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Mindfulness Quotes

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Mindfulness Quotes

“Unlike many other traditions, in Zen, emphasis is placed on the direct experience of enlightenment—experiencing insight through meditation—rather than on the study of the sacred texts of Eastern traditions.”

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Book:Practical Meditation for Beginners: 10 Days to a Happier, Calmer You
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“Zazen practice develops our understanding of our connectedness to the world into which we were born, the world in which we live—which is also the world we are creating together, moment by moment.”

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Book:Practical Meditation for Beginners: 10 Days to a Happier, Calmer You
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“Zen is an especially intriguing school of Buddhism because it brings to mind paradoxical images of monks happily living quiet lives, meditating on mountaintops, as well as powerful martial artists.”

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Book:Practical Meditation for Beginners: 10 Days to a Happier, Calmer You
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“In the ever-accelerating modern world, with new technology constantly bombarding our senses and demanding schedules pulling us in different directions, the benefits of a practice like zazen are easy to overlook but profoundly powerful to practice.”

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Book:Practical Meditation for Beginners: 10 Days to a Happier, Calmer You
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“Slowly and steadily, as the rush to “gain the benefits” of meditation fades away and the depth of the experience itself becomes apparent, your patience will strengthen and your need to be “moving on to the next moment” will begin to recede.”

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Book:Practical Meditation for Beginners: 10 Days to a Happier, Calmer You
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“The chronic tension the average person experiences in modern life finds its way deep into the body, and we live most of our lives in the “whiplash” of past experiences—mentally rehashing and physically re-experiencing past stressors.”

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Book:Practical Meditation for Beginners: 10 Days to a Happier, Calmer You
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“As a result of regular mindfulness practice, you’ll begin to see your role in different circumstances, recognize your oppor- tunities to grow, and develop a relationship with yourself that is more loving, forgiving, and open to new possibilities.”

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Book:Practical Meditation for Beginners: 10 Days to a Happier, Calmer You
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“Appreciating the simple things, the great temporary gift of life and the beauty in all aspects of living, is perhaps one of the most power- ful, fulfilling benefits of practicing breath awareness.”

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Book:Practical Meditation for Beginners: 10 Days to a Happier, Calmer You
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“On my journey from the fantastical to the practical, spirituality has gone from being a mystical experience to something very ordinary and a daily experience. Many don’t want this, instead they prefer spiritual grandeur, and I believe that is what keeps enlightenment at bay. We want big revelations of complexity that validates our perceptions of the divine. What a let down it was to Moses when God spoke through a burning bush! But that is exactly the simplicity of it all. Our spiritual life is our ordinary life and it is very grounded in every day experience. For me, it is the daily practice of kindness, mindfulness, happiness, and peace.”

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Author:Alaric Hutchinson
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“Life is very simple. Just sometimes put your head away, sometimes behead yourself, sometimes look with no clouds in the eyes - just look. Sometimes sit by the side of a tree - just feel. By the side of a waterfall - listen. Lie down on the beach and listen to the roar of the ocean, feel the sand, the coolness of it, or look at the stars, and let that silence penetrate you. Or look at the dark night and let that velvety darkness surround you, envelop you, dissolve you. This is the way of the simple heart.”

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Book:The Buddha Said...: Meeting the Challenge of Life's Difficulties
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“Indicating his twisted legs without a trace of self-pity or bitterness, as if they belonged to all of us, he casts his arms wide to the sky and the snow mountains, the high sun and dancing sheep, and cries, ’Of course I am happy here! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!’ In its wholehearted acceptance of what is;I feel as if he had struck me in the chest. Butter tea and wind pictures, the Crystal Mountain, and blue sheep dancing on the snow-it’s quite enough! Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn’t that wonderful?”

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Book:The Snow Leopard
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“I sit in meditation…and soon all sounds, and all one sees and feels, take on imminence, an immanence, as if the Universe were coming to attention, a Universe of which one is the center, a Universe that is not the same yet not different from oneself: within man as within mountains there are many parts of hydrogen and oxygen, of calcium, phosphorus, potassium, and other elements. ‘You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars…’(Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation) The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no ‘meaning,’ they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share.”

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Book:The Snow Leopard
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“Meditation isn’t what most people think,’ she said. ‘You’re meditating right now, in the way that you’re focused on what I’m saying. If your mind was somewhere else—if you were thinking about the Saints game or what you might have for dessert—that’s not meditation. You have to be here, now. Inhabit the present moment, because that’s the only way to find lasting happiness. If you think happiness is somewhere out there, you’ll spend your whole life chasing it, and once you find something that looks like happiness, it will change without warning. You have to accept yourself as you are, happy to be breathing, to be present in this moment.”

