Mindfulness Quotes - Page 4

To still your mind , first still your tongue.

Stress, burnout and strain on the human heart are all increasingly taking their toll for millions of hardworking people. However, even someone who is working in a job that simply ‘pays the bills’ can turn mundane and stressful tasks into pleasant activities with a slight adjustment in attitude and by adopting a daily mindful practice.

Christopher Dines

I used to think that life was only about progress, getting to a destination, the final outcome. But this isn’t quite right. Life is more of a process, and as much as goals are important, the in-the-moment experiences along the way are really where authentic living takes place. Running has taught me this. In fact, running has been my greatest teacher of life.

Jacqueline Simon Gunn

Through practising body scan awareness meditation, we can greatly reduce the detrimental effects of stress and make our working lives pleasant and enjoyable.

Christopher Dines

The word ‘pranayama’, often referred to as alternate breathing, comes from the Sanskrit meaning ‘extension of life force’ or ‘extension of breath’. At times, we are going to have days where we are bombarded with one task after another. This simple yet effective meditation only takes a couple of minutes and its calming qualities can be felt almost immediately. It is one of the easiest meditation techniques to apply. This practice is well worth applying at least three or four times a day (somewhere private) to develop emotional balance and evenness of mind, especially in the working environment.

Christopher Dines

The Happiest Man in The WorldThe French interpreter for the 14th Dalai Lama, former academic and dedicated meditator Matthieu Ricard, came into the spotlight in the field of neural science after being named “the happiest man in the world”. Naturally, there are many other men and women who demonstrate such equanimity, but the studies on his brain uncovered truly astonishing results. MRI scans showed that Matthieu Ricard and other serious long-term meditators (with more than 10,000 hours of practice each) were mentally, emotionally and spiritually fulfilled and displayed an abundance of positive emotions and equanimity in the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain. When talking about his mindfulness training, Matthieu Ricard said with humility that: “Happiness is a skill. It requires effort and time”.

Christopher Dines

We cannot control the mind by trying to force it to be peaceful or positive. Many have attempted this using a plethora of methods throughout the ages, but it simply does not work. Trying to fight the human mind is like walking into a lion’s den empty-handed and believing that you have a realistic chance of defending yourself.

Christopher Dines

Mindfulness (present-moment awareness) is deliberately focusing our attention on our thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations and mental activity without losing awareness of what is happening in the present moment. It is essentially being in a state of present-moment awareness and maintaining clarity without being swayed or distracted by mental commentary.

Christopher Dines

The standard way of reducing stress in our culture is to put as much energy as possible into trying to arrive at a moment that matches our preferences. This ensures that we feel some level of stress until we get there (assuming we ever will) and worse, it makes the present moment into an unacceptable place to be.

By learning to allow different types of discomfort to simply stay in the room with you, without your scrambling for a button to push (real or metaphorical), you make discomfort matter less.The pool of things you’re afraid of shrinks. It becomes a lot less important to control circumstances, because you know you can handle moments of uncertainty or awkwardness or disappointment without an escape plan.

You have more power over your mind than you realize. The time to strengthen it is now.

Do what you are doing. Monastic motto

We think consciously yet live life unconsciously!

Ramana Pemmaraju

Avoid having to pump your brakes by keeping your flow on cruise control.

He made me question what was, when for a whole lifetime up till that moment, I accepted the world’s excuses.

Stay present, stay conscious.

One day the Buddha was sistting with some of his monks in the woods. They had just come back from an almsround and were ready to share a mindful lunch together. A farmer passed by, looking distraught.He asked the Buddha, "Monks, have you seen some cows going by here?""What cows?" the Buddha responded."Well," the man said, "I have four cows and I don't know why, but this morning they all ran aay. I also have two acres of sesame. This year the insects ate the entire crop. I have lost everything: my harvest and my cows. I feel like killing myself." The Buddha said, "Dear friend, we have been sitting here almost an hour and we have not seen any cows passing by. Maybe you should go and lookin the other direction." When the farmer was gone, the Buddha looked at his friends and smiled knowingly. "Dear friends, you are very lucky," he said. "You don't have any cows to lose.

Thich Nhat Hanh

What is it you really want? Are you really going to be happy when you get the object? What will it bring you? Is what you’re telling yourself really true? You have the choice, you can keep on getting hit by the wave or you can get the courage to run towards it and dive right through it - everything starts with you.

This inability to just do nothing is a direct result of our habit of externalisation. As children we are never taught in schools, or in social settings, to look within ourselves for answers. Whether it is that our answers are found in some sort of religion, or another person, or in something else, we start to make this common practice. We are indecisive in life looking to friends, family, counsellors, teachers, and even strangers for advice. We are never taught or, better yet, shown how to look after our number one relationship in life, which is the relationship with one’s self.

The worlds high on doing and distracting and as result we need to keep doing and it doesn’t really matter what we are doing, as long as it is distracting.

