Quotes About Mindfulness

If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we'd often be better off. Learning to do that is a big part of what mindfulness meditation is about.

Robert Wright

He once recounted a time when he was trying to meditate and kept getting interrupted by sounds from a festival in a nearby village. Then, as he recalls it, he had a realization: "The sound is just the sound. It's me who is going out to annoy it. If I leave the sound alone, it won't annoy me. . . . If I don't go out and bother the sound, it's not going to bother me.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a meditation teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, has said, "Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.

In sum: you can best achieve success at meditation by not pursuing success, and achieving this success may mean caring less about success, at least as success is conventionally defined.

In fact, one of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we'd often be better off.

the thoughts are arising, and there's a strong habit of mind to be identified with them. So it's not so much they have the intent to reach out and capture us, but rather there's this very strong habitual identification. This is how we've lived our lives, and it takes practice to try and break this conditioning- to be mindful of the thought, rather than be lost in it.

Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them." What he meant is that if you want to liberate yourself from the parts of the mind that keep you from realizing true happiness, you have to first become aware of them, which can be unpleasant.

being in closer-than-usual contact with the actual workings of your mind can lead you to confront issues with a new and perhaps unsettling honesty.

Quizá la mejor manera de decirlo sea que la iluminación y la liberación se refuerzan mutuamente: cuantas más cosas que nos liberan del sufrimiento hacemos, más clara es nuestra visión, y cuanto más clara sea nuestra visión, más fácil nos resultará hacer las cosas que nos conducen a la liberación del sufrimiento, lo cual, a su vez, nos permitirá tener aún más claridad de visión, y así sucesivamente.

The Buddha believed that the less you judge things—including the contents of your mind—the more clearly you'll see them, and the less deluded you'll be.

Mindfulness meditation, the main vehicle of Vipassana, is a good way to study the human mind. At least, it's a good way to study one human's mind: yours. You sit down, let the mental dust settle, and then watch your mind work.

So too with the case of the snoring yogi in the previous chapter. As long as I identified with my dislike of him, I was obeying natural selection's instructions to consider myself special (certainly more special than a guy who wants to catch up on his sleep when I'm trying to meditate!).

And don't feel like you're committing a felony-level violation of Buddhist dogma just because you think of yourself as being a self.

Bhikkhu Bodhi

Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.

lo cierto es que en cierto modo quiero que me sigan sacando de quicio, pues no me gustaría llegar tan lejos en la búsqueda del nirvana como para perder este espíritu de lucha. Si la iluminación total significa dejar de hacer juicios de valor de cualquier tipo y dejar de esforzarse por cambiar las cosas, entonces no contéis conmigo2.

The mindfulness meditation I've done has been within a particular school of meditation known as Vipassana (pronounced vih PAW suh nuh). Vipassana is an ancient word that denotes clear vision and is usually translated as "insight.

three marks of existence

According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of 'me' and 'mine,' selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities, and problems.

To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we're naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence.

What's fundamental to the Buddha's teachings is the general dynamic of being powerfully drawn to sensory pleasure that winds up being fleeting at best.

liberation from the craving to capture pleasant feelings and escape unpleasant feelings, liberation from the persistent desire for things to be different than they are.

liberation from the persistent desire for things to be different than they are.