Quotes About Mindfulness

When you don't want to be where you are, you create suffering for yourself. Change happens through acceptance, kindness and relaxation--not resistance, not warfare, not fights.

Awareness is a way you keep yourself company. When you are aware you are being compulsive, you are no longer locked in the behavior. You have a choice to stop. That choice--and therefore awareness itself--is freedom.

anytime you truly listen to your hunger and fullness, you lose weight.

Ask yourself if you are in this for the long run--if it's only your weight you want to change or if you are willing to use your eating patterns as a portal to the inner universe. And if the answer is the latter, then there is no end to what you can learn, be, understand, become.

If you try to lose weight by shaming, depriving and fearing yourself, you will end up shamed, deprived, and afraid. Kindness comes first. Always.

If you decided to reteach yourself your own loveliness today, what would you do? How would you speak to yourself? Can you allow yourself that much?

The process is the goal.

I tell them that if compulsive eating is anything, it's a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard. When we don't want to notice what is going on. Compulsive eating is a way we distance ourselves from the way things are when they are not how we want them to be.

All any feeling wants is be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell its story. It wants to dissolve like a thousand writhing snakes that with a flick of kindness become harmless strands of rope.

People often mistake tenderheartedness for indulgence, as if being kind to themselves leads to lethargy—sitting around the house all day eating bonbons and wearing muumuus and pink rollers. This is simply not true. I often hear a variation on this statement: "If I'm not intolerant of my shortcomings, how can I ever expect to change them?" And the answer is, By doing the opposite of what you think you need to do to change. By being kind to yourself.

There isn't a someday. There never was. No one has ever been to the future that you keep putting your life on hold for. All we ever have is now.

compulsive eating is basically a refusal to be fully alive. No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can't stand it any longer, we binge. The way we are able to accomplish all of this is by the simple act of bolting—of leaving ourselves—hundreds of times a day.

Stephen Levine, a Buddhist teacher, says that hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else. Being constantly agitated—another word for nonaccepting—about the inevitable. Being in a relationship with someone and refusing to surrender to the love because you don't want to give yourself to something you will eventually lose.

We keep wanting more because we don't let ourselves have what we already have

Take yourself in. Ask the questions no one ever asked you. Keep going until you know the answer and you know who's asking. Until you realize- it's not far away- that the essence of you, like the sky, was always here. You just happened to get distracted by the local weather for a few decades.

When we're convinced we have to earn joy, we don't notice the ten thousand places in which it is already waiting, asking, waving for our attention.

hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are.

But staying with the emptiness—entering it, welcoming it, using it to get to know ourselves better, being able to distinguish the stories we tell ourselves about it from the actual feeling itself—that's radical.

You miss the life that happens in the middle zone—between now and what you think your life should be like. And when you miss those moments because you'd rather be doing something else, you are missing your own life. Those moments are gone. You will never get them back.

But staying with the emptiness -entering it, welcoming it, using it to get to know ourselves better, being able to distinguish the stories we tell ourselves about it from the actual feeling itself - that´s radical

There isn't a someday. There never was. No one has ever been to the future that you keep putting your life on hold for. All we ever have is now. And if you continually put your life on hold for what your life will be like tomorrow, or the next year, or when you finally lose the weight, you won't recognize that you already have what you want because you will have spent years training yourself to want, not have.

Meditation develops the capacity to question your mind. Without it, you are at the mercy of every thought, every desire, every wave of emotion. You become unhinged, dependent on whether things are going well that day or not.

If you're eating past fullness, stop. And if you don't stop, fine—but ask yourself what's going on. Notice what you feel, what arises inside you.

Wake up to the riot of life around you every second. The singer Pearl Bailey said, "People see God every day; they just don't recognize Him.