Quotes About Mindfulness

Everything changes—an insight that can help free us from the pull of pleasure and the aversion to pain.

Two qualities are essential to mindfulness: even-hovering attention and tenacity.

The key lies in staying with the experience through all its changes.

order for mindfulness to work for us, we need to make an effort to strengthen our ability to be mindful.

This quality of seeing things freshly, as though for the first time, lies at the heart of mindfulness.

Mindfulness is not thinking about what we experience, but a direct, bare attention to the experience itself.

Mental noting can be especially helpful while you're aware of strong emotions and thoughts, particularly for habitual thoughts and feelings, which can pull you into their reality.

Mental noting can also be a help when you need to focus your wandering, confused, or scattered mind.

you can use the mental note "rising, falling" to track the sensations of breathing as your abdomen rises and falls with each breath.

The noting should be like a whisper in the mind, not like a mantra, or word to focus on. Keep it very soft and light. As an aid to practice, mental noting can help to clearly acknowledge with precision what is actually happening.

apply an antidote, a positive alternative to the mental habit of the afflictive emotion.

other people very clearly, especially the ways we perpetuate our own suffering, driven by habitual impulses and patterns but oblivious to their root causes.

mental noting may help you. Are you agitated? Note "agitation." Are you gripped in tension? Note "tension." Do you feel your pulse beating or your heart pounding? Just note it as such.

When we are free of self-concern or self-pity, free of inner preoccupations, compassion emerges as a spontaneous expression of our awareness

Equanimity is a profound quality of mindfulness that cultivates the ability to let go. With equanimity, we can acknowledge that things are as they are, even though we may wish otherwise.

We start to regulate an upsetting emotion the moment we become aware of it.

Inner peace is the key: if we have inner peace we will be able to deal with situations with calmness and reason.

if you're interested in learning more about his schema model, read Reinventing Your Life).

We see how our reactions to our emotions can keep us at a distance from ourselves.

Try not to get locked into your conceptual mind—it interferes with what's happening naturally. Just let go of the schema thoughts with a mindful presence. Just stay connected to awareness and try to be mindful whenever the schema appears. Try not to be concerned about what needs to happen; healing happens by itself, if you let it, with the soothing effect of awareness.

Jon Kabat-Zinn reminds us, "There is far more right with us than wrong with us." Mindfulness gives us a way to reconnect with that basic rightness, even at times when "what's wrong" looms large.

Becoming aware of our emotional patterns gives us an idea of where our attachments—and so our clinging and misperception—are especially thick.

put the least effort into dealing with a disturbing feeling that will do the job.

Alchemy is accepting everything in the pot without trying to reject or correct it—seeing that even the negative is part of the learning and healing.