Quotes About Mindfulness

Stay up and listen to lightening. If there is no lightening around, stay up and listen to nothing. Just listen to the sheer joy of your thoughts trans-versing from one corner of your brain to the next.

Try to dwell on the people you'd like to love, instead of all the people you do loathe.

Drinking responsibly' doesn't have to mean not drinking enough. It can mean having a bit of self-respect, a bigger, better laugh while you're drinking and a clearer memory of it the next morning. Maybe

happiness isn't to be pursued, it is to be enjoyed. Like life.

If we hurry into the holy without preparing our hearts, we will see things not as they are but as we are.

I urged myself to live in a state of complete consciousness, even when that meant pain or boredom." - Pete Hamill.

But once you cross the Shannon - even though geographically you have only come a short distance - different rules of time apply, and most people still understand the crucial secret of human happiness: that it's better to do a few things slowly, than a lot of things fast.

is purposely conservative. You have little to gain by rushing back into training,

I also like to apply "good enough" to other concepts such as a good enough job, a good enough try, a good enough outing, a good enough day or a good enough life. I apply this concept liberally to contradict the black-and-white, all-or none thinking of the critic which reflexively judges people and things as defective unless they are perfect.

Finally, positive visualization can be a powerful adjunct to thought-substitution. Some survivors gradually learn to short-circuit the fear-mongering processes of the critic by invoking images of past successes and accomplishments, as well as picturing safe places, loving friends or comforting memories.

10. Drasticizing/Catastrophizing/Hypochondriasizing. I feel afraid but I am not in danger. I am not "in trouble" with my parents. I will not blow things out of proportion. I refuse to scare myself with thoughts and pictures of my life deteriorating.

12. Time Urgency. I am not in danger. I do not need to rush. I will not hurry unless it is a true emergency. I am learning to enjoy doing my daily activities at a relaxed pace.

Mindfulness is a perspective of benign curiosity about all of your inner experience. Recovery is enhanced immeasurably by developing this helpful process of introspection. As it becomes more developed, mindfulness can be used to recognize and dis-identify from beliefs and viewpoints that you acquired from your traumatizing family.

Mindfulness is a perspective that weds your capacity for self-observation with your instinct of self-compassion.

Some of the most beautiful things of life – sex, food, exercise, conversation, learning, and work – lose their quality because our frenzied pace makes it impossible to savor them. Rarely do we slow down long enough to digest the full pleasure of these activities.

Advanced flashback management, then, involves learning how to manage the disconcerting experience of falling asleep feeling reasonably put together and waking up in a flashback. Typically this occurs because a dream has triggered you into a flashback. If you remember the dream, you can sometimes figure out why it triggered you. With growing mindfulness you may even understand which events from the previous day triggered your dream.

Thought-stopping is the process of using willpower to disidentify from and interrupt toxic thoughts and visualizations

Mindfulness is a perspective of benign curiosity about all of your inner experience.

Emoting is when we cry, anger out, or verbally ventilate the energy of an inner emotional experience. Feeling, on the other hand, is the inactive process of staying present to internal emotional experience without reacting.

Feeling is a kinesthetic rather than a cognitive experience. It is the process of shifting the focus of your awareness off of thinking and onto your affects, energetic states and sensations. It is the proverbial "getting out of your head" and "getting into your body.

As emotional recovery progresses, the mindfulness described above begins to extend toward our emotional experience. This helps us to stop automatically dissociating from our feelings. We then learn to identify our feelings and choose healthy ways to respond to them and from them.

Deep level recovery from childhood trauma requires a normalization of depression, a renunciation of the habit of reflexively reacting to it. Central to this is the development of a self-compassionate mindfulness. Once again, mindfulness is the practice of staying in your body – the practice of staying fully present to all of your internal experience.

as recovering progresses, and especially as the critic shrinks, the desire to help yourself- to care for yourself - becomes more spontaneous. This is especially true when we mindfully do things for ourselves in a spirit of loving-kindness. As such, we can do it for the child we were – the child who was deprived through no fault of her own. And, we can do it because we believe every child, without exception, deserves loving care.

We can learn to be emotional in benign ways. We can have our emotions without holding onto them. We can soften and relax into our feelings without exiling or enshrining them. We can let our feelings pass through us when they have fully served their function.