Quotes About Awareness

Rarely are we in touch with who is doing the doing—or, put otherwise, with the world of being. To

Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more.

When you see and feel the sensations you are experiencing as sensations, pure and simple, you may see that these thoughts about the sensation are useless to you at that moment and that they can actually make things worse than they need be.

Meditation is a way of being, not a technique. Meditation is not about trying to get anywhere else. It is about allowing yourself to be exactly where you are and as you are, and the world to be exactly as it is in this moment, as well.

The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded. This includes a lack of awareness and understanding of our own mind and how it influences our perceptions and our actions. It severely limits our perspective on what it means to be a person and how we are connected to each other and the world around us.

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. R. D. LAING

Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely, the path that is your life. Meditation may help us see that this path we call our life has direction; that it is always unfolding, moment by moment; and that what happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next.

in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.

If you let restlessness move you, you lose touch with who you are.

TRY: Asking yourself in this moment, "Am I awake?," "Where is my mind right now?

Live with nature In the present Above time

If we are to grasp the reality of our life while we have it, we will need to wake up to our moments. Otherwise, whole days, even a whole life, could slip past unnoticed.

Allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling. [...] Let go of the labels. Just feel what you are feeling, all the while cultivating moment-to-moment awareness, riding the waves of up and down, good and bad, weak and strong, until you see that they are all inadequate to fully describe your experience. Be with the experience itself. Trust in your deepest strength of all: to be present, to be wakeful.

If we are unaware of what we are doing a good deal of the time, and we don't particularly like the way things turn out in our lives, perhaps it's time to pay closer attention, to be more in touch, to observe the choices we make and their consequences down the road.

whatever thoughts and emotions arise, and as best you can without taking any of it personally, as if the thoughts were merely sounds, or weather patterns in the mind.

no place to go, nothing to do, nothing to attain.

Awareness requires only that we pay attention and see things as they are. It doesn't require that we change anything.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the venerable and highly respected Vietnamese meditation teacher, poet, and peace activist, uses the image of cloudy apple juice settling in a glass to describe meditation. You just sit with whatever is present, even discomfort, anxiety, or confusion, with whatever is present, and the mind settles all by itself.

Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science. 2010;330:932. § Harvard Business Review. Jan-Feb 2012:88.

not get caught in their habitual patterning, to see thoughts for what they are, impersonal events, and instead be the knowing that awareness already is. Then, in that moment at least, we are already free, ready to act with greater clarity and kindness within the constantly changing field of events that is nothing other than life unfolding — not always as we think it should, but definitely as it is.

Don't go outside your house to see the flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit.

we are only breathing now — the last breath is gone, the next one hasn't come yet — it is always a matter of this one. So it is an ideal anchor for our wayward attention. It keeps us in the present moment.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." His deepest conviction: "To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts…. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

If you can't entirely trust what you think, what about trusting awareness? What about trusting your heart? What about trusting your motivation to at least do no harm? What about trusting your experience until it's proven to be inaccurate — and then trusting that discovery?