Quotes About Mindfulness

There is now little question that how one uses one's attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them.

Happily, the benefits of training in meditation arrive long before mastery does.

It may not be coincidental that [you] use phrases like 'self conscious' when you really mean that you are conscious of others being conscious of you.

Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault.

In fact, we can directly experience that consciousness is never improved or harmed by what it knows. Making this discovery, again and again, is the basis of spiritual life.

The principal enemy of mindfulness—or of any meditative practice—is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts. The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking.

Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.

If there is any kernel of truth in the religions we so deplore,and they are just a carnival of errors,the truth is that it's possible to sink into the present moment in such a way as to find it sacred and to cease to have a problem.

Our habitual identification with thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts *as thoughts,* as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one's head.

In fact, beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought.

Long before reaching this kind of stability in meditation, however, one can discover that the sense of self—the sense that there is a thinker behind one's thoughts, an experiencer amid the flow of experience—is an illusion. The feeling that we call "I" is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking. Consider

Everything we want to accomplish—to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better job—is something that promises that, if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. Generally speaking, this is a false hope.

We are all trying to find a path back to the present moment. And good enough reason to just be happy here... Mindfulness meditation is just a trick for doing that. It's a trick for setting aside your to-do list, if only for a few moments, and actually locate a feeling of fulfilment in the present

Thoughts themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is.

Is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before one's desires are gratified, in spite of life's difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

While thinking is a practical necessity, the failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, moment after moment, is what gives each of us the feeling that we call "I," and this is the string upon which all our states of suffering and dissatisfaction are strung.

Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind.

One must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts—that is, prior to the arising of the next one. Consciousness does not feel like a self. Once one realizes this, the status of thoughts themselves, as transient expressions of consciousness, can be understood.

Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly or not discovered at all.

If you're constantly ruminating about what you just did- or what you should have done- or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. Ok, you will fail to connect with it. You will fail to connect with other people.

A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time.

But the true discipline is to remain committed, throughout the whole of one's life, to waking up from the dream of the self.

That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I'm as confused as anyone else.

My friend Joseph Goldstein, one of the finest vipassana teachers I know, likens this shift in awareness to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall.