Browse 3271 quotes about Mindfulness.
“Zen is to eat, breathe, cook, carry water, and scrub the toilet, to infuse every act of body, speech, and mind with mindfulness, to illuminate every leaf and pebble, every heap of garbage, every path that leads to our mind’s return home. Only a person who has grasped the art of cooking, washing dishes, sweeping, and chopping wood, someone who is able to laugh at the world’s weapons of money, fame, and power, can hope to descend the mountain as a hero.”
Source: Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals, 1962-1966
“We should live every day like people who have just been rescued from dying on the moon. We are on Earth now, and we need to enjoy walking on this precious, beautiful planet. Zen Master Linji said, “The miracle is not to walk on water or fire. The miracle is to walk on the earth.”
Source: Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm
“I didn’t fight the world;
I silenced the one,
For whom it sang!”
Source: On My Way To Infinity: A Seeker's Poetic Pilgrimage
“ARDUOUS EASE - A HAIKU
River's kind caress,
Rocks yield to its persistence,
Work with ease, sheer force.”
Source: On My Way To Infinity: A Seeker's Poetic Pilgrimage
“Learn to live deeply, and realise that all experiences, good or bad are transient, and opportunities for liberation.”
“Make the practice pleasant, that is what I beg you to do.”
Source: The Ultimate Dimension : An Advanced Dharma Retreat on the Avatamsaka and Lotus Sutras
“Xin Ming, Origin is the present moment.”
Source: Song of Mind: Wisdom from the Zen Classic Xin Ming
“Just as chickens wake up and scream, being reborn is the polar opposite. You are blinded by bliss and numb to such pain.”
“Just as roosters scream in the morning, being reborn is the polar opposite. You are blinded by bliss and numb to such pains.”
“What has always struck me about every Zen master I've met and every Zen book I've read is the sense of humor. Mindfulness in practice is not endlessly silent as much as it is delightfully playful. Presence and connection come with a pinch of sassiness that allows us to return to our inner child in authenticity and lightness.”
Source: Bullshit-Free Mindfulness: An Uncommon Guide for Joy in Everyday Life
“The greatest miracle is to be alive.”
Source: The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation
“We do our real best only when we really do only to do.”
“The shortest sentence that adequately describes life is as long as the universe.”
“The great master Padmasambhava said, Even if my view is higher than the sky, The attention I pay to my actions and their effects is finer than flour.”
Source: On the Path to Enlightenment: Heart Advice from the Great Tibetan Masters
“Renunciation essentially means simplifying one’s mind, one’s words, and one’s activities, by letting go of what obstructs inner freedom. Constraint creates frustration; renunciation produces a real sense of joy.”
Source: On the Path to Enlightenment: Heart Advice from the Great Tibetan Masters
“Your mind is too focussed on human beings. Observe the patterns, shapes, colours, texture, sounds and sensations around you. Soon you will come out of human identity and realize that you're not a person but a presence. You're not something that exists; you're the existence itself.”
“When you see the Sun setting over the horizon, you feel like you've entered into a beautiful art piece. A meditative mind gets that feeling 24×7. The world feels like an art village for those who walk through it slowly.”
“Life has to be freed and lived, instead of being known.”
Source: Embracing Mind: The Zen Talks of Kobun Chino Otogawa
“Many of us have hearts that are encrusted with anxieties, fears, aversions, sorrows, and an array of defensive armor. The non-reactive and accepting awareness of mindfulness will help to dissolve these crusts. The practice has a cyclic quality; it is self-reinforcing. At first, the practice will allow us to let go of a small amount of defensiveness. That release allows a corresponding amount of openness and tender- heartedness to show itself. This process encourages us to drop even more armor. Slowly, a greater sense of heartfeltness supports the further development of mindfulness.
As our neurotic thought patterns drop away, layers of judgment and resistance atrophy, and the need to define our selves through hard-held identities relaxes. As this happens, the natural goodness of the heart shines by itself.
The impulses to be aware, happy, compassionate, and free, all come from the goodness of our hearts. As we connect to these intentions and allow them to motivate our mindfulness practice, the practice becomes heartfelt.”
Source: The Issue at Hand: Essays on Buddhist Mindfulness Practice
“Don't just pass by the present moment. Enter it. Even ordinary moments like peeling potatoes are entry gates of better and better future.”
“Time is not static; it is an ever-flowing river - ongoing and changing yet holding its own integrity. Can you understand the integrity of a drop of rain in the river? It mixes and blends, yet it is always itself - or is it?
If it is part of the whole , can that drop be accessed in any part of the river? We want to stretch your imagination so that you understand the hologram where the whole can be stored in a part.
Imagine a creature, a being so intelligent, alive, and intense that it is everywhere at once. Its essence is pure and responds to every aspect of itself.
This is a creature that curiosity and malleability, unique characteristics that allow it to be molded and to mold as well. And you must learn to dance with this energy.”
Source: Family of Light: Pleiadian Tales and Lessons in Living
“Pencil breaks when you sharpen it fully. A student who wants to write only after fully sharpening the pencil will never be able to write. He will waste whole pencil in sharpening.”
“Your life is like a TV serial. You are the watcher, the audience. Producer of this TV serial is Maya (Interplay of Time and Space). You say to the producer, “I am very angry at this and this villain.”
The producer’s purpose is to invoke emotions in audience and make money. If you are angry, it’s good for producer. More you get angry at characters, more their screentime will be increased in next episode. When they stop invoking any emotion in you, only then they will be thrown out of the TV serial.”
