Quotes About Awareness

The third kind of loneliness is avoiding unnecesssary activities. When we're lonely in a "hot" way, we look for something to save us; we look for a way out. We get this queasy feeling that we call loneliness, and our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair. That's called unnecessary activity. It's a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don't have to feel any pain.

However, in this technique, because your eyes are open and because the gaze in not a tight gaze and because the whole emphasis of the practice is one of openess, even though you're mindful of the out-breath, you're not shutting out all other things that are going on.

As swans swim on the lake and vultures roam in the charnel ground, you can let your mind rest in its natural state.

The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will. It's going to stick around until you learn your lesson, at any rate.

Looking for alternatives is the only thing that keeps us from realizing that we're already in a sacred world. Looking for alternatives—better sights than we see, better sounds than we hear, a better mind than we have—keeps us from realizing that we could stand with pride in the middle of our life and realize it's a sacred mandala.

But the instruction that the awareness is only twenty-five percent really brings home the idea that it's not a concentration practice - there's a very light touch on the berath as it goes out.

It's helpful to always remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing withwhatever arises, without picking and choosing.

Cultivating absolute bodhichitta means having a relationship with the world that is nonconceptual, that is unprejudiced, having a direct, unedited relationship with reality.

Saying "thinking" is a very interesting point in the meditation. It's the point at which we can consciously train in gentleness and in developing a nonjudgmental attitude. The word for loving-kindness in Sanskrit is maitri. Maitri is also translated as unconditional friendliness. So each time you say to yourself "thinking," you are cultivating that unconditional friendliness toward whatever arises in your mind.

Attention to the present moment. We make the choice, moment by moment, to be fully here. Attending to our present-moment mind and body is a way of being tender toward self, toward other, and toward the world. This quality of attention is inherent in our ability to love.

Space permeates everything, every moment of our lives.

When we regard thoughts and emotions with humor and openness, that's how we perceive the universe.

In sitting meditation, our practice is to watch our thoughts arise, label them "thinking," and return to the breath.

It's painful to face how we harm others, and it takes a while. It's a journey that happens because of our commitment to gentleness and honesty, our commitment to staying awake, to being mindful.

We're always in an intermediate state between the past and the future, between the memory of what happened before and the approaching experience that will soon become memory as well.

Tu mente es como un cubo de basura chiflado que grita».

Because we mistake what is impermanent to be permanent

getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, looking it right in the eye—not as a way to solve problems, but as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking.

Because we mistake what is impermanent to be permanent, we suffer.

At the root of all the harm we cause is ignorance. Through meditation, that's what we begin to undo. If we see that we have no mindfulness, that we rarely refrain, that we have little well-being, that is not confusion, that's the beginning of clarity. As

Each situation, each thought, each word, each feeling, is just a passing memory.

The practice is compassionate inquiry into our moods, our emotions, our thoughts.

Thoughts, emotions, moods, and memories come and they go, and basic nowness is always here.

Rather than trying to get rid of something or buying into a dualistic sense of being attacked, we take the opportunity to see how we close down when we're squeezed.