Quotes About Reflection

I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead - and that one was myself.

To see the Earth below you when we could take a break... to appreciate the environment around us was very special.

After I'd gotten a year under my belt in college, I thought I'd outgrown my home.

It's so much more interesting having life under your belt.

The belt will grow dust and sit on the mantelpiece, but it's not about the belt. It's about how I can be as a father, as a human being that matters to me.

It is simply a practical way to be more in touch with the fullness of your being through a systematic process of self-observation, self-inquiry, and mindful action.

Touching soap bubbles is another lovely metaphor.

We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. The incessant stream of thoughts flowing through our minds leaves us very little respite for inner quiet. And we leave precious little room for ourselves anyway just to be

Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? LAO-TZU, Tao-te-Ching

It is the inner experience which counts. And you have to be there for it. All else is mere thinking.

cannot be imposed, legislated, or decreed. They can only be cultivated, and

attention and the awareness that arises from it are the doorway to true education and learning — life-long gifts that keep deepening with use.

But meditation is not just about sitting, either. It is about stopping and being present, that is all.

Our capacity for thought is one of humanity's most amazing qualities.

meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. THOREAU, Walden

When Thoreau says, "it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished," this is waving a red flag in front of a bull for go-getting, progress-oriented people. But who is to say that his realizations of one morning spent in his doorway are less memorable or have less merit than a lifetime of busyness, lived with scant appreciation for stillness and the bloom of the present moment?

There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation has been faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges. In other words, you must be willing to let itself to become your teacher.

It means that how we relate to all our moments, all our experiences, is a choice.

ultimately, mindfulness is intimacy—with ourselves and the world—underneath any apparent separation between the two.

Guess what? When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are. Whatever you wind up doing, that's what you've wound up doing. Whatever you are thinking right now, that's what's on your mind. Whatever has happened to you, it has already happened. The important question is, how are you going to handle it? In other words, Now what?

But waking up is ultimately something that each one of us can only do for ourselves. When it comes down to it, wherever you go, there you are

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more. It all ties in. It's not a real option for me as a