Quotes About Mindfulness

The Noble Eight-Fold Path is the path of living in awareness. Mindfulness is the foundation. By practicing mindfulness, you can develop concentration, which enables you to attain understanding. Thanks to right concentration, you realize right awareness, thoughts, speech, action, livelihood and effort. The understanding which develops can liberate you from every shackle of suffering and give birth to true peace and joy.

Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.

Mindfulness means being aware of how you're deploying your attention and making decisions about it, and not letting the tweet or the buzzing of your BlackBerry call your attention.

No one teaches mindfulness better than Thich Nhat Hanh.

With mindfulness, we can be with the experience in more immediate way. When we find ourselves flooded with an emotion that's come after the judgement, we've often missed the very judgment that triggered the emotion.

Mindfulness is about love and loving life. When you cultivate this love, it gives you clarity and compassion for life, and your actions happen in accordance with that. All ethics and morality, and a sense of interconnectedness, come out of the act of paying attention.

Our joy, peace and happiness depend very much on our practice of recognizing and transforming habit energies. There are positive habit energies that we have to cultivate, and negative habit energies that we have to recognize, embrace and transform. The energy with which we do these things is mindfulness.

Of all footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.

For me mindfulness is like building a house, so the next time the tsunami that is depression comes I'll have a structure in place to resist it.

If we practice mindfulness, we always have a place to be when we are afraid.

Due to attachment, anger, and foolishness, I have committed numberless mistakes in speech, deed and thought. I bow my head and repent. I vow from today to begin anew, to live day and night in mindfulness, and not to repeat my previous mistakes.

Just see beauty as you walk around through your day. Feel things. Unhook from your thoughts and all the busy things you are doing. Start to look at life. This is mindfulness.

Practicing zazen and mindfulness constantly and correctly, over a period of time, can bring strength and clarity to your finite mind and eventually give you access to your infinite mind.

You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.

It is because of that balanced relationship to the moment that mindfulness serves as the platform for insight... if we feel an emotion, for example, and struggle against it right away, there is not going to be a lot of learning going on. In the same way, if we are swamped by that emotion, overcome by it, there won't be enough space for there to be learning or insight.

Mindfulness is like that—it is the miracle which can call back in a flash our dispersed mind and restore it to wholeness so that we can live each minute of life.

You are moving in and out of different advanced states of mind through your practice of meditation and mindfulness. It's that level of excellence that gives you joy in life, not the fact that you won or lost.

We must especially learn the art of directing mindfulness into the closed areas of our life.

Wellness within is mindfulness and acceptance of what you are, what you feel inside and how it's always changing. That process is helped by being attentive to the breath as it moves through the body.

Living with bipolar, schizophrenia or any other mental condition takes a recognition that one has a chronic condition that needs managing. The management can be through pharmaceutical intervention, talk therapy, mindfulness programmes, diet and exercise changes, all kinds of things.

The problem that faces us is the problem of awakening. What we lack is not an ideology or doctrine that will save the world. What we lack is mindfulness of what we are, of what our situation really is. We need to wake up in order to rediscover our human sovereignty. We are riding a horse that is running out of control. The way of salvation is a new culture in which human beings are encouraged to rediscover their deepest nature.

The ultimate expression of meditation comes when we can feel all the pains of the world, experience them with mindfulness and equanimity so they dissolve into energy, and then recolor that energy and radiate it out as unconditional love, moment by moment, through every pore of our being.

Do not pursue the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. The past no longer is. The future has not yet come. Looking deeply at life as it is. In the very here and now, the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom. We must be diligent today. To wait until tomorrow is too late. Death comes unexpectedly. How can we bargain with it? The sage calls a person who knows how to dwell in mindfulness night and day, 'one who knows the better way to live alone.'

So too, monks, I saw the ancient path, the ancient road traveled by the Perfectly Enlightened Ones of the past. And what is that ancient path, that ancient road? It is just this Noble Eightfold Path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

You need the practice of mindfulness to bring your mind back to the body and establish yourself in the moment. If you are fully present, you need only make a step or take a breath in order to enter the kingdom of God. And once you have the kingdom, you don't need to run after objects of your craving, like power, fame, sensual pleasure, and so on. Peace is possible. Happiness is possible.

There are those who give and know not pain in giving, nor do they seek joy, nor give with mindfulness of virtue; They give as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space.

We can’t change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it. That’s the potential of meditation, of mindfulness. You don’t have to burn any incense, and you definitely don’t have to sit on the floor. All you need to do is to take 10 mins out a day to step back; to familiarise yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus, calm and clarity in your life.

Mindfulness must be engaged. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise, what's the use of seeing?

I love that I live a creative life. It is in the work that I do - acting, writing, and directing. It's also in the mindfulness of every part of my life, from a meal that I prepare for family and friends to putting my imagination to work in a garden.

Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.