Quotes About Awareness

Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath. For something to be delicious, you have to be present to savor it, and presence is in attention and in the flow of breath. It begins in the mouth, my parents' preferred site of comfort, and then it connects our heads to our bodies through our throats, and into our lungs and tummies, a beautiful connective cord of air.

Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up.

And because she did not shove this down my throat, this dawned on me.

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.

There really is only today, although luckily that is also the eternal now.

Now, you also want to ask yourself how they stand, what they carry in their pockets or purses, what happens in their faces and to their posture when they are thinking, or bored, or afraid. Whom would they have voted for last time? Why should we care about them anyway? What would be the first thing they stopped doing if they found out they had six months to live? Would they start smoking again? Would they keep flossing? You

The Amen is only as good as the attitude. If you are trying to finish up quickly so you can check your cell phone messages, you are missing the chance to spend quiet moments with the giver of life and the eternal, which means you may reap continued feelings of life racing along without you. So as Samuel Beckett admonished us to fail again, and fail better, we try to pray again, and pray better, for slightly longer and with slightly more honesty, breathing more, deeper, and with more attention.

good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep

You never get over certain losses, but the anguish part eventually ends, and it all just sucks for a while. There were moments when I understood that there was nothing much I was going to understand or figure out. There was simply the present moment, awareness, impermanence, birdsong, love. There is no fixing this setup here. It seems broken and ruined at times, but it isn't: it's simply the nature of human life.

that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around. Writing

They taught me to pay attention, but not so much attention to my tiny princess mind.

Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on. Now, if you ask me, what's going on is that we're all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another.

So try to calm down, get quiet, breathe, and listen.

If you stop trying to control your mind so much, you'll have intuitive hunches about what this or that character is all about.

How can we know all this, yet somehow experience joy? Because that's how we are designed – for awareness and curiosity. We are hardwired with curiosity inside us, because life knew that this would keep us going even in bad sailing.

Every sound is by definition a stop, which is how we can hear it.

If you... don't get to hear or read stories about your world, you can be fooled into thinking that the world isn't miraculous—and it is.

I remind myself of this when I cannot get any work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus. To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence.

A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

Even mushrooms respond to light—I suppose they blink their mushroomy little eyes, like the rest of us.

had to learn to be present without paying quite so much attention to my poor old overamped mind, because this was the source of most of my unhappiness. And it still is. The

Life on earth is a head-scratcher for anyone who's paying attention. This place has been a bad match for me since I was four.

The point was to lean toward goodness, to resist less, to pray for our enemies. The point was to have a spiritual awakening of any sort that would help us live more often in kind awareness.