Quotes About Mindfulness

The essence of this practice is that when we encounter pain in our life we breathe into our heart with the recognition that others also feel this. It's a way of acknowledging when we are closing down and of training to open up. When we encounter any pleasure or tenderness in our life, we cherish that and rejoice.

What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you're doing for others, and what you do for others, you're doing for yourself.

It all comes through learning to pause for a moment, learning not to just impulsively do the same thing again and again. It's a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately filling up the space. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness. The result is that we cease to cause harm. We begin to know ourselves thoroughly and to respect ourselves.

Impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don't struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality.

I'd like to encourage us all to lighten up, to practice with a lot of gentleness. This is not the drill sergeant saying, "Lighten up or else." I have found that if we can possibly use anything we hear against ourselves, we usually do.

Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. It is all we ever have so we might as well work with it rather than struggling against it. We might as well make it our friend and teacher rather than our enemy.

It's very helpful to realize that being here, sitting in meditation, doing simple everyday things like working, walking outside, talking with people, bathing, using the toilet, and eating, is actually all that we need to be fully awake, fully alive, fully human.

But as we let go of our repetitive stories and fixed ideas about ourselves--particularly deep-seated feelings of I'm not okay--the armor starts to fall apart, and we open into the spaciousness of our true nature, into who we really are beyond the transitory thoughts and emotions. We see that our armor is made up of nothing more than habits and fears, and we begin to feel that we can let those go.

You want it your own way. You'd just like to have a little peace; you'd like to have a little happiness, you know, just "gimme a break!" But the more you think that way, the more you try to get life to come out so that it will always suit you, the more your fear of other people and what's outside your room grows.

Pointing directly at your own heart, you find Buddha.

IMPERMANENCE means that the essence of life is fleeting. Some people are so skillful at their mindfulness practice that they can actually see each and every little movement of mind—changing, changing, changing.

Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment

However, no matter what the size, color, or shape is, the point is still to lean toward the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from it.

The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself.

Meditation is a totally nonviolent, nonaggressive occupation.

the life span of any particular emotion is only one and a half minutes. After that we have to revive the emotion and get it going again.

When thoughts come up, touch them very lightly, like a feather touching a bubble. Let the whole thing be soft and gentle, but at the same time precise.

Every situation is a passing memory.

MY teacher Trungpa Rinpoche encouraged us to lead our lives as an experiment, a suggestion that has been very important to me.

When the resistance is gone, so are the demons. It's like a koan that we can work with by learning how to be more gentle, how to relax, and how to surrender to the situations and people in our lives.

We don't sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we'll be more awake in our lives.

In other words, I would say that the drive to blame ourselves or others comes from our inability to stay present with what is, because the sense of failure challenges us. It's uncomfortable, unpleasant.

Leonard Cohen once said about the benefits of many years of meditation, "The less there was of me, the happier I got." Letting

We would like to believe that when things are still and calm, that's the real stuff, and when things are messy, confused, and chaotic, we've done something wrong, or more usually someone else has done something to ruin our beautiful meditation. As someone once said about a loud, bossy woman, "What is that woman doing in my sacred world?