Quotes About Meditation

It's very important as a beginner that you understand right from the start that 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.

When I was talking to a reporter, she said, "Oh, you mean to live for the moment." I said, "No, it isn't that. That has a hedonistic ring to it. I mean to live in the moment.

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

Seven attitudinal factors constitute the major pillars of mindfulness practice as we teach it in MBSR. They are non-judging, patience, a beginner's mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go.

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.

Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself. The watching is the holding. By watching your thoughts without being drawn into them, you can learn something profoundly liberating about thinking itself, which may help you to be less of a prisoner of those thought patterns (….)

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.

So when we make contact with the domain of being in the meditation practice, we are already, in a profound sense, beyond the scarring, beyond the isolation and fragmentation and suffering we may be experiencing.

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.

A good place to start is with yourself. See if you can give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Practice feeling deserving enough to accept these gifts without obligation—to simply receive from yourself, and from the universe.

Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely, the path that is your life. Meditation may help us see that this path we call our life has direction; that it is always unfolding, moment by moment; and that what happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next.

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

Socrates was famous in Athens for saying, "Know thyself." It is said that one of his students said to him: "Socrates, you go around saying 'Know thyself,' but do you know yourself?" Socrates was said to have replied, "No, but I understand something about this not knowing.

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.

Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science. 2010;330:932. § Harvard Business Review. Jan-Feb 2012:88.

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.

You certainly have to be ready for meditation. You have to come to it at the right time in your life, at a point where you are ready to listen carefully to your own voice, to your own heart, to your own breathing

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.

The entirety of our mind, on the other hand, is by its very nature deep, vast, intrinsically still and quiet, like the depths of the ocean.

It is not that mindfulness is the "answer" to all life's problems. Rather, it is that all life's problems can be seen more clearly through the lens of a clear mind.

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