Quotes About Awareness

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

Just because it's taken you three years to notice, Ron, doesn't mean no one else has spotted I'm a girl!

Near as I can figure, living has always been the primary cause of dying, and the sooner we all accept that simple truth, the better off we'll be." Well,

Happiness is distraction from the human tragedy.

Mindfulness could also be described as "heartfulness" because it is really about a compassionate awareness.

When we stop trying to force pleasant feelings, they are freer to emerge on their own . When we stop trying to resist unpleasant feelings, we may find that they can drift away by themselves . When we stop trying to make something happen, a whole world of fresh and unanticipated experiences may become accessible to us.

Every time you forced yourself not to think, your thoughts exploded into life with renewed strength.

And so we create a story—a "drama about me"—that may gradually wander far away from the here and now and far away from the way things actually are. Once the script we have concocted for ourselves has been set in the mind, we may unwittingly rely on it as a reference point for all present and future judgments—without ever checking back with the here and now. Without knowing it, our thoughts become words carved in stone rather than words written on water.

You only ever have a moment to live, this moment, and yet we all tend to live in the past or in the future.

once you see the difference that paying full attention can make to the small things in life, you start to get an inkling of the cost of inattention.

Is your speaking an improvement on silence?

Gradually, moment by moment, you may have come to realize that although you can't stop the unsettling thoughts from arising in your mind, you can stop what happens next. You can stop the vicious circle from feeding off itself.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking out new landscapes but in having new eyes. (ATTRIB. MARCEL PROUST, 1871–1922)

Mindful awareness—or mindfulness—spontaneously arises out of this Being mode when we learn to pay attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment, to things as they actually are.

Mindful awareness – or mindfulness – spontaneously arises out of this Being mode when we learn to pay attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment, to things as they actually are. In mindfulness, we start to see the world as it is, not as we expect it to be, how we want it to be, or what we fear it might become.

Everyday life offers endless opportunities for you to stop, to focus, to remind yourself to be fully awake and present to what is happening right now

thinking. And we don't need language to stand as an intermediary between us and the world; we can also experience it directly through our senses. We are capable of directly sensing things like the sounds of birds, the scent of beautiful flowers and the sight of a loved one's smile. And we know with the heart as well as the head. Thinking is not all there is to conscious experience. The mind is bigger and more encompassing than thought alone.

Mindfulness teaches us that thoughts are just thoughts; they are events in the mind. They are often valuable but they are not 'you' or 'reality'.

Thirdly, the breath provides a natural, gently moving target to focus on in your meditation; it grounds you in the here and now. You cannot take a breath for five minutes ago, or for five minutes' time. You can only take a breath for now

If you could double the number of hours that you were truly alive each day then, in effect, you would be doubling your life expectancy.

use your restless and churning mind as an opportunity to look more deeply into it, rather than as an immediate reason to conclude that the meditation is "not working.

A typical meditation consists of focusing your full attention on your breath as it flows in and out of your body (see "A one-minute meditation" on the opposite page). Focusing on each breath in this way allows you to observe your thoughts as they arise in your mind and, little by little, to let go of struggling with them

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking out new landscapes but in having new eyes. ATTRIB. MARCEL PROUST

mindfulness allows you to catch negative thought patterns before they tip you into a downward spiral. It begins the process of putting you back in control of your life.