Quotes About Mindfulness

When we are with people and feeling bored, can we listen a little more carefully, stepping off the train of our own inner commenting? If we are sitting in meditation and feeling uninterested, can we come in closer to the object, not with force but with gentleness and care? What is this experience we call the breath? If someone were holding your head under water, would the breath be boring? Each breath is actually sustaining our life. Can we be with it fully, just once?

In meditation practice, we build the energy of awareness until it grows powerful enough to see entirely different levels of reality.

that the value of an action is measured not by its success or failure, but by the motivation behind it.

It's always helpful to have a sense of humor about one's own mental foibles. By

Receiving joy is another way to say enjoyment, and sam?dhi is the act of refined enjoyment. It is based in skillfulness. It is the careful collecting of oneself into the joy of the present moment. Joyfulness means there's no fear, no tension, no "ought to." There isn't anything we have to do about it. It's just this.1

Another aspect of wrong view that we will discuss in much greater detail in later chapters is the deeply conditioned sense of "I," of self. On the relative level, of course, we move and speak and act as individuals, as selves. Yet on a deeper level, and with close attention, we can see through this appearance and experience the place of nonseparation from others and from the world. This is the realization of selflessness.

In the moment that we awaken from being lost in a thought or feeling or reaction, in that very moment we can recognize the empty, clear, skylike nature of awareness itself. In that moment of wakefulness, we get a glimpse of freedom. And instead of judging ourselves for all the times we do get lost, which happen again and again, we can delight in each moment of awakening.

Not Seeing Dukkha Is Dukkha

The meditative journey is not about always feeling good. Many times we may feel terrible. That's fine. What we want is to open to the entire range of what this mind and body are about. Sometimes we feel wonderful and happy and inspired, and at other times we deeply feel different aspects of suffering.

let the breath draw the mind down to its own level of subtlety. It is like listening to someone playing a flute as they walk off into the distance.

As a solid mass of rock Is not moved by the wind, So a sage is not moved by praise and blame.

The mind does not belong to you, but you are responsible for it.

In the second training, we develop energy, concentration, and mindfulness. These are the meditative and life tools that enable us to awaken. Without them we simply act out the patterns of our conditioning.

It is the truth that liberates, not your efforts to be free.

and the liberating insight into how suffering in our lives is born from ignorance and ends through wisdom.

together and disappear when the conditions change. None of them

The second kind of unwholesome speech is the use of harsh, angry, or aggressive language.

No longer do we look outside of ourselves for solutions. We have seen where the path lies. All we require are the skillful means that will help us walk it.

In our own culture, we might call it "catalogue consciousness," obsessively rifling through the pages to see what else we might want. It's "wanting to want," and it's a disease our culture keeps nourishing.

No one can practice for us. The Buddhas just point the way.

the value of an action is measured not by its success or failure, but by the motivation behind it.

To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad thing come forth and experience themselves is awakening.

The last of these wholesome actions is meditation, the development of tranquillity and insight.

But in their deeper meaning, these refuges always point back to our own actions and mind states. Although there may be many false starts and dead ends as we begin our journey, if our interest is sincere, we soon make a life-changing discovery: what we are seeking is within us.