Quotes About Mindfulness

The principle of nowness is very important to any effort to establish an enlightened society.

Any experience can be made into a further blockage or can become a way of freeing ourselves.

Basing your comfort on things that don't last is a futile strategy for living. Even when you get something you've always wanted, the pleasure you get lasts for such a short time.

The towns and countryside that the traveler sees through a train window do not slow down the train, nor does the train affect them. Neither disturbs the other. This is how you should see the thoughts that pass through your mind when you meditate. —DILGO KHYENTSE RINPOCHE

The way to reunite with bodhichitta is to lighten up in your practice and in your whole life. Meditation

The idea isn't to try to get rid of your anger, but to make friends with it, to see it clearly with precision and honesty, and also to see it with gentleness.

The experience of labeling your thoughts "thinking" also, over time, becomes much more vivid.

Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. That's the compassionate thing to do. That's the brave thing to do. We could smell that piece of shit. We could feel it; what is its texture, color, and shape?

you are the sky. everything else - it's just the weather.

You say to yourself, "Thinking," and as you're saying that, basically what you are doing is letting go of those thoughts. You don't repress the thoughts. You acknowledge them as "thinking" very clearly and kindly, but then you let them go.

The problem isn't with the beliefs themselves but with how we use them to get ground under our feet, how we use them to feel right and to make someone else wrong

Cutting our expectations for a cure is a gift we can give ourselves.

There is, however, no need to be a prophet of doom or for us to go around living in constant dread. Our situation is definitely workable. By learning not to bite the hook now, with the little annoyances of an ordinary day, we'll be preparing ourselves to work with whatever lies ahead with compassion and wisdom.

So whether it's anger or craving or jealousy or fear or depression—whatever it might be—the notion is not to try to get rid of it, but to make friends with it. That means getting to know it completely, with some kind of softness, and learning how, once you've experienced it fully, to let go.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that's life. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together.

Taking refuge is the way that we begin cultivating the openness and the goodheartedness that allow us to be less and less dependent.

If we can train ourselves through meditation to be more open and more accepting toward the wild arc of our experience ... we can become more settled and relaxed amid whatever life brings us.

The point is that you begin where you are, you see what a child you are, and you don't criticize that. You begin to explore, with a lot of humor and generosity toward yourself, all the places where you cling, and every time you cling, you realize, "Ah!

What we're talking about is getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, looking it right in the eye—not as a way to solve problems, but as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking.

This is where, through my mindfulness and my tonglen and everything that I do, my whole life is a process of learning how to make friends with myself.

The path of meditation and the path of our lives altogether ha to do with curiosity, inquisitiveness.

No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear. We are very rarely told to move closer, to just be there, to become familiar with fear. I once asked the Zen master Kobun Chino Roshi how he related with fear, and he said, "I agree. I agree." But the advice we usually get is to sweeten it up, smooth it over, take a pill, or distract ourselves, but by all means make it go away.

Hour after hour we sit here and just come back to the present moment as much as we can, acknowledge what's going on in our minds, come back to the present moment as much as we can, acknowledge what's going on in our minds, follow the out-breath, label our thoughts "thinking," come back to the present moment, acknowledge what's going on in our minds.

Uno de los muchos dones de la meditación es que nos ayuda a interesarnos por nuestras vidas con curiosidad y expansión, en lugar de adoptar la posición de ver todas las complejidades que se nos presentan como una lucha constante.