Quotes About Mindfulness

By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home.

The art of concentration is a continual letting go. We let go of what is inessential or distracting. We let go of a thought or a feeling, not because we are afraid of it or because we can't bear to acknowledge it as a part of our experience; but, because it is UNNECESSARY.

You may have heard the old story, usually attributed to a Native American elder, meant to illuminate the power of attention. A grandfather (occasionally it's a grandmother) imparting a life lesson to his grandson tells him, I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is vengeful, fearful, envious, resentful, deceitful. The other wolf is loving, compassionate, generous, truthful, and serene. The grandson asks which wolf will win the fight. The grandfather answers, The one I feed.

Buddha first taught metta meditation as an antidote: as a way of surmounting terrible fear when it arises.

As an ability, love is always there as a potential, ready to flourish and help our lives flourish. As we go up and down in life, as we acquire or lose, as we are showered with praise or unfairly blamed, always within there is the ability of love, recognized or not, given life or not.

over time, offering loving kindness to all beings everywhere, including ourselves, unites us to one another so that we know that we can not go forward forgetting those left behind. Page 62

Meditation can be a refuge, but it is not a practice in which real life is ever excluded. The strength of mindfulness is that it enables us to hold difficult thoughts and feelings in a different way—with awareness, balance, and love

Meditation may be done in silence & stillness, by using voice & sound, or by engaging the body in movement. All forms emphasize the training of attention.

Can you revise your perceptions to see the world in terms of suffering and the end of suffering, instead of good and bad? To see the world in terms of suffering and the end of suffering is Buddha-mind, and will lead us away from righteousness and anger. Get in touch with your own Buddha-mind, and you will uncover a healing force of compassion.

If we truly loved ourselves, we'd never harm another. That is a truly revolutionary, celebratory mode of self-care.

Self-compassion is like a muscle. The more we practice flexing it, especially when life doesn't go exactly according to plan (a frequent scenario for most of us), the stronger and more resilient our compassion muscle becomes.

In order to do anything about the suffering of the world we must have the strength to face it without turning away.

The foundation of metta practice is to know how to be our own friend. According to the Buddha, "You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

Meditation is essentially training our attention so that we can be more aware— not only of our own inner workings but also of what's happening around us in the here & now.

These four qualities are among the most beautiful and powerful states of consciousness we can experience. Together they are called in Pali, the language spoken by the Buddha, the brahma-viharas. Brahma means "heavenly." Vihara means "abode" or "home." By practicing these meditations, we establish love (Pali, metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upekkha) as our home.

All forms of meditation strengthen & direct our attention through the cultivation of three key skills: concentration, mindfulness & compassion or lovingkindness.

Thinking we are only supposed to have loving & compassionate feelings can be a terrible obstacle to spiritual practice.

Our practice rather than being about killing the ego is about simply discovering our true nature.

Training attention through meditation opens our eyes.

The poet Rumi says: How long will we fill our pockets like children with dirt and stones? Let the world go. Holding it, we never know ourselves, never are airborne.

Cultivating loving kindness for ourselves is the foundation of real love for our friends and family, for new people we encounter in our daily lives, for all beings and for life itself.

With the practice of meditation we can develop this ability to more fully love ourselves and to more consistently love others.

When you recognize and reflect on even one good thing about yourself, you are building a bridge to a place of kindness and caring.

When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences—good and bad alike—are opportunities to learn and grow.