Meditation Quotes

One of the most difficult things to remember is to remember to remember. We forget that we live in a body with senses and feelings and thoughts and emotions and ideas. We get caught up in rumination and fantasy, isolating us from the world of colors, shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations constantly bombarding our input sensors. To stop and pay attention to the moment is one way of snapping out of these mindscapes, and is a definition of meditation. This awareness is a process of deepening self-acceptance. Whatever it observes, it embraces. There is nothing unworthy of acceptance.

Stephen Batchelor

Just as the light bulb allows the electricity within it the opportunity to express its power, the body allows prana—life energy—to express itself. In yoga, our goal is to slowly increase the wattage of the subtle body, allowing prana to flow within us and through us, leaving health and balance in its wake.

Darren Main

The great spiritual tension between the contemplative life of the monk andspiritual activism in the world dissolves entirely with one word—namaste: thelight in me bows to the light in you.When meditation reveals the light in ourselves, we naturally want to bow tothe light in all beings—to act on their behalf in reverence and devotion.When we truly see the light in another being, our own light shines forth, dissolving the seemingly eternal ache in our hearts and the near constant struggle of the ego mind. To see the light in one being—your own light or thatof another—is to win the cosmic game of hide and seek and ease the suffering of the world.

Darren Main

Do numbers hold spiritual significance? Perhaps they do. For me, the most powerful numbers are two and six because when you multiply those numbers, you get the exact amount of square feet required to roll out a yoga mat. Even after years of practice, I’m continually astounded that all I really need to heal my body, open my heart, and still my chaotic mind is twelve square feet.

Darren Main

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.

Darren Main

A Kula or spiritual community is like a nudist camp for the soul. Not only are we given the permission to remove our robes of guilt, our suits of shame, and our masks of false identity—we are encouraged to do so. To become naked and hold nothing back is to become truly beautiful.

Darren Main

On a physical level, water is often called the universal solvent because of its ability to dissolve almost anything at the molecular level. On a spiritual level it is the breath which acts as a universal solvent, because there is no trauma so great, no wound so deep, no delusion so convincing, that deep and mindful breathing will not dissolve it.

Darren Main

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.

Darren Main

Forcing Your body into a yoga pose is like brushing your teeth with a wire brush. You may get rid of the plaque but gingivitis will be the least of your concerns.

Darren Main

Resolutions, like all spiritual virtues, can be misused by the ego when mindfulness is absent. There are few things that will keep you in the bondage of habit like a grand resolution. It is like an empty box wrapped in the best ofintentions, yet lacking anything of substance.

Darren Main

Meditation is the best tool for neutralizing the voice in the head. It's a muzzle for the ego. Being mindful is an innate but underused ability we all have, the act of being aware without judging. When you repeatedly go through the cycle of trying to focus on your breath, losing that focus, and noticing and returning to the practice, you are literally building your mindfulness muscle the same way dumbbell curls build your biceps. As this mind-muscle develops, you start being way more aware of thoughts, emotions, and sensations as what they really are: squirts of chemicals & hormones that enter, peak and then fade completely back to the nothingness of which they arose. In other words, mindfulness provides space between impulse and action, so you're not a slave to whatever pops into your head. You are not your thoughts. You are the awareness of them.

Dan Harris

Most people believe that pain and suffering are synonymous—that one begets the other. A yogi recognizes that pain is an unavoidable aspect of life and that suffering is a choice. Pain is what happens when you stub your toe, suffering is what your mind does with the sensation.

Darren Main

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.

Darren Main

While religions and mystical traditions attempt to address the same spiritual questions with which all human beings wrestle, a religious person demands answers to questions that have no answers and attempts to demand harmony from the paradox of life. The result is less wisdom and varying degrees of bothinternal and external chaos. A mystic, on the other hand, contemplates and makes peace with unanswered questions. The great paradox is that sitting quietly with unanswered questions is the doorway to wisdom, balance, and peace.

Darren Main

I understand that for beginners it isn't that easy to sit down, close your eyes, and settle into stillness. Your thoughts have gotten used to making SO MUCH NOISE! They have enjoyed too much influence over you to simply fade the first time you try.

Russell Simmons

After my first experience via yoga, I became incredibly focused on experiencing that sense of stillness again. The stillness that reminded me that I could be a better person, a better friend, a better citizen of the world, as well as a better businessman.

