Quotes About Awareness

We start to regulate an upsetting emotion the moment we become aware of it.

we are consciously aware of only a tiny portion of our perceptions and actions. To us, that small compartment appears to fill our whole mental cabinet.

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.

Try not to get locked into your conceptual mind—it interferes with what's happening naturally. Just let go of the schema thoughts with a mindful presence. Just stay connected to awareness and try to be mindful whenever the schema appears. Try not to be concerned about what needs to happen; healing happens by itself, if you let it, with the soothing effect of awareness.

Becoming aware of our emotional patterns gives us an idea of where our attachments—and so our clinging and misperception—are especially thick.

put the least effort into dealing with a disturbing feeling that will do the job.

Alchemy is accepting everything in the pot without trying to reject or correct it—seeing that even the negative is part of the learning and healing.

A brief act of noticing the disturbing thoughts and feelings, just an acknowledgment, like an inner nod—rather than a mental conversation with them—can sometimes suffice.

left. If you drive to work or school along the same route every day, intentionally vary the way you go, exploring different streets and unfamiliar territory. This sounds simple, almost innocuous. But when we do a familiar task in a novel way, we stir a fresh awareness.

This gives us an added anchor in the mind to resist the tide of those thoughts and to help us determine how active the schema seems to be. Mindfulness teacher Joseph Goldstein points out that one reason it is so important to make our thoughts the object of mindfulness is that "if we remain unaware of thoughts as they arise, it is difficult to develop insight" into them.

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

breaking free from a habit, no matter how seemingly trivial, can bring a shift in our awareness, inspiring a fresh attitude: beginner's mind, seeing things as if for the first time. And that fresh look gives us the option of doing things differently.

Mindfulness means seeing things as they are, without trying to change them. The point is to dissolve our reactions to disturbing emotions, being careful not to reject the emotion itself. Mindfulness can change how we relate to, and perceive, our emotional states; it doesn't necessarily eliminate them.

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.

Stepping back from our thoughts through mindfulness gives us the freedom to question the thoughts and so be less controlled by them.

Mindfulness gives us breathing space from this conditioning.

Bringing an automatic habit into awareness in order to change it is a crucial step.

But once we become aware that the sequence is starting, we can consciously and intentionally initiate a different, more constructive response.

Having counter-thoughts ready makes it easier to challenge them, once mindfulness has brought them to your attention.

Bringing mindfulness to the moment, she was able to step back enough to ask herself, "Do I want to make this real?" That gave her a chance to answer herself, "No"—and she would drop it.

Opening up a space in her mind gave her more choice in the moment.

recognize them as mere thoughts, seeing them as well-worn ruts in the mind: "Oh, I'm having those thoughts again." As we recognize them for what they are, we break their tyranny in the mind.

When she caught herself in such moments, she'd talk back to her deprivation schema, saying, "I'm not depriving you if I don't eat this ice cream.

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