Quotes About Mindfulness

You are a Buddha, and so is everyone else. I didn't make that up. It was the Buddha himself who said so. He said that all beings had the potential to become awakened. To practice walking meditation is to practice living in mindfulness. Mindfulness and enlightenment are one. Enlightenment leads to mindfulness and mindfulness leads to enlightenment.

I have seen that there are a number of people who benefit from doing loving kindness meditation, either prior to or along with mindfulness meditation. It varies from person to person of course, but for many, their practice of mindfulness will bring along old habits of self-judgment and ruthless criticism, so it is not actually mindfulness.

Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. Without calmness, the mirror of mindfulness will have an agitated and choppy surface and will not be able to reflect things with any accuracy.

Mindfulness is deliberately paying full attention to what is happening around you-in your body, heart and mind. Mindfulness is awareness without criticism or judgment.

There are so many things that can provide us with peace. Next time you take a shower or a bath, I suggest you hold your big toes in mindfulness. We pay attention to everything except our toes. When we hold our toes in mindfulness and smile at them, we will find that our bodies have been very kind to us. We know that any cell in our toes can turn cancerous, but our toes have been behaving very well, avoiding that kind of problem. Yet, we have not been nice to them at all. These kinds of practices can bring us happiness.

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.

It's never too late to change the programming imprinted in childhood, carried in our genes or derived from previous lives; the solution is mindfulness in the present moment.

The practice of mindfulness is monitoring your mind all day and all night. It's enjoyable to just remove things that make you unhappy from your mind, to clarify your emotions.

The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought. That's what we're going to discover again and again and again. Nothing is what we thought. I can say that with great confidence. Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion––not what we thought. Love. Buddha nature. Courage. These are code words for things we don't know in our minds, but any of us could experience them. These are words that point to what life really is when we let things fall apart and let ourselves be nailed to the present moment.

The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.

You can turn just about any simple act into a practice of mindfulness, and it will nurture and nourish you; it will start your day off in a positive way.

Mindfulness meditation should be more than just watching what you are doing. What you really need to watch is your motivation.

Mindfulness has never met a cognition it didn't like.

I would encourage you to follow the pathway to enlightenment, to learn to meditate, to practice mindfulness, and not to really care what anybody thinks about you, including yourself.

This Ariyan Eightfold Path, that is to say: Right view, right aim, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right mindfulness, right contemplation.

We all need a place that is safe and wholesome enough for us to return for refuge. In Buddhism, that refuge is mindfulness.

Mindfulness, by helping us notice our impulses before we act, gives us the opportunity to decide whether to act and how to act

Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body. Then look at, or think of, the person triggering this emotion: With mindfulness, you can see that she is unhappy, that she is suffering. You can see her wrong perceptions. You can see that she is not beautiful when she says things that are unkind.

People who do not see their choices do not believe they have choices. They tend to respond automatically, blindly influenced by their circumstances and conditioning. Mindfulness, by helping us notice our impulses before we act, gives us the opportunity to decide whether to act and how to act.

And one of the powers of mindfulness is the ability to get to that frame of mind on demand.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

Disassociating, mindfulness, transcendence-whatever the label-it's a sort of loophole in our contract with reality, a form of self-rescue.

As long as we have practiced neither concentration nor mindfulness, the ego takes itself for granted and remains its usual normal size, as big as the people around one will allow.

Mindfulness is the ability to be aware, to note, to notice. When we apply that to our thoughts and mental habits, we bring a clarity of awareness in seeing what's just an ordinary thought and what's a judging thought that's pejorative or putting us down in some way. So, we first bring that lens of awareness, and then we can do all kinds of different strategies. We can inquire.

With mindfulness training we are able to recognize when we get lost in our mental dramas, and bring a kind and nonreactive presence to the feelings that accompany them.