Russell Simmons

The beautiful thing about meditation is that it allows you to access that cool guy or girl inside of you that's waiting to come out. You'll be able to access the part of you that people like to be around. The part of you that feels upbeat about things. That feels like you're moving toward your goals without frustration and anxiety. That feels ecstatic to be alive! The more I meditate, the more I have these moments.

Russell Simmons

True happiness lies in being compassionate and appreciating the world and our circumstances, rather than being coldhearted and greedy. We often realize too late that our favorite moments are those spent simply with the people we love. In seeing the miracles that unfold around us every day. Eventually we all come to understand that our happiness is derived from being present in the moment. Why wait until the end of your life to discover this Truth?

Russell Simmons

Still yourself to steel yourself.

Fakeer Ishavardas

How would you like a friend or loved one talking to you only when they needed something? That’s kind of how most of use prayer or meditation. Since there is ALWAYS something for which to be grateful, how about praying or meditating on that?

Charles F. Glassman

How would you like a friend or loved one talking to you only when they needed something? That’s kind of how most use prayer or meditation. Since there is ALWAYS something for which to be grateful, how about praying or meditating on that?

Charles F. Glassman

The brain is a pleasure seeking machine. Once you teach it, through meditation, that abiding calmly in the present moment feels better than our habitual state of clinging l, over time, the brain will want more and more mindfulness.

Dan Harris

Truth in, untruth out. Seek thus, within-without

Fakeer Ishavardas

After your daily bread, if you ask God for anything, ask 'him' to make you right in the head.

Fakeer Ishavardas

To forgive does not mean to forget.

Allan Lokos

Meditation brings Nirvana, and Nirvana brings Buddhahood.

Abhijit Naskar

The tongue never rests. It speaks even when we sleep. It speaks through the mind even when the mouth keeps shut

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Short prayers with long legs travel far.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The quieter the mind the louder the soul.

Matshona Dhliwayo

A single word can brighten the faceof one who knows the value of words.Ripened in silence, a single wordacquires a great energy for work.War is cut short by a word,and a word heals the wounds,and there’s a word that changespoison into butterand honey.Let a word mature inside yourself.Withhold the unripened thought.Come and understand the kind of wordthat reduces money and riches to dust.Know when to speak a wordand when not to speak at all.A single word turns the universe of hellinto eight paradises.Follow the Way. Don’t be fooledby what you already know. Be watchful.Reflect before you speak.A foolish mouth can brand your soul.Yunus, say one last thingabout the power of words –Only the word “I”divides me from God.

Yunus Emre

[On scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss][Carl Friedrich] Gauss told his friend Rudolf Wagner, a professor of biology at Gottingen University, that he did not believe in the Bible but that he had meditated a great deal on the future of the human soul and speculated on the possibility of the soul being reincarnated on another planet. Evidently, Gauss was a Deist with a good deal of skepticism concerning religion.

Gerhard Falk

Anytime you meditate, some electric jerks occur in your thigh...the symbol of premonition of an unpleasant event that has happened or will take place in future.

Michael Bassey Johnson

If you keep on saying a single thing to yourself, you are likely to attract it to yourself, dreaming it always, then in a twinkle of an eye, it comes to you.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Micro meditations should be performed with very little activity. These practices should not be associated with any goal, concept or belief.

Amit Ray

The future is as blank as a plane sheet if you don't have an eagle's eye, that's why you should climb to a vantage point to get a good perspective view at your future.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Meditation takes you out of your mind and possibly into the future, negative thoughts are quicksands that keeps you glued to your past.

Michael Bassey Johnson

By keeping the mind in the present, unless you deliberately want to contemplate the past or future, it’s possible to firmly face life without fear. Then, no thoughts of past failures or future problems will exist in the mind, and a truly positive mental state will result—fudoshin, the “immovable mind.

H.E. Davey

The young should not think of themselves as immature and the elderly need not view themselves as feeble. Our minds control our bodies. Have no age, transcend both past and future, and enter into naka-ima—the “eternal present.

H.E. Davey

Our past cannot be changed, and to be preoccupied with it is inefficient in time and effort. Likewise, by fretting over the future, we only exhaust ourselves, making us less able to effectively respond when the future is actually upon us. By worrying about a mishap that may or may not take place, we’re forced to undergo the event twice—once when imagining it and once again if and when we actually experience it.

