Quotes About Mindfulness

Live with nature In the present Above time

Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.

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.

Allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling. [...] Let go of the labels. Just feel what you are feeling, all the while cultivating moment-to-moment awareness, riding the waves of up and down, good and bad, weak and strong, until you see that they are all inadequate to fully describe your experience. Be with the experience itself. Trust in your deepest strength of all: to be present, to be wakeful.

If we are unaware of what we are doing a good deal of the time, and we don't particularly like the way things turn out in our lives, perhaps it's time to pay closer attention, to be more in touch, to observe the choices we make and their consequences down the road.

Everything can be taken from a human being 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.

whatever thoughts and emotions arise, and as best you can without taking any of it personally, as if the thoughts were merely sounds, or weather patterns in the mind.

no place to go, nothing to do, nothing to attain.

Awareness requires only that we pay attention and see things as they are. It doesn't require that we change anything.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the venerable and highly respected Vietnamese meditation teacher, poet, and peace activist, uses the image of cloudy apple juice settling in a glass to describe meditation. You just sit with whatever is present, even discomfort, anxiety, or confusion, with whatever is present, and the mind settles all by itself.

not get caught in their habitual patterning, to see thoughts for what they are, impersonal events, and instead be the knowing that awareness already is. Then, in that moment at least, we are already free, ready to act with greater clarity and kindness within the constantly changing field of events that is nothing other than life unfolding — not always as we think it should, but definitely as it is.

Don't go outside your house to see the flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit.

we are only breathing now — the last breath is gone, the next one hasn't come yet — it is always a matter of this one. So it is an ideal anchor for our wayward attention. It keeps us in the present moment.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." His deepest conviction: "To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts…. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

If you can't entirely trust what you think, what about trusting awareness? What about trusting your heart? What about trusting your motivation to at least do no harm? What about trusting your experience until it's proven to be inaccurate — and then trusting that discovery?

One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait. WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hand.

You certainly have to be ready for meditation. You have to come to it at the right time in your life, at a point where you are ready to listen carefully to your own voice, to your own heart, to your own breathing

When we spend some time each day in non-doing, resting in awareness, observing the flow of the breath and the activity of our mind and body without getting caught up in that activity, we are cultivating calmness and mindfulness hand in hand.

Perhaps over time we can adjust our default setting to one of greater mindfulness rather than of mindlessness and being lost in thought.

Feel your body lying in bed. Straighten it out. Ask yourself, Am I awake now? Do I know that the gift of a new day is being given to me? Will I be awake for it? What will happen today? Right now I don't really know. Even as I think about what I have to do, can I be open to this not-knowing? Can I see today as an adventure? Can I see right now as filled with possibilities?

We can feel victimized by our thoughts, or blinded by them. We can easily mis-take them for the truth or for reality when in actuality they are just waves on its surface, however tumultuous they may be at times.

The entirety of our mind, on the other hand, is by its very nature deep, vast, intrinsically still and quiet, like the depths of the ocean.

It is not that mindfulness is the "answer" to all life's problems. Rather, it is that all life's problems can be seen more clearly through the lens of a clear mind.