Quotes About Mindfulness

It's been a tough year. . . Someone said I should send out Buddhist thank-you cards since Buddhists believe that anything that challenges you makes you pull yourself together.

I always seem to be so cozy with my own company that I rarely think of going out.

That was what he got for lowering his guard and going off into a dream for a moment.

what she had

He did not have to do anything here. He could just be. Perhaps that was the best and most enduring of lessons one could learn from life.

the slightest noise

Cleansing our emotional poison is a simple process. All it takes is the thought of love and our breath. We hold the wound in our mind briefly. Then we breathe deliberately while thinking of the word love. We can apply this cleansing routine to old wounds and new ones. When we clean a wound, it heals itself. We cannot clean a wound by sharing the poison with someone else. Such an action increases the poison.

Self-care should include the cold shower as well as the scented tub.

Everything, even sweeping, scraping vegetables, weeding a garden and waiting on the sick could be a prayer, if it were offered to God.

Patti proposes that I pray to accept whatever reality I'm in, staying alert for practical solutions rather than issuing orders in prayer. It takes discipline to stop beseeching the heavens for wheelbarrows of gold

Put your mind where your body is. One day at a time forces you to reckon with the instant you actually occupy, rather than living in fantasy la-la that never comes.

If you've got one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, you're straddling today—pissing all over it rather than living in it.

You're working so hard, burning the candle at both ends. Up early, home late. When are you going to stop and smell the roses?

Stop the habit of wishful thinking and start the habit of thoughtful wishes.

Praying It doesn't have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don't try to make them elaborate, this isn't a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.

Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.

And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

Listen, whatever you see and love— that's where you are.

Today I'm flying low and I'm not saying a word. I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten. And so forth. But I'm taking the day off. Quiet as a feather. I hardly move though really I'm traveling a terrific distance. Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.

I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? While the soul, after all, is only a window, and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep.

If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness. I would be a fox, or a tree full of waving branches. I wouldn't mind being a rose in a field full of roses. Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition. Reason they have not yet thought of. Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what. Or any other foolish question.

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?