H.E. Davey

Through becoming aware of how the inner man and woman relates and communicates inside ourselves, it creates a joy and satisfaction in the three life areas that they influence: our meditation and inner growth, our relationships and our work and creativity.

Swami Dhyan Giten

Becoming aware of our inner man and woman means to discover the roots and creative potential of both the male and female aspect within ourselves. Becoming aware of the inner man and woman means to understand that they have different visions of life. It means to understand that they have different perspectives and views of life. The inner man and woman are our two wings of love and freedom. Through awareness, acceptance and understanding, we can allow our two wings to develop in a deep and natural harmony. In the world today, a one-sided development of the male side leads to destructivity. A one-sided development of the male side leads to ego, struggle, exhaustion and a separation from life. A one-sided development of the female side leads to passivity and dependence.

Swami Dhyan Giten

An idea is like a spark to creativity, which turns to a wild conflagration of thoughts, burning every ignorance. When the fire burns, the creative power is awake, and comes out to join the ideas in your head to bring out the hidden valuables the world never knew

Michael Bassey Johnson

For you to make your creative work creative, you must seek creativity from the creator.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Writing creatively is a process of self-consumption that requires one to dive deeply inside of oneself with no guarantee of reemergence.

Ashim Shanker

My friends think I'm outgoing, but I don't travel as much outside as I do from the inside.

Ana Claudia Antunes

Historically, techniques to attain altered states of consciousness, usually called meditation, or sometimes prayer, actually involve various forms of concentration, the first level of this kind of internal work. The linear scale of progression is Concentration, then Meditation, and finally Contemplation. Virtually all categories of meditation are, in actuality, forms of concentration. What makes them so are the innate “goals” or ambitions attached to them: to achieve a state or to acquire something, like relaxation, insight or “advancement.” This then constructs a dichotomy, or dualism, between the pursuer and the thing pursued. That is, you are conscious of or believe in something “better,” you are separate from it, and there is effort to attain it.

Darrell Calkins

Meditation, in contrast, is the accidental moments of actual harmony that arrive anyway when you are trying to get something, even in trying to get harmony or calm. This often happens outside of the intention to meditate, and most people access the beginnings of this through other events, such as walking, working, athletic activities, or transitional moments, such as between waking and sleeping. The effect, in brief, is one of harmony and well-being, from which other insights or intuitive glimpses can naturally emerge. The moment you notice this, the meditation is over.

Darrell Calkins

Contemplation is purer still, yet more sophisticated. This comes from a strongly developed base of concentration—basically, constancy—through any temptation, including altered states of consciousness, that leads one to meditation (effortless engagement), from which is born an intuitive connection to that which is being focused upon (often, the nature of being in the moment, which is the default “focus”). Some people can attain this state accidentally through some combination of surprising events, which is sometimes called revelation. Fewer still can cause this to happen intentionally, mainly because you have to surprise yourself to have it occur. In any case, it requires a real sense of the value of paradox. One leaves a single position behind (such as “I like this” or “I don’t like this”) and expands in comprehension to simultaneously experience its opposite as well. From there, one rises above the two through a creative burst of intuition, and looks down on them both. What you might call transcendence, although I prefer mildly amused.

Darrell Calkins

A thought weaves into another thought, seeking the other. The thought world has its-own Inner Life. A rose acts upon us through its symbolism, through its beauty, through our conscious & sub-conscious mind.Meditating we tap into the thought form of ‘rose adoration’.

Nataša Nuit Pantović

Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayermaking, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between-worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

There is no destination except the one inside of you.

Bryant McGill

Our future lies on the horizon of our destiny.

Robin Hubbard

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Whenever a time arises where clarity is desired, it is always wise to reflect on the sage within.

Sereda Aleta Dailey

Daily meditation promotes self confidence, peace of mind and strong faith in God.

Lailah Gifty Akita

If you feel that you are going without go within

Rasheed Ogunlaru

From this moment forward, I am in control of every situation. I will always know the exact right action to take, and this is so. I will now obtain vibrant good health. I will have the possessions I want, I now have the power and wisdom to bring this about, and this is so. I will have peace and harmony in my life. I will have love and abundance, and this is so. I now claim all these things for my own from this time forward.

Chris Prentiss

Don't let the excess of demand make you loose your command and get you further from what you've planned.

Ana Claudia Antunes

Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience.

Sharon Salzberg

When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences—good and bad alike—are opportunities to learn and grow.

Sharon Salzberg

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Meditation Quotes

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