Quotes About Mindfulness

Every time we forget to breathe or our minds wander or we're hijacked by feelings or sensations, we gently bring ourselves back to the breath, again and again.

Each opportunity to interrupt the onslaught of thoughts and return to the object of meditation is, in fact, a moment of enlightenment

The more we practice mindfulness, the more alert we become to the cost of keeping secrets.

As we explore new ways of loving and being loved by others, we need to equip ourselves with open, pliant minds; we need to be willing to investigate, experiment, and evaluate as we approach a topic we thought we knew so much about.

Love simply, perpetually exists and that it's a matter of psychic housekeeping to make room for it.

Concepts such as loving kindness should never be used as weapons against our real feelings.

The simple act of being completely attentive & present to another person is an act of love, and it fosters unshakeable well-being.

Mindfulness may help you gain insight into your role in conflicts with others, it won't single-highhandedly help you resolve them.

Self-love is an unfolding process that gains strength over time, not a goal with a fixed end point.

Moreover, a mind that is saturated by lovingkindness cannot be overcome by fear; even if fear should arise, it will not overpower such a mind.

Meditation] trains us to be with a painful experience in the moment, without adding imagined distress and difficulty. If we look closely at it, the pain is bound to change, and that's as true of a headache as it is of a heartache: the discomfort oscillates; there are beats of rest between moments of unpleasantness. When we discover firsthand that pain isn't static, that it's a living, changing system, it doesn't seem as solid or insurmountable as it did at first.

The manifestation of the free mind is said to be lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

Laughing at your pettiness probably works better than scolding yourself for it.

The more we identify and acknowledge moments when we're unable to share in someone else's pleasure and ask ourselves whether another person's happiness truly jeopardizes our own, the more we pave the way for experiencing sympathetic joy

Sympathetic joy is a practice. It takes time and effort to free ourselves of the scarcity story that most of us have learned along the way, the idea that happiness is a competition, and that someone else is grabbing all the joy.

We also try not to harm others verbally, seeing that our speech has tremendous power. Words do not just leave our mouths and disappear; they have great effects in this world.

IMAGINE RECLAIMING ALL THE ENERGY that could be available to us but isn't because we scatter it, squandering it on endlessly regretting the past, worrying about the future, berating ourselves, blaming others, checking Facebook yet again, throwing ourselves into serial snacking, workaholism, recreational shopping, recreational drugs.

Several performers have told me that they do the following brief lovingkindness meditation if they have stage fright: Standing in front of an audience, before they start acting, playing music, or reciting a poem, they send out wishes for the well-being of everyone in the room. 'When I do that,' one singer told me, 'I no longer have a sense of the audience as a group of hostile people out there waiting to judge me. I feel, okay, here we all are together.

We begin to cultivate real love for ourselves when we treat ourselves with compassion.

With bright faith we act on our potential to transform our suffering and live in a different way.

If we hold beliefs skillfully, we will not get entangled in them, but will see them as the mental constructs they are. When we claim our right to question everything, including our beliefs, we can unhook from our dependence on what is familiar and let in the heartfelt, open, fresh quality of faith.

But if people are genuinely happy in their choice of action or lifestyle, we do not need to impose our standards. If they are not harming themselves, if they are not harming others, can we be generous enough to feel joy for them? That is the practice of mudita.

May you never forget what is worth remembering or remember what is best forgotten.

Test me, LORD, and try me, examine my heart and my mind; for I have always been mindful of your unfailing love and have lived in reliance on your faithfulness. Psalm 26:2–3 NIV