Quotes About Mindfulness

When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they're going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are.

Right there in the moment of sadness WHEN you wake up in the morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, could you use that as a golden opportunity? Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart? The next time you get a chance, experiment with this.

We commit to doing all it takes to free ourselves completely from all our varieties of confusion and unconscious habit and suffering, because these prevent us from being fully there for others. In the language of Buddhism, our ultimate commitment is to attain "enlightenment." In essence, this means knowing fully who we really are.

It's about being able to stay present with ourselves. It becomes increasingly clear that we won't be free of self-destructive patterns unless we develop a compassionate understanding of what they are.

The trick is not getting caught in hope and fear.

IN the morning when you wake up, reflect on the day ahead and aspire to use it to keep a wide-open heart and mind. At the end of the day, before going to sleep, think over what you've done. If you fulfilled your aspiration, even once, rejoice in that. If you went against your aspiration, rejoice that you are able to see what you did and are no longer living in ignorance. This way you will be inspired to go forward with increasing clarity, confidence, and compassion.

In a nutshell, when life is pleasant, think of others. When life is a burden, think of others. If this is the only training we ever remember to do, it will benefit us tremendously and everyone else as well.

all of us have had to start in the same place—as confused, reactive, but basically good human beings.

The rain in the morning isn't good or bad, comforting or threatening. It's not even "rain." It's just what it is.

addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it.

When my children were teenagers, I took them to meet the Sixteenth Karmapa. As they weren't Buddhists, I asked His Holiness to say something that didn't require any understanding of the dharma. Without hesitating, he told them: "You are going to die; and when you do, you will take nothing with you but your state of mind.

The secret of Zen is just two words: not always so. —SHUNRYU SUZUKI ROSHI

When we find ourselves in a mess, we don't have to feel guilty about it. Instead, we could reflect on the fact that how we relate to this mess will be sowing the seeds of how we will relate to whatever happens next. We can make ourselves miserable, or we can make ourselves strong. The amount of effort is the same. Right now we are creating our state of mind for tomorrow, not to mention this afternoon, next week, next year, and all the years of our lives.

When I realize I'm triggered, I think of it as a neutral moment, a moment in time, a moment of truth that can go either way. What I'm advocating is that in that precious moment we start to make choices that lead to happiness and freedom rather than choices that lead to unnecessary suffering and the obscuration of our intelligence, our warmth, our capacity to remain open and present with the natural movement of life.

The journey of patience involves relaxing, opening to what's happening, experiencing a sense of wonder.

Another word for this is freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human.

If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.

In Jill Bolte Taylor's book My Stroke of Insight, she points to scientific evidence showing that 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.

If we don't look into hope and fear, seeing a thought arise, seeing the chain reaction that follows—if we don't train in sitting with that energy without getting snared by the drama, then we're always going to be afraid.

Selfless help, helping others without an agenda, is the result of having helped ourselves. We

Rather than trying to get rid of an obstacle or buying into a sense of being attacked, we can use it to see what we do when we're squeezed.

We may find that we're habitually focused on incompleteness. We have thoughts such as "I am unworthy, I am lacking, the world is nothing but problems." With this outlook, we will see imperfection wherever we look and always feel dissatisfied.

In reality, whatever arises in our experience is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong. Yet we spend so much energy and suffer so much because we believe in all these concepts.

Real safety is your willingness to not run away from yourself.