You are only here now; you're only alive in this moment.

When you're walking, just walk. When you're eating, just eat. Not in front of the TV, not with the newspaper. It turns out, that's huge.

Nourishing the soul is the process of drinking at the life stream, coming back to one's true self, embracing the whole of one's experience - good, bad, or ugly; painful or exalted; dull or boring.

Most of the time, if you're not really paying attention, you're someplace else. So your child might say, "Daddy, I want this," and you might say, "Just a minute, I'm busy." Now that's no big deal-we all get busy, and kids frequently ask for attention. But over your child's entire youth, you may have an enormous number of such moments to be really, fully present, but because you thought you were busy, you didn't see the opportunities these moments presented. . . . People carry around an enormous amount of grief because they missed the little things.

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.

Meditation is like farming... the right soil is required to grow anything, nothing will grow if the soil is polluted by striving or pushing too hard.

Mindfulness is a way to rebalance ourselves. Instead of being lost in thought, or caught up in emotional upheaval, we can tip the scale in the direction of greater equanimity, clarity, wisdom, and self-compassion by actually learning how to inhabit that other dimension of our being.