Quotes About Mindfulness

Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed: after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed." But there's a difference: I don't identify with it anymore.

The content of your awareness is less important than the quality of the awareness

There is another way besides laborious self-punishment on the one hand and stagnant acceptance on the other. It is the way of self-understanding. This is far from easy because to understand what you are requires complete freedom from all desire to change what you are into something else.

if you just suppress your desire, and you attempt to renounce the object of your desire, you are likely to be tied to it.

I don't identify with the feeling. "I" is not that feeling. "I" am not lonely, "I" am not depressed, "I" am not disappointed. Disappointment is there, one watches it. You'd be amazed how quickly it glides away. Anything you're aware of keeps changing; clouds keep moving. As you do this, you also get all kinds of insights into why clouds were coming in the first place.

Your attitude should be: "I want to be aware, I want to be in touch with whatever is and let whatever happens happen; if I'm awake, fine, and if I'm asleep, fine.

You're never so ready to forget yourself as when you are happy.

Is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened? As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning. Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe? To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.

If there is anything I can do about the future, right now, I shall do it. Then I'm going to just leave it alone and settle down to enjoy the present moment, because all the experience of my life has shown me that I can only cope with things when they are present, not before they occur. And that the present always gives me the resources and the energy I need to deal with them.

Who decides what will finally make its way to your conscious mind from all the material that is pouring in from the world? Three decisive filters: first your attachments, second your beliefs and third your fears.

Negative feelings are in you, not in reality. So stop trying to change reality. That's crazy! Stop trying to change the other person.

It is a sobering thought that the finest act of love you can perform is not an act of service but an act of contemplation, of seeing.

It is enough for you to be watchful and awake. For in this state your eyes will see the Savior.

That is how you bring about change in yourself. Not by condemnation, not by calling yourself names, but by understanding what's going on. Not by calling yourself a dirty old sinner.

You will never live until you stop clinging to life. Let go. When you cling, happiness dies. If your happiness depends on anyone or anything, that's not happiness.

When you're living for nothing, you've got all your skills, you've got all your energy, you're relaxed, and you don't care. It doesn't matter to you whether you win or lose. Now there's human living for you. That's what life is all about.

But are you listening for what will confirm what you already think? Or are you listening in order to discover something new?

If it is peace you want, seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth.

In order to be genuinely happy there is one and only one thing you need to do: get deprogrammed, get rid of those attachments.

Most people don't live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts—generally somebody else's—mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions. As you begin to understand this, you stop making demands on yourself, you stop having expectations of yourself, you stop pushing yourself, and you begin to understand yourself.

For in the death of the ego is freedom, peace, serenity, joy.

If you aren't consciously aware, you're vulnerable to either being brainwashed or being influenced by forces within you that you have no awareness of at all.

To acquire happiness you don't have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already.

An attachment, by its very nature, makes you vulnerable to emotional turmoil and is always threatening to shatter your peace.