Quotes About Mindfulness

Like meditation, psychotherapy has the potential to reveal how much of our thinking is an artificial construaction designed to help us cope with an unpredictable world.

Many people, in both the East and the West, believe that shutting down the ego, and the thinking mind, is the ultimate purpose of meditation. The Dalai Lama, rather forcefully, always argues that this is a grave misunderstanding. Ego is at once our biggest obstacle and our greatest hope. We can be at its mercy or we can learn to mold it according to certain guiding principles. Intelligence is a key ally in this shaping process, something to be harnessed in the service of one's progress.

It's not what she is thinking that matters, it's how she relates to her thoughts that will make all the difference.

As the famous Zen master Dogen has said: To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be one with others.

The Second Noble Truth of the Buddha takes its cue from this experience. It is traditionally described as the truth of "the arising of dukkha," and its central tenet is that the cause of suffering is craving or thirst. The

It is a fundamental tenet of Buddhist thought that before emptiness of self can be realized, the self must be experienced fully, as it appears. It is the task of therapy, as well as of meditation, to return those split-off elements to a person's awareness—to make the person see that they are not, in fact, split-off elements at all, but essential aspects of his or her own being.

Many others do not make this transition so seamlessly: they become enamored of the observing self that beginning meditation empowers and use that capacity for self-observation as a way to avoid personal responsibility. They observe their own pain, but not their contribution to its making.

Form is emptiness, the Buddhists teach, but form is also form. I would never be able to approach the emptiness of form if I continued to deny myself the experience of it.

The Buddha was interested in teaching us not only how to find our own freedom, but in how to stay in affectionate relationship to other people.

Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection

But when we are able to see the extent of our own fears and desires, there is something in us, recognized by both Buddha and Freud, which is able to break free.

The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.

How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.

Perhaps this is what all prayer is, when the ceremony and the theology are peeled away, a serious stillness in which one talks quietly to one's own best self.

To be honest, I'm trying to maintain a Buddhist detachment about the whole thing to stop it taking ten years off my life.

Think about today. Think about things that have happened. Especially about good things that have happened.

Just think about today. Think about things that have happened. Especially about good things that have happened.

Maybe the answers weren't important. Maybe it was the asking which mattered. Not taking anything for granted. Maybe that's what stopped you growing old.

Perhaps the secret was to stop looking for greener grass. Perhaps the secret was to make the best of what you had.

This is the thought that should be uppermost on your mind in all you do for your children. In every step you take about them, in every plan, and scheme, and arrangement that concerns them, do not leave out that mighty question, How will this affect their souls?

Ten menos miedo y más esperanza; come menos, mastica más; lloriquea menos, respira más; habla menos, di más; odia menos, ama más; y todo lo bueno será tuyo. Proverbio sueco

Good habits are hard to form and easy to live with. Bad habits are easy to form and hard to live with. Pay attention. Be aware . If we don't consciously form good ones, we will unconsciously form bad ones.

Supongo que en la vida hay algunas cosas que no podemos explicar y otras en las que es mejor no pensar.

Often we find it easier to think our way around things rather than to feel our way through them: