Quotes About Mindfulness

You can't worry about what you can't control,

I don't think any day is worth living without thinking about what you're going to eat next at all times.

Know how to live with the time that is given you.

dive inside your head, where you are safe. separate yourself from the pain. inside your head you can be in control and you can bear any pain if you know it isn't going to last. the key was figuring out when it was going to end

Be yourself. Be true to that, to your heart. Patience. See what happens if you step back instead of bounding forward.

Happiness is not a reward. It's a consequence. You have to work at it every day.

We tend to think of happiness (and by happiness I also mean health or overall well-being)as a gift, and sometimes it is, a pure gratuity. But most of the time it comes about because you've done the work, prepared the ground to allow it in or tended it carefully once it has arrived. You have to practice happiness the way you practice the piano, commit to it the way you commit to going to the gym.

We will not have peace by afterthought.

Laughter is inner jogging.

Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions

Reduce the effort whenever possible. The use of force is the opposite of awareness; learning does not take place when we are straining. The principle should not be no pain, no gain. Rather, it should be if strain, no gain. Feldenkrais thought the use of willpower (of which he obviously had plenty) was not helpful in developing awareness.

6. Slowness of movement is the key to awareness, and awareness is the key to learning. As

Men seek retreats for themselves in country places, on beaches and mountains, and you yourself are wont to long for such retreats, but that is altogether unenlightened when it is possible at any hour you please to find a retreat within yourself. For nowhere can a man withdraw to a more untroubled quietude than in his own soul.

When we sit we recognize the crucial, divine importance of absolutely everything that arises—every thought, every feeling, every breath, every unspeakable, unnameable impulse. But also we recognize the ultimate importance of the others—of the sky, of all the sounds inside and outside the room. As the mind becomes a little more quiet the sacredness of everything within and without becomes clear to us.

Meditation is doing what you are doing - whether you are doing formal meditation or child care.

In other words, to Train in the preliminaries is to stop moaning and feeling sorry for yourself and to recognize instead that regardless of what has happened or why, this is your life and you are the only one equipped to deal with it.

Why would we have to know everything all the time? Why do we have to be so knowledgeable, so smart, so in control? We don't! There's no need to figure everything out. We can just be alive. We can breathe in and breathe out and let go and just trust our life, trust our body. Our body and our life know what to do. The problem is to let them do it, to relax and let them guide us.

But the whole point of mind training is to promote, to the bottom of our hearts, down to our bones, even to the marrow, the understanding and the feeling that we are not alone in this sadly poignant situation. We are together in it with everyone else. And that makes it beautiful, and even joyful, no matter how hard it may get.

In a Zen retreat we have a format for working with these quicksilver changes: we sit with them, we pay attention to them... Being steady with mindfulness as an anchor for all the changes we go through is the way we practice forbearance. And you can employ this same method anywhere anytime: just pay close attention to the details of what is going on internally and externally. Don't flinch, don't run away. Trust what happens. Take your stand there." (71)

The only difference between meditation and non meditation is that when we meditate we are not grasping anything or trying to do anything: instead we are releasing ourselves to our lives, with trust that our lives are all we need. (78)

Forgiveness Meditation. Settle into meditation. Recall someone whom you know you need to forgive. Just let the person's image or the sense of who they are arise in your mind. Feel the feelings. Observe whatever happens without entanglement. Let the feelings come and go. Don't try to forgive, just be present.

Reality is not, as we imagine it to be, difficult and painful. It is always only just as it is: suchness.

Believe you are defeated, believe it long enough, and it is likely to become a fact.

The life of inner peace, being harmonious and without stress, is the easiest type of existence.