When awareness embraces the senses, it enlivens them.

Science is now documenting that it's not the objects of meditation that are important, it's the process of paying attention to them - the attending - that actually influences the organism in a whole range of different ways. The brain changes significantly enough to impact thought, emotion, and other biological functions. Today, people recognize that they're not going to find well-being from the outside, or from a pill; they're going to find it by looking inside. All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.

It's the nature of the mind to drift away. The mind is like the Pacific Ocean, it waves. And mindfulness has been shown to drop underneath the waves. If you drop underneath the agitation in the mind, into your breath deep enough calmness, gentle undulations.

People say things that get you ramped up. I find myself, as my body clenches up when somebody says something that I know is wrong or I wanna catch them in a lie or whatever, that just, "Calm down. When it's your turn, you make your point."

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

Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature... But is is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma.

In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are the same word.