Quotes About Awareness

Pointing directly at your own heart, you find Buddha.

Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment

The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself.

the life span of any particular emotion is only one and a half minutes. After that we have to revive the emotion and get it going again.

When thoughts come up, touch them very lightly, like a feather touching a bubble. Let the whole thing be soft and gentle, but at the same time precise.

Every situation is a passing memory.

We don't sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we'll be more awake in our lives.

Leonard Cohen once said about the benefits of many years of meditation, "The less there was of me, the happier I got." Letting

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves.

We can learn to act and think in ways that sow seeds of our future well-being, gradually becoming more aware of what causes happiness as well as what causes distress.

With the global economy in chaos and the environment of the planet at risk, with war raging and suffering escalating, it is time for each of us in our own lives to take the leap and do whatever we can to help turn things around.

The calligraphy reads, "Pointing directly at your own heart, you find Buddha." Listening to talks about the dharma, or the teachings of Buddha, or practicing meditation is nothing other than studying ourselves.

Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts.

You come back to that breath over and over, through boredom, edginess, fear, and well-being. This perseverance and repetition—when done with honesty, a light touch, humor, and kindness—is its own reward.

the point is still to lean toward the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from it.

When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha" means that when you see that you're grasping or clinging to anything, whether conventionally it's called good or bad, make friends with that. Look into it. Get to know it completely and utterly. In that way it will let go of itself.

In order to be gentle and create an atmosphere of compassion for yourself, it's necessary to stop talking to yourself about how wrong everything is—or how right everything is, for that matter.

I N TAOISM there's a famous saying that goes, "The Tao that can be spoken is not the ultimate Tao." Another way you could say that, although I've never seen it translated this way, is, "As soon as you begin to believe in something, then you can no longer see anything else." The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.

I take refuge in the Buddha," that means I take refuge in the courage and the potential of fearlessness, of removing all the armor that covers this awakeness of mine. I am awake; I will spend my life taking this armor off. Nobody else can take it off because nobody else knows where all the little locks are, nobody else knows where it's sewed up tight, where it's going to take a lot of work to get that particular iron thread untied.

When we start to ask ourselves, "Does it matter?" we realize how many aspects there are to every situation. We begin to appreciate how interconnected we are to the rest of the world, and how even our thought patterns can lead to a whole series of consequences

Even though there are so many teachings, so many meditations, so many instructions, the basic point of it all is just to learn to be extremely honest and also wholehearted about what exists in your mind - thoughts, emotions bodily sensations, the whole thing that adds up to what we call me or I.

The path is uncharted. It comes into existence moment by moment and at the same time drops away behind us. It's like riding on a train sitting backwards. We can't see where we're headed, only where we've been. This is a very encouraging teaching, because it says that the source of wisdom is whatever is going to happen to us today. The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this very instant.

Refraining is very powerful because it gives us an opportunity to acknowledge when we're caught and then to get unstuck.