Quotes About Mindfulness

Visualization is not just some spiritual event—it's a basic cognitive process.

When we are mindful, we experience our social presence as a series of momentary connections with one other being. These moments of interpersonal connection are like the Lego building blocks of our social awareness. The

If you are preparing for an important meeting or event, for instance, you often fantasize about everything that could possibly go wrong beforehand. This is basically just an anxious mind generating a negative, insecure, and incapable image of itself. With visualization, the very space of our imagination, often dominated by fantasies of the future and nightmares of the past, could be converted into a kind of mindfully creative space, a kind of movie studio that actually benefits sentient beings.

Whenever an emotion arises in the space of our awareness, it creates a powerful wind that can be either harnessed as wisdom or fixated upon and treated neurotically and destructively.

The basic premise of Buddhism is that there is no savior to worship: nobody is going to save you from your own mind. Nobody can get into the heart of your experience and fix anything for you. If you want to make your own internal experience more hospitable, only you can do that work. Others can always support and guide you and spark insights, but ultimately you are your own boss and the agent of understanding your mind and opening your heart. Nothing

When we try to do more than one thing at a time, another deeper problem starts to develop. In the frenzy of juggling it all, we tend to shift our focus away from the things that matter and toward activities we don't really need to be doing at all. We

When we spend lifetimes numbing out against now, even the gentle stillness of the present moment becomes a threat. Even slowing down long enough to look at your own heartmind becomes an act of revolution against the sheer pace of our social karma.

As we've said, those people weren't "born this way" (if they were, what use would they be as examples for us?). Rather, they were brave enough and patient enough to slowly develop themselves, to till the fertile soil of their own minds over time.

to engage in any path of well-being or self-development, some small part of us must already believe that we're worth developing.

people struggle because we don't know where we belong, and we always assume that home lies somewhere other than here and now, a mistake that sets us on an exhausting commute.

in order to fully awaken, we have to dissolve the false dichotomy between secular and spiritual truths, and start to view ourselves, each other, and the world we share as sacred, 24/7/365.

For a committed practitioner, forming a healthy relationship between meditation practice and the cultivation of awareness throughout the day is crucial. Otherwise, the momentum and pace of the rest of our life overwhelms whatever insights we are able to experience through formal meditation. Ideally,

The study of our habitual conditioning and how habit leads us to react is the study of karma. On

Karma becomes most relevant if we simply examine it as a psychology of habit. Karma is about beginning to see the general script we act from, the strategies we employ when confronted with familiar obstacles along our commute. This

Eventually, if we are going to wake up and truly come home to our own heartmind, we have to turn the full scope of our life into a practice space. This doesn't have to start as an all-the-time endeavor, but little by little it is said that our awareness practice can become a constant companion. It

When we stop asking the question "Whose fault is it?" and start asking the question "How can I work with this now?" then we are truly stepping onto the path of taking responsibility for our karma. When

If we are able to take responsibility for our own mind, then we can work with whatever life throws at us without resentment or blame, and with the curiosity and self-care that are necessary for mindfulness to develop in all aspects of life. On this basis, we can also help others.

With natural curiosity, the practice of mindfulness becomes effortless.

Love requires learning to love ourselves in the mirror, and learning to look other people in the eye. Buddhism, in turn, asks us to pause and look at even the subtlest causal connections and take our appreciation of them to greater depths.

Inhabiting a human nervous system is kind of like living in a house where the doorbell and the burglar alarm make exactly the same sound. Because

If we are going to conquer materialism, we have to make the heartmind into a place in which the full range of human emotions can feel at home.

We would worry less about what others think of us if we realized how seldom they do.

We learn the inner secret of happiness when we learn to direct our inner drives, our interest and our attention to something besides ourselves.

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths.