Mindfulness Quotes - Page 8

Mindfulness is a quiet strength and deeply rooted value which many other cultures understand and often practice better than we do. It can be puzzling to people from other countries as to why Americans are so task-driven and action-oriented.

I learned that when we can be absolutely present like this, our mind, body and spirit become integrated and we are fully conscious, energised, peaceful, alive, at one with the true essence of what it is to be ourselves. In that moment, we can relate with compassion to those around usand to ourselves. It is when what we have satisfies us, and when what we don’t have doesn’t matter.

Eventually it will become quiet enough so that you can simply watch the heart begin to react, and let go before the mind starts. At some point in the journey it all becomes heart, not mind. ... The mind doesn’t even get achance to start up because you let go atthe heart level.

I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience. I'm serious. Patience is usually so underrated. I mean, for all these projects, from third grade all the way to eighth grade, I just learned things gradually, figuring out how to put electronic devices together without so much as cracking a book ... I learned to not worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it.

Mindful observation is based on the principle of “non-duality”: our feeling is not separate from us or caused merely by something outside us; our feeling is us, and for the moment we are that feeling. We are neither drowned in nor terrorized by the feeling, nor do we reject it. Our attitude of not clinging to or rejecting our feelings is the attitude of letting go[.]

If everyone could spend some time self analysing, spend some quiet time with nothing to do and nowhere to go, then without a doubt the world would be an infinitely better place to live and play. It would probably be the cause of the end of bullying, teen suicide, anxiety, depression, stress, and fear and the start of a more genuine and authentic world. I have found that my tranquillity and peacefulness grew significantly stronger as I began to live comfortably with my desires and cravings.

...but we're not being educated in how to be, only in how to accomplish. So it's all about acquisition, about getting stuff we don't have...As soon as you realize it's a thought pattern, you can write yourself a restraining order.

You learn who you are by unlearning who they taught you to be.

Inner Peace can be seen as the ultimate benefit of practicing patience.

Balance is the key to a long and happy life.

The study of modern mindfulness meditation and emotional intelligence is deeply rooted in the ancient Vipassana meditation techniques.

Great leaders have three things; inner light, inner vision and inner strength.

As the flower blooms in spring, compassion grows in mindfulness.

In the 1991 movie City Slickers, Jack Palance gives Billy Crystal some profoundly simple advice. When Crystal asks him the secret of life, Palance holds up a forefinger, answers with a single word: "One."Choose one thing. Do it to the best of your ability. Let it go. Pick something else. Repeat endlessly.

As any distance we take from things give us an outside perspective, so does taking a geographical distance—offering us a new vantage point over our lives.

When we observe the flow of our breathing, we transcend our thoughts and are able to bring mind and body into harmony with each other. Thus, we create calm.

Sometimes I live so much in my mind that I forget what is right before my eyes.

When life is good do not take it for granted as it will pass. Be mindful, be compassionate and nurture the circumstances that find you in this good time so it will last longer. When life falls apart always remember that this too will pass. Life will have its unexpected turns.

When you can begin to see the similarities between you and your work colleagues in respect of ‘being human’ and the collective challenges we all face, it makes life much easier to deal with, especially when met with overbearing behaviour.

Awake my soul.Awake my spirit.Awake my desires.Awake my light.Awake my mind.Awake my hope.Awake my faith.Awake my love.

When we're consciously aware, we receive the messages the universe sends to answer us through intuition that could be easily missed if we weren't living in the moment. These messages will guide us to our true path.

The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.

Moment is a flower. Mindfulness is sipping the nectar of that flower.

First, people were not thinking about what they were doing 47 per cent of the time. Second, people were unhappier when their minds were wandering than they were not. And third, what people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness than what they were doing.

Mindfulness and compassion can give you the power, illumination, love, and wisdom to draw higher forms, thoughts, feelings, and situations into your life.

I promise from now on to always make time for at least one more. One more chapter before I turn out the light and float off to sleep. One more kiss before I sink into this sea of words and search for meaning to bring back up with me. One more stretch and one more wiggle of my toes before I jump out of bed; and one more moment in meditation before I re-emerge. One more full, deep breath and one more look at the sunset. One more touch, one more smile, one more moment of stillness, of gratitude, of simplicity, of love. From now on, I’ll always make room for one more because you never know when one more is all you’ll ever have.

I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

Every moment is auspicious. There is always some magic in it.

Don’t wait for tomorrow. Tomorrow may be too late. If we know how to live according to the insight of impermanence, we will not make many mistakes. We can be happy right now. We can love our beloved, care for her, and make her happy today. And we won’t run toward the future, losing our life, which is available only in the present moment.

Of all the nouns we use to disguise the hollowness of the human condition, none is more influential than "myself". It consists of a collage of still images - name, gender, nationality, profession, enthusiasms, relationships - which are renovated from time to time, but otherwise are each a relic from one particular experience or another. The defining teaching of the Buddhist tradition, that of non-self, is merely pointing out the limitations of this reflexive view we hold of ourselves. It's not that the self does not exist, but that it is as cobbled together and transient as everything else. [With] the practice of meditation, ... we can begin to see how each artifact of the mind is raised and lowered to view, like so many flashcards. But we can also glimpse, once in a while, the sleight-of-hand shuffling the card and pulling them off the deck. Behind the objects lies a process. Self is a process. Self is a verb.

If you make time for the nonsense, good or bad, it will continue to seek you out.

The virtues of free enterprise can become distorted by greed & delusion.

