Quotes About Presence

The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.

If we gain something, it was there from    the beginning. If we lose anything, it is hidden nearby.

Through practice, gently and gradually we can collect ourselves and learn how to be more fully with what we do.

With mindfulness, we are learning to observe in a new way, with balance and a powerful disidentification.

Meditation is not a process of getting rid of something, but one of opening and understanding. When

We note feelings and find that they last for only a few seconds. We pay attention to thoughts and find that they are ephemeral, that they come and go, uninvited, like clouds.

Skill in concentrating and steadying the mind is the basis for all types of meditation.

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather around us, that they may see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer perhaps even a fiercer life because of our quiet. William Butler Yeats

Mindfulness and fearless presence bring true protection. When we meet the world with recognition, acceptance, investigation, and non-identification, we discover that wherever we are, freedom is possible, just as the rain falls on and nurtures all things equally.

Be rigorously mindful of the awareness of touch. We should be rigorously, ardently, intensively mindful. Do not rest when tired, scratch when itched, nor shift when cramped. We should keep our bodies and minds absolutely still and strive till the end. The uncomfortable truly is the norm; the comfortable will set us adrift on the current of illusion.

You may have heard of "out-of-the-body experiences," full of lights and visions. A true spiritual path demands something more challenging, what could be called an "in-the-body experience." We must connect to our body, to our feelings, to our life just now, if we are to awaken.

In Buddhist practice, the outward and inward aspects of taking the one seat meet on our meditation cushion.

Bring yourself back to the point quite gently. And even if you do nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back a thousand times, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Through awareness of the body, we remember who we truly are.

The art of living ... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past ... on the other. It consists in being completely sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.

you must be present to win.

James Joyce described this relationship in the line, "Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.

In sitting on the meditation cushion and assuming the meditation posture, we connect ourselves with the present moment in this body and on this earth.

When a bell rings, is it the bell we hear, the air, the sound at our ears, or is it our brain that rings? It is all of these things. As the Taoists say, "The between is ringing." The sound of the bell is here to be heard everywhere—in the eyes of every person we meet, in every tree and insect, in every breath we take.

Working with these distractions, steadying the canoe, letting the waves pass by, and coming back again and again in a quiet and collected way, is at the heart of meditation. After

Meditation practice is neither holding on nor avoiding; it is a settling back into the moment, opening to what is there.

Stay humble. Always answer your phone - no matter who else is in the car.

Here comes Johnny!

Dad was just an emotional wreck. He was drinking a lot of the time, he was smoking a lot of pot. And because he takes certain medications, the drinking was making him... you know, he wasn't even present, really.