Quotes About Mindfulness

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.

I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can... . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the ore our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

What comes, comes, why bark?

down. He realized he hadn't taken a single sip.

I try not to want. I try instead to accept.

It was a limitation of human consciousness: We live only in the future and past, we cannot perceive now. Now occupies no space, a hypothetical gap between future and past. Only an exceptional few could feel now athletes and jazzmen and, yes, thieves...

But things were racing too fast to linger over the past or future. There was only now.

We talked about this before. The rare beauty of nonattachment.

Be intent upon the perfection of the present day.

Start admiring the vastness of the forest and a tree will surely fall on you, bashing your skull for the crime of perspective.

Hope had finally learned to live in the present. Often, when she found herself in a space of tremendous comfort, usually out in nature, or when her children were safe all around her and on the verge of going to bed, she forced herself to take stock. Here you are, Hope, she told herself. What a beautiful moment. You may never again be here at this spot, enjoying the calm. This habit of hers, to acknowledge the immediate and elusive joy of the present, kept her sane.

We cannot attain the presence of God. We're already totally in the presence of God. What's missing is awareness.

There's something deeply important about the early experience of being in the presence of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands, and without them needing you to make a demand on them. And that this creates a space internally into which one can be absorbed. In order to be absorbed one has to feel sufficiently safe, as though there is some shield, or somebody guarding you against dangers such that you can 'forget yourself' and absorb yourself, in a book, say.

What Your Speed Means

You may say to yourself: "Well, how did I get here?

While we may not awaken to a perfect, pristine world in our natural bodies, we can awaken to a "brand-new day" in our minds and hearts.

Though there are exceptions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism tend to stress desirable states of consciousness, escaping the fretful, self-aware state of mind that so often makes everyday living a burden. For mystics from the Abrahamic faiths, however, the inward odyssey is also an upward odyssey, a quest for personal and vital communion with an infinite Being.

After all, the object isn't to become so mentally strong that we can suffer through any experience; the object is to become so peaceful inside that we choose not to suffer when the pain comes.