Quotes About Focus

Two qualities are essential to mindfulness: even-hovering attention and tenacity.

order for mindfulness to work for us, we need to make an effort to strengthen our ability to be mindful.

Mindfulness is not thinking about what we experience, but a direct, bare attention to the experience itself.

Mental noting can also be a help when you need to focus your wandering, confused, or scattered mind.

you can use the mental note "rising, falling" to track the sensations of breathing as your abdomen rises and falls with each breath.

The noting should be like a whisper in the mind, not like a mantra, or word to focus on. Keep it very soft and light. As an aid to practice, mental noting can help to clearly acknowledge with precision what is actually happening.

But when emotions enter the picture, our mind's selective attention can be less useful: we can avoid noticing something not because it's irrelevant but because it might disturb us.

simply noting the disturbance may be enough to dislodge it from the mind.

Meditating on thoughts—being mindful of them—as he defines it, means "simply to be aware, as thoughts arise, that the mind is thinking, without getting involved in the content: not going off on a train of association, not analyzing the thought and why it came, but merely to be aware at the particular moment [that] 'thinking' is happening. If we fail to do this, to see our thoughts as such, they remain the unconscious filters on our perception.

When the amygdala heats up with intense activity, emotionally loaded thoughts loom larger in our field of attention.

The second way mindfulness disempowers schema thoughts has to do with the nature of attention itself.

mindfulness fills much of our attention with something other than the mental tape loops that activate our schemas.

Mindfulness helps to derail schema thoughts by focusing our awareness on the here and now, simply noting what we experience without getting caught up in our thoughts or our reactions to them.

Our emotional reactions often distract us from the present, filling our minds with relentless thoughts about another time and place, filling our bodies with turbulent feelings.

At this level of mindfulness, it may help to use the method of naming—bringing to mind a single word that identifies the nature of the disturbance.

The most important thing is remembering the most important thing.

It's imperative that we limit overtly recreational activities that do not lead to constructive results.

If you are once sure what you do want, you find that everything else goes down before it like grass under a roller—(all other interests, your own and other people's. I had

caught hold of myself and nearly laughed at how ridiculous it all seemed. Colin was right—it was time I returned to my studies. Idle hands indeed proved the devil's tools.

It is while tracking that the hunter exhibits his true skill.

just because mindfulness is simple does not mean that it is easy.

A mind cannot exist independently, without an object. By its very nature, mind is the subject, the agent, the doer. Subject and object are interdependent—without one the other cannot exist. This is why if, through deep meditation, we free our minds from interaction with all external and internal objects, the subjective mind will naturally focus on itself as the object.

Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing. —HENRY MILLER

I wanted to acquire an education, work extremely hard and never deviate from my goal, to make it.