Quotes About Mindfulness

I think any spiritual experience that's worthwhile is not about ego and it will humble you in some way. And also, a Zen monk once said to me, 'If you're not laughing, then you're not getting it.'

What we have to get clear to kids is that when you offer your stillness and open yourself to the experience of music, it pays you back more than you give.

Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret.

In the words of the Scottish proverb, 'Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.

He hoped these students would learn how to be at home in the desert, not how to conquer it; and he hoped that, in the process, they might discover the spiritual value of quietude.

Intentional actions, repeated over and over, become habits. Habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and reacting construct and compose my sense of of self: the Kind of person I am. The kind of person I am does not fully determine what occurs to me but strongly affects what happens and how I respond to it.

don't ever let your focus be so much on the one cloud in the sky that you miss noticing the unending expanse of beautiful blue and the brilliant, shining sun all around. What I do

Getting stuck on the past will weigh you down and looking into the future will only create worries.

We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness. —THICH NHAT HANH

your head. Sally Kempton

is the basic problem the nature of this world itself, or our inability to accept it as it is? Or something else?

When meditating one dwells in the empty, silent no-thing-ness from which mental phenomena arise; when thoughts and images appear one lets them go.

When you're making something, you're in a different state. You go into a deep level of concentration, to the point where you're not self-conscious anymore, it's just flowing out of you.

In a true you-and-I relationship, we are present mindfully, nonintrusively, the way we are present with things in nature.We do not tell a birch tree it should be more like an elm. We face it with no agenda, only an appreciation that becomes participation: 'I love looking at this birch' becomes 'I am this birch' and then 'I and this birch are opening to a mystery that transcends and holds us both.

Most people think of love as a feeling but love is not so much a feeling as a way of being present.

Bread takes the effort of kneading but also requires sitting quietly while the dough rises with a power all its own.

The biggest mistake we humans make is to become attached to someone's being a certain way and then to think that will never change.

To say yes to reality is to host eternity.

When faced with one of life's givens, we might ask: "Why did such a terrible thing happen to a good person like me? I deserve better." The mindful version of that question is: "Yes this happened. Now what?" We will notice we are happier when we accept what we do not like about life as a given of life. Our mindful yes is an entry into this sheltering paradox. When

Mindfulness is an ancient meditation mode in which we let go of our fears, our attachments to control and being right, our expectations and entitlements, and our judgments of others.

We cannot attune if we assume certain feelings are right and others wrong. To attune to someone, we need neutrality toward all feelings, moods, and inner states and the fearless openness of mindfulness.

Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still Even among these rocks.

we cannot tolerate them, we add stress to our lives by fighting a losing game.

To create a pause between the stimulus and your reaction, add a truth to every defensive answer. For a healthy adult, the truth is the only defense and the best resource.