Quotes About Mindfulness

Guess what? When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are. Whatever you wind up doing, that's what you've wound up doing. Whatever you are thinking right now, that's what's on your mind. Whatever has happened to you, it has already happened. The important question is, how are you going to handle it? In other words, Now what?

No matter what people are doing, they are much less happy when their minds are wandering than when their minds are focused

By grounding yourself in mindfulness early in the morning, you are reminding yourself that things are always changing, that good and bad things come and go, and that it is possible to embody a perspective of constancy, wisdom, and inner peace as you face any conditions that present themselves.

But waking up is ultimately something that each one of us can only do for ourselves. When it comes down to it, wherever you go, there you are

acceptance of the present moment has nothing to do with resignation in the face of what is happening. It simply means a clear acknowledgment that what is happening is happening.

In this way, clear seeing also means clear hearing, clear smelling, clear tasting, clear touching, and clear knowing, which would include knowing what's on your mind, and therefore knowing both what you are thinking and what emotions are visiting, and therefore feeling what you are feeling, grounded in the body, whether it be fear or anger or sadness, frustration, irritation, impatience, annoyance, satisfaction, empathy, compassion, happiness, or anything else.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts…. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.

To be patient is simply to be completely open to each moment, accepting it in its fullness, knowing that, like the butterfly, things can only unfold in their own time.

as long as you are breathing there is more right with you than wrong with you, no matter what is wrong.

This means learning to work with the very stress and pain that are causing you to suffer.

Meditation is a way of being, not a technique.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

These qualities are beautifully encapsulated in the famous statement of Victor Frankl, himself a survivor of Auschwitz (and a neurologist and psychologist): "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." MBSR

Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more. It all ties in. It's not a real option for me as a

TRY: Noticing the resistance to the impulse to give, the worries about the future, the feeling that you may be giving too much, or the thought that it won't be appreciated "enough," or that you will be exhausted from the effort, or that you won't get anything out of it, or that you don't have enough yourself.

in the meditation practice, it is best to hold to and honor one's own direct experience, and not worry too much about whether this is what you are supposed to feel or see or think about.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake." If we are to grasp the reality of our life while we have it, we will need to wake up to our moments. Otherwise, whole days, even a whole life, could slip past unnoticed.

When you begin to question the narrative of yourself and inquire as to who is even doing all of this talking inside your own head, you may come to realize that you have no idea!

As encountering each moment with awareness becomes more familiar to you, you will find that it is not only possible but even enjoyable to be in the moment, even with ordinary tasks such as washing the dishes. You come to see that you don't have to rush to get through with the dishes so that you can get on to something better or more important because, at the moment that you are doing the dishes, that is your life.

All this can dissolve in a moment, when awareness apprehends what is actually unfolding … like the soap bubble being touched by the finger. Liberation from suffering in that very moment. Liberation from greed, hatred, and delusion. Now for the next moment, which, of course, is this one.

becoming more of a human doing than a human being

Mindfulness reminds us that it is possible to shift from a doing mode to a being mode through the application of attention and awareness.

Patience is an ever present alternative to the mind's endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly, is anger. It's the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it.

There really is no place to go in this moment. We are already here. Can we be here fully? There really is nothing do to. Can we let go into non-doing, into pure being? There really is nothing to attain, no special "state" or "feeling," because whatever you are experiencing in this moment is already special, already extraordinary, by virtue of the fact that it is being experienced.