Quotes About Meditation

My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

I love playing music with people, but I also just love the art and meditation of being alone and working on stuff.

It is simply a practical way to be more in touch with the fullness of your being through a systematic process of self-observation, self-inquiry, and mindful action.

You can think of concentration as the capacity of the mind to sustain an unwavering attention on one object of observation.

The deeper your concentration, the deeper the potential for mindfulness.

In attending to the breath with onepointed concentration, everything else falls away—including thoughts, feelings, the outside world. Samadhi is characterized by absorption in stillness and undisturbed peacefulness.

Touching soap bubbles is another lovely metaphor.

In all the meditative traditions of the world, visualizations and imagery are used to invoke particular qualities of mind and heart.

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.

Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? LAO-TZU, Tao-te-Ching

It is the inner experience which counts. And you have to be there for it. All else is mere thinking.

awareness is at least as important and useful to us as thinking. In fact, it is demonstrably more powerful in that any thought, no matter how profound, can be held in awareness.

But meditation is not just about sitting, either. It is about stopping and being present, that is all.

meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way.

But meditation is different. From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are. Perhaps its value lies precisely in this. Maybe we all need to do one thing in our lives simply for its own sake.

No matter what people are doing, they are much less happy when their minds are wandering than when their minds are focused

The main things are to commit to some simple behaviors—meditating, exercising, getting enough sleep—and to practice altruism.… And nurture your social connections." If

Jon Kabat-Zinn

in the meditation practice, it is best to hold to and honor one's own direct experience, and not worry too much about whether this is what you are supposed to feel or see or think about.

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath.

comes up with. This is the flavor of true intentionality and inner discipline. You do it simply

The mountain image held in the mind's eye and in the body can freshen our memory of why we are sitting in the first place, and of what it truly means, each time we take our seat, to dwell in the realm of non-doing. Mountains are quintessentially emblematic of abiding presence and stillness.

Above all, meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment.