Quotes About Mindfulness

We can change habits at any of four levels: our thoughts, our emotions, our behavior, and our relationships.

A brief act of noticing the disturbing thoughts and feelings, just an acknowledgment, like an inner nod—rather than a mental conversation with them—can sometimes suffice.

left. If you drive to work or school along the same route every day, intentionally vary the way you go, exploring different streets and unfamiliar territory. This sounds simple, almost innocuous. But when we do a familiar task in a novel way, we stir a fresh awareness.

This gives us an added anchor in the mind to resist the tide of those thoughts and to help us determine how active the schema seems to be. Mindfulness teacher Joseph Goldstein points out that one reason it is so important to make our thoughts the object of mindfulness is that "if we remain unaware of thoughts as they arise, it is difficult to develop insight" into them.

simply noting the disturbance may be enough to dislodge it from the mind.

Mindfulness means seeing things as they are, without trying to change them. The point is to dissolve our reactions to disturbing emotions, being careful not to reject the emotion itself. Mindfulness can change how we relate to, and perceive, our emotional states; it doesn't necessarily eliminate them.

Meditating on thoughts—being mindful of them—as he defines it, means "simply to be aware, as thoughts arise, that the mind is thinking, without getting involved in the content: not going off on a train of association, not analyzing the thought and why it came, but merely to be aware at the particular moment [that] 'thinking' is happening. If we fail to do this, to see our thoughts as such, they remain the unconscious filters on our perception.

Stepping back from our thoughts through mindfulness gives us the freedom to question the thoughts and so be less controlled by them.

Mindfulness gives us breathing space from this conditioning.

As another general antidote for distress, the Dalai Lama recommends caring for others despite our own problems. "The space of awareness is small, so our personal distress looms large," as he puts it. "But the moment you think of helping others, the mind expands, and our own problems seem smaller.

Bringing an automatic habit into awareness in order to change it is a crucial step.

I realized that part of my struggle was in wishing things were different:

Automatic thoughts are the slippery initial defining thoughts of a schema, the ones that prime the flood of feelings and lead to a schema attack.

But once we become aware that the sequence is starting, we can consciously and intentionally initiate a different, more constructive response.

The ability to bring a lightheartedness and humor to our schemas is a powerful way to reframe these weighty thoughts.

Having counter-thoughts ready makes it easier to challenge them, once mindfulness has brought them to your attention.

Bringing mindfulness to the moment, she was able to step back enough to ask herself, "Do I want to make this real?" That gave her a chance to answer herself, "No"—and she would drop it.

Opening up a space in her mind gave her more choice in the moment.

When she caught herself in such moments, she'd talk back to her deprivation schema, saying, "I'm not depriving you if I don't eat this ice cream.

When the amygdala heats up with intense activity, emotionally loaded thoughts loom larger in our field of attention.

The second way mindfulness disempowers schema thoughts has to do with the nature of attention itself.

mindfulness fills much of our attention with something other than the mental tape loops that activate our schemas.

Of course I'm anxious now—my schema fears are making me assume I'm going to be abandoned or left out.

Mindfulness helps to derail schema thoughts by focusing our awareness on the here and now, simply noting what we experience without getting caught up in our thoughts or our reactions to them.