Quotes About Mindfulness

To be able to create, we must be willing to learn how to quiet our minds, feel our emotions, and stay in the vacuum so the ideas can well up from our deepest place of knowing.

Fritz Perls says that the more deeply grounded we are in our actual reality, the more possibility exists for actual change. In other words, acceptance of the present must precede action.

We shape clay into a pot, but it is emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. -TAO TE CHING

Most of the things we need to be most fully alive never come in busyness. They grow in rest.

Sometimes we're so focused on our desired blessings that we fail to stop and thank God by remembering the blessings we already have in Christ.

the Buddha may well have been the original psychoanalyst, or, at least, the first to use the mode of analytic inquiry that Freud was later to codify and develop.

Making one's life into a meditation is different from using meditation to escape from life.

His efforts were always in the service of releasing people from their fixed ideas about who or what they were, about freeing them from attachment to whatever concept they were clinging to, about loosening the hold that the fear-based ego claimed as its birthright.

The early parent-child environment, the balance between being and doing, lives on in the mind. Mindfulness offers an opportunity to see these patterns clearly. In seeing them, in bringing them into the domain of reflective self-awareness, there is a possibility of emerging from their constraints. Choice emerges where before there was only blind and conditioned behavior.

I began to think that there was something awesome about my timing. How was it that, at the exact moment of my stopping, such incredible things were happening? It took me longer than I am prepared to admit to realize that such things were always happening. It was only that I was finally paying attention.

The Buddha] is not dividing himself into worthy and unworthy pieces; he is one being, indivisible, immune from the tendency to double back and beat up on himself. He has seen the worst in himself and not been taken down.

In the practice of mindfulness, the ego's usual insistence on control and security is deliberately and progressively undermined. This is accomplished by steadily shifting one's center of gravity from the thinking mind to a neutral object like the breath, or in the case of my workshop, the random sounds of the environment.

The traumatized individual lives outside time, in his or her own separate reality, unable to relate to the consensual reality of others. The remembering quality of mindfulness counters this tendency.

According to Buddhism, it is our fear at experiencing ourselves directly that creates suffering.

Trauma is a basic fact of life, according to the Buddha. It is not just an occasional thing that happens only to some people; it is there all the time.

What I had learned from Buddhism was that I did not have to know myself analytically as much as I had to tolerate not knowing.

The more we come to terms with our own separateness, taught the Buddha, the more we can feel the connections that are already there.

Buddhism teaches us that we are not so much isolated individuals as we are overlapping environments, and that we have the capacity to know ourselves in this way.

meditation is not just about creating states of well-being; it is about destroying the belief in an inherently existent self.

After five minutes, or ten, or fifteen—it doesn't matter—open your eyes and resume your day. For a moment or two things might seem more alive.

Trauma is not just the result of major disasters. It does not happen to only some people. An undercurrent of it runs through ordinary life, shot through as it is with the poignancy of impermanence.

One of the things I have always appreciated about the Buddhism I have known is the way it has urged me to circumvent my own expectations about what an "enlightened" response might be in any given situation.

When Jack was returning to America from his years in Thailand, he sought out an elderly Western monk and asked him if he had any advice about being back in the West. "Only one thing," said the monk. "When you're running to catch the subway and you see it leaving without you, don't panic, just remember, 'There's always another train.

The ego needs all the help it can get. We can all benefit from getting over ourselves.