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Book:Gods of the Flesh: A Skeptic's Journey Through Sex, Politics and Religion
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“In meditation we discover our inherent restlessness. Sometimes we get up and leave. Sometimes we sit there but our bodies wiggle and squirm and our minds go far away. This can be so uncomfortable that we feel’s it’s impossible to stay. Yet this feeling can teach us not just about ourselves but what it is to be human…we really don’t want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience. It goes against the grain to stay present. These are the times when only gentleness and a sense of humor can give us the strength to settle down…so whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to “stay” and settle down. Are we experiencing restlessness? Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay! What’s for lunch? Stay! I can’t stand this another minute! Stay!”

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Book:The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times
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“But whoever develops mindfulness of death, thinking, 'O, that I might live for the interval that it takes to swallow having chewed up one morsel of food... for the interval that it takes to breathe out after breathing in, or to breathe in after breathing out, that I might attend to the Blessed One's instructions. I would have accomplished a great deal' — they are said to dwell heedfully. They develop mindfulness of death acutely for the sake of ending the effluents. "Therefore you should train yourselves: 'We will dwell heedfully. We will develop mindfulness of death acutely for the sake of ending the effluents.' That is how you should train yourselves. -Manassatti sutta (AN 6.19 PTS: A iii 303)”

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Author:Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu
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“It’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the Buddha taught. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for that is freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human.”

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Book:Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change
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“When I listened within myself I saw that the world is what it is – nothing more, nothing less. Where reality is concerned, there is no “what should be.” There is only what is, just the way it is, right now. The truth is prior to every story. And every story, prior to investigation, prevents us from seeing what’s true.”

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Book:Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
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“Mindfulness opposes judgment, conceptualization, words, language, reason, logic, knowledge, understanding, science, philosophy, mathematics, history, intellectualism, learning from the past and planning for the future. It reduces thoughtful humans to the state of thoughtless animals, prisoners of the ignorance of the moment, overwhelmed by primitive sense-certainty. And this is sold as a desirable state, something we should all aspire to!”

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Book:The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes
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“We start the path to the end of suffering, not by trying to drop our clingings immediately, but by learning to cling more strategically. In terms of the feeding analogy, we don’t try to starve the mind. We simply change its diet, weaning it away from junk food in favor of health food, developing inner qualities that will make it so strong that it won’t need to feed ever again. The canon lists these qualities as five: conviction in the principle of karma—that our happiness depends on our own actions; persistence in abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones in their stead; mindfulness; concentration; and discernment. Of these, concentration—at the level of jhāna, or intense absorption— is the strength that the Buddhist tradition most often compares to good, healthy food”

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Book:The Karma of Questions
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“We have to recognise impermanence on a gut level, not just as an abstract idea. Everything changes—things crack, people change, situations shift—and resisting that truth fuels endless fear, restlessness, and an unrealistic attitude towards life. By opening up to the truth of impermanence, you loosen the grip of ‘it must stay this way’ and in its absence, you make space for genuine peace and wellbeing.”

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Author:David Oromith (Johnson)
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“Mindfulness means being present to whatever is happening here and now - when mindfulness is strong, there is no room left in the mind for wanting something else. With less liking and disliking of what arises, there is less pushing and pulling on the world, less defining of the threshold between self and other, resulting in a reduced construction of self. As the influence of self diminishes, suffering diminishes in proportion.”

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Book:Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism
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“The mess we are making of our planet is caused by our own greed, hatred, and delusion. Aside from the existential afflictions of aging, death, and at least some of the illnesses, every instance we see of human misery, injustice, affliction. or sufficient and pain will, upon sufficient and sometimes even cursory investigation, be shown to be rooted in the attachment, aversion, or ignorance of some person or some group of people together.”

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Book:Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism
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“The goal of becoming a better person is within the reach of us all, at every moment. ... We need only invoke the power of mindful awareness in any action of body, speech, or mind to elevate that action from the unconscious reflex of a trained creature to the awakened choice of a human being who is guided to a higher life by wisdom. ... We may not "complete" the work in this lifetime and root out the very mechanism by which our minds and bodies manifest their hereditary karmic toxins. Yet to whatever extent we can notice them as they arise, understand them for what they are, and gently abandon our grasp of them - if only for this moment - we are gaining ground in the grand scheme of things. And even a modest moment of emancipation from the unwholesome roots of greed, hatred, and delusion is a moment without suffering.”

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Book:Unlimiting Mind: The Radically Experiential Psychology of Buddhism
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“The hilarious irony is that Buddhists - who deny the existence of the self - are the most self-obsessed people you can find. The idea of karma is a clear marker of self-obsession. People actually believe that the vast cosmos is infatuated about what they do - as opposed to completely indifferent - and goes to all the trouble of rearranging itself to teach them personal karmic "lessons.”

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Book:Endarkenment: New Age Fake Enlightenment
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“I’m helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are “near enemies” to every great virtue—reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a “pathological empathy” of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can’t help but stay present”

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Book:Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
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