Quotes About Mindfulness

Dharma is the study of what is , and the only way you can find out what is true is through studying yourself.

We can be with what's happening and not dissociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.

If you realize that you don't have that many more years to live and if you live your life as if you actually had only a day left, then the sense of impermanence heightens that feeling of preciousness and gratitude.

Remembering impermanence motivates you to go back and look at the teachings, to see what they tell you about how to work with your life, how to rouse yourself, how to cheer up, how to work with emotions.

Compassion involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us.

When we're thinking that we're competent or that we're hopeless—what are we basing it on? On this fleeting moment? On yesterday's success or failure? We cling to a fixed idea of who we are and it cripples us.

What I have realized through practicing is that practice isn't about beng the best horse or the good horse or the poor horse or the worst horse.

It is unconditional compassion for ourselves that leads naturally to unconditional compassion for others.

I learned today that life is very precious. Even when we're determined to block the magic, it will get through and wake us up.

Impermanence can teach you a lot about how to cheer up.

Self-improvement can have temporary results, but lasting transformation occurs only when we honor ourselves as the source of wisdom and compassion.

Fear can make you start asking a lot of questions. If it doesn't get you down, it's going to start you wondering, "What's this fear? Where did it come from? What am I scared of?" Maybe you're scared of the most exciting things you have yet to learn. Impermanence is a great reminder.

The third reminder is karma: every action has a result. One could give a whole seminar on the law of karma. But fundamentally, in our everyday life, it's a reminder that it's important how we live.

Every time you're willing to acknowledge your thoughts, let them go, and come back to the freshness of the present moment, you're sowing seeds of wakefulness in your unconscious.

Trying to cheer yourself up isn't easy, and sometimes it feels hypocritical, like going against the grain. But the reminder is that if you want to change your habitual stuckness, you're the only one who can do it.

BEING ABLE to lighten up is the key to feeling at home with your body, mind, and emotions, to feeling worthy to live on this planet.

It's up to you how to use your life. It doesn't mean that you have to be the best one at cheering up, or that your habitual tendencies never get the better of you. It just has to do with this sense of reminding yourself.

push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.

As Buddhists, we might say, "My ego causes me so many problems." Then we might think, "Well, then, we're supposed to get rid of it, right? Then there'd be no problem." On the contrary, the idea isn't to get rid of ego but actually to begin to take an interest in ourselves, to investigate and be inquisitive about ourselves.

Two kinds of selfish people: the unwise and the wise. Unwise selfish people think only of themselves, and the result is confusion and pain. Wise selfish people know that the best thing they can do for themselves is to be there for others. As a result, they experience joy.

That sticky feeling is shenpa.

you begin where you are, you see what a child you are, and you don't criticize that.

Meditation practice is regarded as a good and in fact excellent way to overcome warfare in the world: our own warfare as well as greater warfare.

In My Stroke of Insight, the brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor's book about her recovery from a massive stroke, she explains the physiological mechanism behind emotion: an emotion like anger that's an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it's triggered until it runs its course. One and a half minutes, that's all. When it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it's because we've chosen to rekindle it.