Quotes About Mindfulness

It is not things themselves that trouble us," wrote Epictetus, a first-century Greek philosopher, "but our thoughts about those things.

Realizing that these thoughts are just projections of the mind helps counter the disturbing emotions they provoke.

One method—mental noting, where we label familiar thoughts as such without getting pulled into them—is quite helpful in working with our schemas.

Challenge those thoughts. Remind yourself that they distort the way things really are.

If you stay mindful as thoughts appear in your awareness, they reveal their empty nature and eventually dissolve. Let them vanish on their own, without adding to them in any way.

Mindfulness is a meditative awareness that cultivates the capacity to see things just as they are from moment to moment

equanimity offers a great inner resource: a sense of nonreactivity, of patience and acceptance.

In Buddhist psychology, compassion is seen as a direct antidote to aggression.

get to a point where we've observed our mind long enough to become more aware of its repetitive cycles, playing the same tapes over and over, in endless variations.

Their rule of thumb for classifying a state of mind was simple but profound: it depended on whether the mind state led to inner peace or disturbed the mind.

We each have our unique ways of responding to life's challenges, and we need to respect our own needs, temperament, and timing.

With mindfulness, we can see their impersonal nature more clearly, not identifying with the thinker, letting thoughts dissolve like waves back into awareness.

There is no fixed, solid, permanent self—just a series of changing patterns of experience.

schema responses are overreactions, not appropriate responses to difficult situations.

Instead of being swept away and captured by a thought or feeling, mindfulness steadily observes those thoughts and feelings as they come and go.

our emotional problems are seen as temporary and superficial. The emphasis is on what is right with us,

Buddhist psychology acknowledges our disturbing emotions but sees them as covering our essential goodness like clouds covering the sun.

Feelings are held, but not held on to.

Recognizing, for instance, "Oh, I'm having those-feelings again," or "Here come my schema thoughts," gives us the freedom to wake from the schema trance.

Mindfulness can help you recognize your fearful thoughts so that you can see that they're simply thoughts, not reality.

By mindfully monitoring your thoughts rather than letting them dictate how you behave, you will start to win emotional freedom from your fears.

mindfulness creates a "wise" attention, a space of clarity that emerges when we quiet the mind. It makes us more receptive to the whispers of our innate intuitive wisdom.

means to penetrate dense emotions. This meditative awareness, I've found, can bring us a remarkably subtle understanding of our emotional patterns and so help us find ways to unravel deep fixations and destructive habits.

Our emotional reactions often distract us from the present, filling our minds with relentless thoughts about another time and place, filling our bodies with turbulent feelings.