Quotes About Awareness

Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment.

In order to free ourselves from our assumptions about love, we must ask ourselves what long-held, often buried assumptions are and then face them, which takes courage, humility, and kindness.

Awareness levels the playing field. We are all humans doing the best we can.

Meditation is not about what's happening, it is about how we're relating to what's happening.

When we are willing to explore our own experiences, we open the doorway to deeper connection and intimacy.

Every time we forget to breathe or our minds wander or we're hijacked by feelings or sensations, we gently bring ourselves back to the breath, again and again.

Each opportunity to interrupt the onslaught of thoughts and return to the object of meditation is, in fact, a moment of enlightenment

The more we practice mindfulness, the more alert we become to the cost of keeping secrets.

The simple act of being completely attentive & present to another person is an act of love, and it fosters unshakeable well-being.

Meditation] trains us to be with a painful experience in the moment, without adding imagined distress and difficulty. If we look closely at it, the pain is bound to change, and that's as true of a headache as it is of a heartache: the discomfort oscillates; there are beats of rest between moments of unpleasantness. When we discover firsthand that pain isn't static, that it's a living, changing system, it doesn't seem as solid or insurmountable as it did at first.

IMAGINE RECLAIMING ALL THE ENERGY that could be available to us but isn't because we scatter it, squandering it on endlessly regretting the past, worrying about the future, berating ourselves, blaming others, checking Facebook yet again, throwing ourselves into serial snacking, workaholism, recreational shopping, recreational drugs.

If we hold beliefs skillfully, we will not get entangled in them, but will see them as the mental constructs they are. When we claim our right to question everything, including our beliefs, we can unhook from our dependence on what is familiar and let in the heartfelt, open, fresh quality of faith.

Gangaji's truth required activism, not passivity.

She said my problem was that I saw things in people that they didn't see in themselves.

The British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and what it meant to its subject peoples.

This book has no pretensions to infallibility, let alone to omniscience.

As someone once said about water pollution, we all live downstream. We are all interconnected, and we can no longer afford the luxury of not thinking about the rest of the planet in anything we do.

The Atharva Veda points out that the quest for awareness, the search for answers, the journey towards self-realization, never ceases: How does the wind not cease to blow? How does the mind take no repose? Why do the waters, seeking to reach the truth, Never at any time cease to flow? —Atharva Veda, X.7.3731

I can see the color of the grass deepening, becoming impossibly green the way it does in early spring when you've almost stopped believing that things will ever grow again. Right now it looks like each individual blade has been painted, and I wonder who will notice these things when I'm gone.

Sentience without senses. Blind, deaf, nerveless, moveless. Some irritability, response to touch. Response to sun, to light, to water, and chemicals in the earth around the roots. Nothing comprehensible to an animal mind. Presence without mind. Awareness of being, without object or subject. Nirvana. (p. 517)

It is much more difficult to deal with the truth about your life when you have no idea that you have feet of clay and it suddenly begins to rain.

Many of the judgments we make of one another—judgments that cause great pain—are preventable, because they are based on misunderstanding

Children are the best recorders of information - they miss nothing; but they are the poorest interpreters.

My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you" (Job 42:5).