Quotes About Awareness

L]ive life as if each moment was important, as if each moment counted and could be worked with, even if it was a moment of pain, sadness, despair, or fear. This work involves above all the regular, disciplined practice of moment-to-moment awareness or mindfulness, the complete owning of each moment of your experience, good, bad, or ugly. This is the essence of full catastrophe living.

Each moment is an opportunity to see that we do not have to succumb to old habits that function below the level of our awareness. With great intentionality and resolve, we can experiment with non-distraction. We can experiment with non-diversion. We can experiment with non-fixing. We can experiment with non-doing.

This has everything to do with holding the present moment in its fullness without imposing anything extra on it, perceiving its purity and the freshness of its potential to give rise to the next moment.

It is a bit like television sports commentary. There is what is actually going on in the game, and then there is the endless commentary. When you begin a formal meditation practice, it is almost inevitable that you will now be subject to meditation commentary to one degree or another. It can fill the space of the mind. Yet it is not the meditation any more than the play-by-play is the game itself.

Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine." In other words, no attachments—especially to fixed ideas of yourself and who you are.

when you inhabit the domain of alert and affectionate attention, the domain of non-judgmental spaciousness, and simply rest in awareness with no agenda other than to be awake. We adopt this perspective of open presence and acceptance throughout the meditation practice.

The challenge for each of us is to find out who we are and to live our way into our own calling.we do this by paying close attention to all aspects of life as they unfold in the present moment.

Parenting and family life can be a perfect field for mindfulness practice, but it's not for the weak-hearted, the selfish or lazy, or the hopelessly romantic. Parenting is a mirror that forces you to look at yourself. If you can learn from what you observe, you just may have a chance to keep growing yourself.

We see each moment as a new beginning, a new opportunity to start over, to tune in, to reconnect.

M]indfulness does not involve trying to get anywhere or feel anything special. Rather it involves allowing yourself to be where you already are, to become more familiar with your own actual experience moment by moment.

It is remarkable how liberating it feels to be able to see that your thoughts are just thoughts and that they are not "you" or "reality." For instance, if you have the thought that you have to get a certain number of things done today and you don't recognize it as a thought but act as if it's "the truth," then you have created a reality in that moment in which you really believe that those things must all be done today.

Note that an individual thought does not last long. It is impermanent. If it comes, it will go.

Every time you get a strong impulse to talk about meditation and how wonderful it is, or how hard it is, or what it's doing for you these days, or what it's not, or you want to convince someone else how wonderful it would be for them, just look at it as more thinking and go meditate some more. The impulse will pass and everybody will be better off—especially you.

The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. PETER MATTHIESSEN, The Snow Leopard

if I can perceive myself as transparent or empty, then what comes toward me can go through me and out the door.

Il s'agit d'apprécier la plénitude de chaque moment que nous vivons et surtout d'être en contact avec notre être dans sa plénitude.

La méditation consiste à s'éveiller de cet état de rêve.

La pleine conscience signifie « faire attention » de manière particulière : délibérément, au moment présent et sans jugements de valeurs.

Le mot bouddha signifie celui ou celle qui s'est éveillé à sa propre nature.

You discover that the boundaries of how far your body can stretch or how long you can hold a particular posture are not fixed or static. So your thoughts about what you can and can't do shouldn't be too fixed or static either, because

Mindfulness has to do above all with attention and awareness, which are universal human qualities. But in our society, we tend to take these capacities for granted and don't think to develop them systematically in the service of self-understanding and wisdom. Meditation is the process by which we go about deepening our attention and awareness, refining them, and putting them to greater practical use in our lives.

You certainly have to be ready for meditation. You have to come to it at the right time in your life, at a point where you are ready to listen carefully to your own voice, to your own heart, to your own breathing—to just be present for them and with them, without having to go anywhere or make anything better or different. This is hard work.

The present is the only time that we have to know anything. It is the only time we have to perceive, to learn, to act, to change, to heal, to love.

It wakes us up to the fact that our lives unfold only in moments. If we are not fully present for many of those moments, we may not only miss what is most valuable in our lives but also fail to realize the richness and the depth of our possibilities for growth and transformation.