly pleasant, remembering impermanence doesn't diminish the experience--it enhances it [p. 33]

If I can't see around my personal story, I'll have no way to see sit in context: This is one event in a life of events. It is whatever it is, but it is temporal. The pain is terrible, but it won't last. I can manage it. or this joy is incredible, but it won't last. Celebrate it now! [pp. 104-105]

Mindfulness, the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience, is at the heart of what the Buddha taught.

I think they paid attention to their lives and became wise. For those of us who don't arrive at wisdom naturally, meditation is one way to get there through practice.

Mindfulness, the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience, is at the heart of what the Buddha taught. This book is meant to be a basic Buddhist primer, but no one should be daunted. It's easier than you think [p. 4]

Fear doesn't frighten me as much as it used to. I know it's from clinging, and I know it will pass [p. 29].

Being trapped by fear is a form of delusion. Either I can do something or I can't. If I truly can't ... I don't do it. If I truly can, and it wold be a wholesome thing to do, I push myself [p. 39].

Life is easier without imperatives.

Here is an exercise in advanced Right Speech. Starting tomorrow when you wake up, don't gossip. See what happens if you just give up making comments about anyone not present. Listen carefully to the voice in your mind as it is getting ready to make a comment, and think to yourself, "Why am I saying this?" Awareness of intention is the best clue for knowing whether the remark you are about to make is Right Speech. Is

Don't just do something, sit there!

not doing anything to change experience but rather discovering that experience is bearable.

Here is the instruction: Only connect. Wherever you are, right now, pay attention. Forever.

I would not ask you to do this practice, to undertake this path of liberation from the habits of suffering mind, unless it were a feasible path.

The next-to-last sentence that the Buddha is reported to have spoken as he was dying, before his final sentence of encouragement to his community, was "Transient are all conditioned things.

Listen, or your tongue will make you deaf—Tribe Unknown