Quotes About Meditation

Damn you, I want to think. I'll want to take this off alone where I can pick it apart and see. Maybe you've tumbled a world for me. And I don't know what I can build in my world's place.

Always keep your mind as bright and clear as the vast sky, the highest peak, and the deepest ocean, empty of all limiting thoughts.

Intent on prayer, she has a dumb girl's sweet piercing way of putting her whole body into one thing at a time.

The most terrifying and important test for a human being is to be in absolute isolation," he explained. "A human being is a very social creature, and ninety percent of what he does is done only because other people are watching. Alone, with no witnesses, he starts to learn about himself—who is he really?

I stand there sipping and savoring for over ten minutes, thinking of the man I read about who weighed six hundred pounds from drinking vast amounts of tap water.

I have to speak my mind. Because what is in my mind is always more interesting than what is happening in the world outside my mind.

Drink deeply from good books.

When panic sets in, my advice is to fast and read the Book of Mormon for at least a half hour.

we had talked ourselves into silence.

Close the book. Read the title. Read the title again. Nuff said.

To allow ourselves to be truly in touch with where we already are, no matter where that is, we have got to pause in our experience long enough to let the present moment sink in; long enough to actually feel the present moment, to see it in its fullness, to hold it in awareness and thereby come to know and understand it better.

So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.

One very important domain of our lives and experience that we tend to miss, ignore, abuse, or lose control of as a result of being in the automatic pilot mode is our own body.

By repeatedly bringing your attention back to the breath each time it wanders off, concentration builds and deepens, much as muscles develop by repetitively lifting weights.

Another way to look at meditation is to view the process of thinking itself as a waterfall, a continual cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantagepoint in a cave or depression in a rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

A willingness to embrace and work with what is lies at the core of all meditation practice.

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.

Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes use of thinking, honoring its value and its power. Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thoughts as thoughts rather than getting caught up in them in reality.

we are simply inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.

Meditation is neither shutting things out nor off. It is seeing things clearly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.

Allow your attention to gently alight on your belly, as if you were coming upon a shy animal sunning itself on a tree stump in a clearing in the forest. Feel your belly rise or expand gently on the inbreath, and fall or recede on the outbreath.

Above all, meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment. It's not about getting somewhere else, but about allowing yourself to be where you already are.

Knowing what you are doing while you are doing it is the essence of mindfulness practice.