Quotes About Mindfulness

Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.

In the time it takes to say 'now,' now is already over. It's already 'then.' 'Then' is the opposite of 'now.' So saying 'now' obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't.

Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could just hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array.

Forget the clock. It has no power over time.

The only time they ever throw anything away is when it's really and truly broken, and then they make a big deal about it. They save up all their bent pins and broken sewing needles and once a year they do a whole memorial service for them, chanting and then sticking them into a block of tofu so they will have a nice soft place to rest. Jiko says that everything has a spirit, even if it is old and useless, and we must console and honor the things that have served us well.

In Zen we have a story. If your left hand gets a painful splinter, what does your right hand do? Does your right hand say, "Oh, that's too bad, but it's not my problem"? No, of course not. The right hand pulls the splinter out. This is interconnectedness.

Drawing my thoughts out of my mind and holding me down to earth at the same time.

when you hang out with people who are always being supergrateful and appreciating things and saying thank you, in the end it kind of rubs off, and one day after I'd flushed, I turned to the toilet and said, Thanks, toilet, and it felt pretty natural.

I was deep inside my mind, which is where I go when things get too intense.

I whispered Now! ... Now! ... Now! ... over and over, faster and faster, into the wind as the world whipped by, trying to catch the moment when the word was what it is: when now became NOW. But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.

As I bathe myself I pray with all beings that we can purify body and mind and clean ourselves inside and out.

Jiko also says that to do zazen is to enter time completely.

Time interacts with attention in funny ways.

Don't waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now! 6.

6,400,099,980 moments that constitute a single day. His point is that every single one of those moments provides an opportunity to reestablish our will. Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.

whispered Now! . . . Now! . . . Now! . . . over and over, faster and faster, into the wind as the world whipped by, trying to catch the moment when the word was what it is: when now became NOW. But in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then.

Feeling is the important part. You don't have to make a big deal about it.

And I still believe, to the core of my being, that when you pay attention, cooking becomes a kind of meditation.

I got back into the car thinking how lucky I was to be aware of happiness!

Kiedy si? spieszysz, nic nie widzisz, nic nie prze?ywasz, niczego nie do?wiadczasz, nie my?lisz! Szybkie tempo wysusza najg??bsze warstwy twojej duszy, st?pia twoj? wra?liwo??, wyja?awia ci? i odcz?owiecza.

Every day I practice yoga, read poetry, and translate. What do I need politics for?

I don't need to eat the stuff now because now I'm here-right in the middle of it!The soup I ordered in Colorado had all these little slices of vegetables and things, which at the time just looked like kitchen scrapings to me. But now I'm in the miso soup myself,just like those bits of vegetable. I'm floating around in this giant bowl of it, and that's good enough for me.

Many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it.