“Every thought is a concept that divides reality in some way, and therefore is a mental abstraction that distorts the truth of what is. This is not to say that all thoughts are useless, though many of them seem to be, but it is clear that by being so consumed by this continuous stream of thoughts, we become disconnected from the reality of life that exists beyond our thinking minds.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“If we can understand that all thought is based on memory, that it is conditioned by the past, then we can see that it is of no use in helping us understand the true reality of the present moment, for every thought we have about reality will only distort reality according to our conditioned way of thinking.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“When I think about something that is happening in the moment, I am introducing my accumulation of the past into the immediate experience of the present. I am evaluating the situation based on my conditioned perspective, and projecting my internal workings onto the unconditioned reality of the present moment.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“To know the reality of the present moment as it is, we have to go beyond thought, otherwise we live only in memories of the past and fantasies of the future, cut off from the direct experience of the radiance and beauty of life.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“When we are not awake to reality, we are living in the dream of the mind. When we are in the dream state, we do not know what we are doing, and are unaware of what is happening within and around us. We are simply acting out of deep programming, behaving according to conditioned patterns, living as if on auto-pilot.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“There are many ways that the dream state operates, but it is primarily characterized by a lack of awareness to what is actually happening in the present moment, and the consequent dwelling in the mind and its endless thinking, reacting and behaving from unconscious conditioning and programming.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“One of the fundamental delusions that most people have is the delusion that this “I” exists as an independent entity, as something separate from the whole of life.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“The ego is not who we are, it is who we think we are. When we think of our name, our image, our history, and our life experiences as who we are, we become associated with an idea of ourselves, a mental image that is not at all who we are in reality.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“We all have an image of who we are, how we think of ourselves, and how we think others perceive us, but obviously this image is not really who we are; it is just a projection of the mind. When we mistake this illusory entity of thought to be who we actually are we do all kinds of strange and unnecessary things to maintain it and improve it. We feel the need to always state our point of view, push our beliefs onto others, tell them about our experiences, tell them who we are, what we like, what we dislike, and so on…always focused on “me.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“If we stop completely, not just outwardly, but inwardly, we will see that there is no truth to our self-image; it is completely mind-made.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“Everything that makes up your organism comes from the environment in which you live.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“To remove our beliefs is to open ourselves up to the possibility that everything we know about reality is untrue.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“Language is an attempt to define life in linear words and symbols, but in reality, everything everywhere is happening all together at once, and to explain the totality of this with language is impossible. Thus, to awaken to the truth of reality, the truth of who we are, we must go beyond our language and intellectual way of understanding life.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“It isn’t until we begin to observe our minds that we notice just how prevalent thoughts are in our experience.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“Ultimately, it is not the circumstances in life that affect us, but how we choose to perceive those circumstances.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“It is our perception—of ourselves and of reality—that determines our experience.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“We do not need an ashram or church, some secret initiation, a guru’s blessing, or an intentional community. As helpful or supportive as those may be at times, ultimately, what we need is the willingness to look at ourselves honestly, to feel what emotions lie within us, to acknowledge our thoughts and actions, to choose to be aware of what we ignore or suppress, and to let go of what limits and distracts us so we can open ourselves fully to the truth of life in this moment.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“The way that we experience reality is determined by how our mind perceives reality.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“Our perception of reality is not reality itself, but it is the lens through which we view reality. It is like looking outside through a stained-glass window—if we look through red glass, the outside world will appear to be red; if we look through blue glass, the outside world will appear to be blue. The outside world isn’t changing, we are just observing it through different colors of glass, which make it appear to have the same color as whatever color glass that we look through.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“All human beings throughout the world are conditioned. It is an obvious and undeniable fact.
Yet, many of us are unaware of this fact of our conditioning. We are unaware of the ways in which our culture influences our minds and shapes our perception of reality. We do not realize that most of our thoughts, opinions, and beliefs are not really our own, but were simply inherited by our family and the society that we were raised in.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“We all have only one true emotional need as human beings, and that is the need to feel loved. The majority of our actions aim towards this goal in one way or another. We seek relationships, we seek fame or success, we act (or don’t act) in certain ways simply because we feel the need to be accepted, the need to be recognized, the need to feel loved. This is a very powerful thing to realize.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“It is actually not the objective circumstances that determine whether an event is traumatic, it is our interpretation, our subjective emotional experience of the event.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“The psychological suffering of human beings on such a mass scale manifests as the physical suffering we see and experience in the world today. It is ignorant to objectify this suffering as if it were something outside of us, belonging only to the world and to those unfortunate beings who experience it. It is within each one of us, and to acknowledge our suffering is the only way to start to heal it, and by healing the suffering within ourselves, we help to heal the suffering of the world.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“By healing the suffering within ourselves, we help to heal the suffering of the world.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“We often do not experience reality directly as it is, but rather we impose our own mental concepts and illusions onto reality, and then react to our own projections as if they were true.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“If you have ever watched a football game, you will likely recall that while the game is being played, there is a commentator who is narrating the plays of the game and making interpretations. Our thoughts are just like this. In our mind, we have the direct experience and we have the commentator that narrates and describes our direct experience.
The commentator of a football game isn’t really necessary, and he doesn’t affect the activity of the game in any way. He is just describing the game to the audience, and doing so from his perspective, with his own opinions, based on his mood, memory, education, past experiences and so on. In ourselves, the commentator is also unnecessary, and does not change the experience that it is commenting on. It merely describes it from its own biased perspective, with its own opinions, based on its mood, memory, education, past experiences, and so on.
Our problem is that we have mistaken the comments of the commentator for the reality that is being commented on. We have confused our own identity as being that of the commentator, and we believe that what is being described is actually the truth of reality.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“While we fear the discomfort of dissolving our fixed beliefs and mental patterns, we often overlook the fact that it is because of these mental patterns that we are unhappy in the first place.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment