Quotes About Meditation

One hour a day, one day a month, eight days a year, for longer if necessary, you must leave everything and everybody and retire, alone with God. If you don't look for this solitude, if you don't love it, you won't achieve real contemplative prayer.

Every morning, after Mass and meditation, you will make your way to work in a store or shipyard. And when you get back in the evening, tired, like all poor men forced to earn their living, you will enter the little chapel of the brotherhood and remain for a long time in adoration; bringing to your prayer all that world of suffering, of darkness, and often of sin, in the midst of which you have lived for eight hours taking your share of pain and toil.

With your work finished and the caravan halted, you stretch out on the sand with a blanket under your head and breathe in the gentle breeze which has replaced the dry, fiery daytime wind. Then you leave the camp and go down to the dunes for prayer. Time passes undisturbed. No obligations harass you, no noise disturbs you, no worry awaits you: time is all yours. So you satiate yourself with prayer and silence, while the stars light up in the sky.

I said earlier that prayer is like love. Words pour at first. Then we are more silent and can communicate in monosyllables. In difficulties a gesture is enough, a word, or nothing at all—love is enough.

These are presumably the thoughts that made him restless.

To understand ourselves means to reflect on time. But to understand time we need to reflect on ourselves.

He squeezed his eyes shut and sent up a silent prayer.

To plant the seed of mindfulness firmly in your life, set the intention to practice mindful breathing daily.

The monkey mind is constantly generating thoughts, which may appear as images, sounds, fragments, judgments, or memories. Sometimes, these thoughts pass through us like clouds. At other times, we may identify with them and get hooked by them.

With mindful attention, you realize that thoughts are just thoughts - mental processes in the mind - rather than the truth.

When you bring mindful mindful awareness to your thoughts, you train your mind to settle, and, with time and practice, realize you don't have to react to every passing thought.

Para visitar un recuerdo conviene -según creencia bastante extendida- haberlo cultivado antes.

Poetry and prayer are very similar.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself. So, a woman will lift her head from the sieve of her hands and stare at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Mountain pose teaches us, literally, how to stand on our own two feet.... teaching us to root ourselves into the earth.... Our bodies become a connection between heaven and earth.

everything else fell away,

It's an honor and privilege to be next to the great mysteries, and that's what I get to do every day. Why are we here? How beautiful the Earth is. Whatever it is, large and small. There's so much that's beautiful and moving and sad, to experience that and find shapes for it, to deeply enter that meditative space. There's nothing like it. Everything else seems so pale.

When in doubt, shut up.

You don't know how to be alone with yourself. And if you block out the world, there you'd be.

The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind

the silence of God is God.

There is no easy off button for your brain.It would be really really nice if there were.

In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.