Quotes About Mindfulness

The more we connect with a bigger perspective, the more we connect with energetic joy. Exertion is touching in to our appetite for enlightenment. It allows us to act, to give, to work appreciatively with whatever comes our way.

We can make ourselves miserable or we can make ourselves strong. The amount of effort is the same.

we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice. If

Dzigar Kongtrül has a sign on the front door of his retreat cabin that reads, "Don't believe everything you think." That's the basic idea here.

Taking the leap involves making a commitment to ourselves and to the earth itself—making a commitment to let go of old grudges, to not avoid people and situations and emotions that make us feel uneasy, to not cling to our fears

You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.

Begin the journey without hope of getting ground under your feet. Begin with hopelessness.

be free of suffering and the root of suffering.

We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn't have any fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience.

we don't have to obscure the joy and openness that is present in every moment of our existence.

We don't have to be harsh with ourselves when we think, sitting here, that our meditation or our oryoki or the way we are in the world is in the category of worst horse.

strengthening habitual patterns of suffering. We begin to see this more and more clearly, and we begin to realize that we can do something different.

When you refrain from habitual thoughts and behavior, the uncomfortable feelings will still be there. They don't magically disappear. Over the years, I've come to call resting with the discomfort "the detox period," because when you don't act on your habitual reactions, it's like giving up an addiction. You're left with the feelings you were trying to escape. The practice is to make a wholehearted relationship with that.

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.

Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.

How we regard what arises in meditation is training for how we regard whatever arises in the rest of our lives.

We can connect with that openness at any time. For instance, right now, for three seconds, just stop reading and pause. If

In reality, when you feel depressed, lonely, betrayed, or any unwanted feelings, this is an important moment on the spiritual path. This is when real transformation can take place.

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

Meditation is an invitation to notice when we reach our limit and to not get carried away by hope and fear.

We seem doomed to suffer simply because we have a deep-seated fear of how things really are.

To make things as easy as possible to under stand, we can summarize the four boundless qualities in the single phrase "a kind heart." Just train yourself to have a kind heart always and in all situations. —PATRUL RINPOCHE

Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know. When things fall apart and we're on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that's really swell.

In any case, the point is not to try to get rid of thoughts, but rather to see their true nature. Thoughts will run us around in circles if we buy into them, but really they are like dream images. They are like an illusion—not really all that solid. They are, as we say, just thinking.