Quotes About Awareness

issue hit home—when their own children started using intravenous drugs and got infected.

was struck by American ignorance about the rest of the world and Americans' crude idea that Russia

Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. MATTHEW 6:8

We assume that we've come so far as compassionate citizens of the world if we do choose to read the news, yet the attitude towards life can be one where we put blinders on and forget that there are civil wars going on. It's easy to forget that there are so many people starving to death every single day.

There is no politically neutral fence available for us to sit on, and our attempts to do so have the consequence (intended or not) of supporting the existing political system.

If we concentrate exclusively on the 'individual-as-presented', we are much more likely to see their present emotional difficulties as deriving from internal adaptations - but without reference to what necessitated those adaptations in the first place. Since adaptations are essentially ways of protecting ourselves, we need to be aware of what external threats the individual may be protecting themself against.

Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.

No one knocked on his door the next day. Nor the day after. Nor the one after that. But that didn't mean he was unaware of what was happening. Someone had carried a plate of those fucking biscuits past his room, and even the oak door had provided no barrier for the smell. Not for anything of hers.

Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.

Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time

When one is out of touch with oneself, one cannot touch others.

Which all goes to show that it is hard to hide how you feel, when mirrors are out there everywhere, just waiting to pounce.

but old wounds don't stop aching. They are always under the surface, ready to remind one of the original injuries.

I have this theory actually, that after an absence you discover in that first glimpse what you really think and feel about another person. You know things you couldn't know before

I think that sometimes the great changes in our lives, the ones that divide time, happen so deep down and silently that we don't even know when they occur......It frequently happens that the seasons of the greatest change are the times that feel the most tranquil, the most suspended, the most...timeless.

We also have to make sure our children know the history of women. Tell them the rotten truth: It wasn't always possible for women to become doctors or managers or insurance people. Let them be armed with a true picture of the way we want it to be.

To do that, we first learn to pay attention, to be fully present in each moment and aware of the nuances of life. It takes a while, but every bit of improvement in this skill is a wonderful gift we give ourselves each day. And it's done by relaxing, not by forcing.

The more you talk about It and the more you think about It, the further from It you go; stop talking, stop thinking and there is nothing you will not understand.

Watching the tiny shrimp and snails on the sea whips, I realized that those moments between birth and death are exactly what we have in life. If we just pay full attention to each of them as we live it, the universe will tell us what it's about. And I strongly suspected that it was as much about sea whips and snails as it was about humans.

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house. It's as though I could fly, almost, and I get very tense before I've told the truth — hard. Then I sit down at the desk and get going with it.

I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It's as though I could fly.