Quotes About Mindfulness

Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.... We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little by stepping back from the noise.

Wherever you are is called Here and you must treat it as a powerful stranger.

Beauty is the harvest of presence.

Let the apple ripen on the branch beyond your need to take it down.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

Enough. These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath. If not this breath, this sitting here. This opening to life we have refused again and again until now. Until now.

beginning well means seating ourselves in the body again, catching up with ourselves and the person we have become since we last tried to begin.

You have a moment in the day, as Blake said, that Satan (the strategic mind, worried about being 'productive') cannot find.

Only those who put more energy into self-pity than into paying attention are truly marooned.

Beautify your thoughts. Thoughts are the headwaters of action, life and manifestation.

You are now aware that your lower jaw has weight, and that it requires effort for you to hold it up. Good evening.

Our true fear of the zombie was never that its bite would turn us into one of them. Our fear is that we are already zombies.

I've developed a pretty good survival system involving nothing more than mental alertness exercises, positive thinking and amphetamines.

doing an excellent job of ignoring

mental state

Developing perceptual fluency will increase your ability to access your total mind. No small thing. You will also find that habitual defensiveness and manipulation of others is gradually replaced by a flexible ability to establish rapport with a wide variety of people. What is needed to reach that point is lavish curiosity and the willingness to be a little awkward and embarrassed—qualities that indicate that we are, after all, merely human.

key intentional questions: • What is most important to you about this? • What is surprising to you right now? • What is inspiring you? • What is challenging you?

Think deliberately. Use this remarkable gift of consciousness to direct your thoughts rather than being pushed around by reality.

Besides helping the person prayed for, it is likely that prayer benefits the person doing the praying. Studies show that regular acts of altruism prolong our lives and improve our own happiness.29 Prayer is good medicine for the person doing the praying as well as the receiver.

Meditation—all by itself—may offer more to the health of a modern American than all the pharmaceutical remedies put together."36

As we realize our ability to choose that world, we begin to select thoughts, feelings, experiences, and beliefs that facilitate its creation.

Focus is when attention is centered in the meditative state. Then mind wandering begins. We become aware that the mind is wandering, then shift ourselves back into focus. Seeing meditation as this four-part cycle, rather than as a single ideal state, gives us a more realistic picture of what to expect in our meditation sessions.

As soon as you wake up in the morning, place your hand over your heart and feel love.

By choosing these practices, we use our minds deliberately in order to induce transcendent states. Such states become not an inadvertent happy accident, but a lifestyle upgrade that we have deliberately installed.