Quotes About Presence

Rather, it is bearing in mind what is most important to you so that it is not lost or betrayed in the heat and reactivity of a particular moment.

it is the awareness that is of primary importance, no matter what the objects are that we are paying attention to.

Meditation is not so concerned with how much thinking is going on as it is with how much room you are making for it to take place within the field of your awareness from one moment to the next.

As you begin befriending your breath, you see immediately that unawareness is everywhere.

Mindful sitting meditation is not an attempt to escape from problems or difficulties into some cut-off "meditative" state of absorption or denial. On the contrary, it is a willingness to go nose to nose with pain, confusion, and loss, if that is what is dominating the present moment, and to stay with the observing over a sustained period of time, beyond thinking.

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

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.

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?

Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.

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.

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.

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.

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hand.

When we spend some time each day in non-doing, resting in awareness, observing the flow of the breath and the activity of our mind and body without getting caught up in that activity, we are cultivating calmness and mindfulness hand in hand.

Perhaps over time we can adjust our default setting to one of greater mindfulness rather than of mindlessness and being lost in thought.

Just because you decide to still your body and observe your breath from moment to moment doesn't mean that your thinking mind is going to cooperate.

What does happen as we intentionally pay attention to our breathing is that we realize pretty quickly that we are

Embody what you most want to impart, and keep your mouth shut.