To the unaware person, karma is the prison in which the mind is held hostage. Because of karma, an unaware person is doomed to repeat the past in perpetuity as the seeds planted yesterday bear bitter fruit tomorrow. But to the mindful person, karma offers the promise of freedom. Mindfulness allows us to change our mind in the present, plantingnew seeds that will bear sweet fruit.

How can we expect to be happy when we have no peace of mind, when our mind is constantly jumping from the present to the past? When your mind is constantly running and filled with anxiety and fear, where is the freedom? You are stuck in the prison of your mind, stuck in thoughts and feelings from yesterday, from five years ago. There comes a time when everyone has to stop, look deep, breathe and let go.

Happy Endings are an illusion. Real life is filled with brief moments of fleeting happiness, but ultimately every life is a tragedy that ends in death and grief.

It has been said that the body is the temple of the spirit and the mind is the altar within that temple. When we practice hatha yoga we allow ourselves to come fully into the temple of the body—not simply as a tourist wishing to admire the fine architecture, but as a seeker on a pilgrimage of deep devotion and reverence.Meditation is the devotional practice of placing on the altar of the mind that which is sacred, holy, and revered. Just as you would not place garbage on the altar of a great temple, meditation allows a yogi to place on the altar of her mind that which is noble, pure, and free from attachment.

If we think we have twenty-four hours to achieve a certain purpose, today will become a means to attain an end. The moment of chopping wood and carrying water is the moment of happiness. We do not need to wait for these chores to be done to be happy. To have happiness in this moment is the spirit of aimlessness. Otherwise, we will run in circles for the rest of our life. We have everything we need to make the present moment the happiest in our life, even if we have a cold or a headache. We don't have to wait until we get over our cold to be happy. Having a cold is a part of life.

Your self-worth and self-esteem cannot be changed by doing positive affirmations. If that were the case many people would be super confident and are not. It may appear to work for some, but only because they have already faced the hurts inside that have caused low self-worth and low self-esteem, and are ready to feel differently. Acknowledging the pain and the suffering that take place inside you, and allowing the feelings, will take time, but this new way of handling these feelings will change the way you relate to you and to the outside world.

Mindfulness is not a mechanical process. It is developing a very gentle, kind, and creative awareness to the present moment.

When you enter a room, a social situation, or a business meeting, be mindful of cues; read between the lines to better understand people and events. What do these things tell you?

not every breakfast needs to be something worthy of posting to a food blog. Sometimes food is simply fuel, something we eat to live. But with TV ads and billboards and in-store displays saying otherwise—in colorful and provocative ways—that can be a hard case to make.

Letting go of the belief that we’re powerless to help relieve our own suffering enhances our ability not only to heal but also to genuinely love and receive the love of others.

Our feelings are formations, impermanent and without substance. We learn not to identify with ourselves with our feelings, not to consider them as a self, not to seek refuge in them, not to die because of them.

The simple act of being completely attentive & present to another person is an act of love, and it fosters unshakeable well-being.

A thought that stayed with me was that I had entered a private place in the earth. I had seen exposed nearly its oldest part. I had lost my sense of urgency, rekindled a sense of what people were, clambering to gain access to high waterfalls and a sense of our endless struggle as a species to understand time and to estimate the consequences of our acts.

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

The is a secret for greater self-control, the science points to one thing: the power of paying attention.

It’s easy to put the links between the increases in mental illness, depression, ADHD, and the like, with the speed of the modern world. People never get the chance to do nothing, or when they do, they lack the control to prevent their mind from racing off in a thousand different directions. So much so that their doing nothing becomes a thousand different things and the thousand different things becomes stress, anxiety, worry and fear. Left untreated these simple everyday things become well entrenched in our psyches and start to dominate our lives. We have a chronic addiction with doing and we love to use our busyness as a stamp of our hard work and hectic lives and we get stuck in this busy trap of always doing.

When you understand, you cannot help but love. You cannot get angry.

I felt like I wasn’t living thoroughly enough — I was distracted in ways I wouldn’t be if I’d been born in 1929.

We live in a world where it is completely the norm to worry about what we put in our bodies but worry very little about what we throw in our minds. We think a hamburger is bad but a celebrity gossip magazine is completely harmless. As children you never hear “don’t put that garbage in your mind,” but for our body counterpart it is common thread. There is something very wrong with this scenario.

The greatest gift you can give (yourself or anyone else) is just being present

It stands to reason that anyone who learns to live well will die well. The skills are the same: being present in the moment, and humble, and brave, and keeping a sense of humor. (361)

A person must be in tune with the light and dark forces of their nature and remain in harmony with the bands of their own multivariate being.

Though it may seem counter intuitive to our inner perfectionist, recognizing our mistakes as valuable lessons (not failures) helps us lay the groundwork for later success.

Here,” he said, “I place the man I was aside the man I am now. And we have not the same hope nor thought, yet are one continuous breath from the body of I, Akiyama Akio.

The same way we grow our bodies we must attend to our mind and spirit.

Freedom of will is our birthright.

There has been more bloodshed in the name of God than for any other cause. And it is all because people never attempt to reach the fountain-head. They are content only to comply with the customs of their forefathers and instructions on some books, and want others to do the same. But, to explain God after merely reading the scriptures is like explaining the city of New York after seeing it only in a map.

True spiritual virtues can have no opposite, but they can wear masks and costumes.Joy often masquerades as anger; innocence often dresses up as guilt; lovepretends to be fear. At the end of the day, we discover that we don’t need tobe fearful of these internal monsters—we simply need to unmask them.