Either you 'are' in your mind, or you are where you are. Fully present.

Matthew Donnelly

When you're one with being you're one with god.

Matthew Donnelly

Traffic is more of the in between time where we think more about where we are going than where we are at the moment.

Mindless fear is greater than mindful fear.

Idowu Koyenikan

Collaboration is the essence of life. The wind, bees and flowers work together, to spread the pollen.

Amit Ray

Mindfulness is intimacy with all things.

Jeffrey A. White

It is easier to act your way into a better feeling than to feel your way into a better way of acting. When certain feelings hinder you, look for other feelings to feel. Supplant your fear with a greater motivation. The more frequently we feel and do not act, the less often we will feel. Act genially in the face of rancor; you may be the only angel in that person’s life. What you practice projecting you are projecting and you become.

We become more devoted to pleasing other people than establishing a relationship with ourselves. We believe we are what we have and what we do and we believe we are what other people think we are. Ego is in many ways the primary cause of most of our misconception and woe.

The bike does this; it is an apotheosis of self-sufficiency, in which a well-loved machine will unhesitatingly and quietly mediate intentional being into momentum. As you ride a bike and start to ride it well, there are moments when it becomes an affirmation of life devoid of separation and distinction; you ride through the earth unthinkingly rather than across it. There is no need to account for who you are in others’ terms, in language, even. Your characteristics give way to your being. The effort put into the bike can take you out of your socialized, represented self into what Heidegger called ‘disclosing self’, where you simply are ever-shifting endeavour.

The mistake is to assume that the way it feels at the moment is the way it will feel forever.

Mindfulness is a quiet mind, an aware mind. Mindfulness itself is not about ‘arriving,’ but about being.

Mindfulness is not chasing the moment but beautifying the moment.

Amit Ray

The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.

A full-throttled deployment of the practices of strategic communication would kill candor and leave truth bereft to fend for herself in the backstabbing night of political bogeys.

The energy of mindfulness has the element of friendship and loving kindness in it.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Body scan meditation is mentally scanning through each part of the body with presence. It helps us be one with the body. Thus, we can feel if we are holding on to any tension or heaviness or any static emotions. And by doing so, we can find relief and internal freedom.

Christopher Dines

When we observe the flow of our breathing, we transcend our thoughts and are able to bring mind and body into harmony with each other. Thus, we create calm.

Christopher Dines

Every moment nature is serving fresh dishes with the items of happiness. It is our choice to recognize and taste it.

Amit Ray

We do so much, we run so quickly, the situation is difficult, and many people say, "Don't just sit there, do something." But doing more things may make the situation worse. So you should say, "Don't just do something, sit there." Sit there, stop, be yourself first, and begin from there.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of "instinctual wisdom." Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the foetus in the womb - without verbalizing the process of knowing "how" it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between "I" and my experience.

Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child - our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

Thich Nhat Hanh

No ideals. No illusions. Just reality - but more perfect than you’ve ever imagined. That’s what being mindful and living in the present means.

Lidiya K.

Vast skies in the Australian desertwaves that don't movewe slide surf glide like condors

I felt like I wasn’t living thoroughly enough — I was distracted in ways I wouldn’t be if I’d been born in 1929.

Meditation is to be aware of what is going on: in your body, in your feelings, in your mind, and in the world.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Everything can turn around in a moment, if you just change your thoughts, and make different decisions. Listen to your heart.

Our work and educational institutions reinforce this preference for later over now throughout our lives. In school we focus on the ends — passing the semester, making the grade, or otherwise getting it all behind us — rather than the present-moment experience of actually learning. As employees, we want the work to be over as soon as it begins. Work culture is driven by quotas, billable hours, budgets, and Gantt charts — bottom lines of any sort. The value is always somewhere ahead of you, rather than here right now, in the room with you. We’re perpetually looking ahead to a payday or a weekend or some other kind of finish line. Virtually every day of our lives, we’re trained to lean towards something we don’t have, which essentially trains us to be dissatisfied with where we already are.

My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be.

Mary Doria Russell

Mindfulness is not chasing the moment but sipping the nectar of the moment.

Amit Ray

If we think we have twenty-four hours to achieve a certain purpose, today will become a means to attain an end. The moment of chopping wood and carrying water is the moment of happiness. We do not need to wait for these chores to be done to be happy. To have happiness in this moment is the spirit of aimlessness. Otherwise, we will run in circles for the rest of our life. We have everything we need to make the present moment the happiest in our life, even if we have a cold or a headache. We don't have to wait until we get over our cold to be happy. Having a cold is a part of life.

Thich Nhat Hanh

The wise man is one who knows, the significance and nothingness of his life.

There is no need to put anything in front of us and run after it. We already have everything we are looking for, everything we want to become. Be yourself. Life is precious as it is. All the elements for your happiness are already here. There is no need to run, strive, search, or struggle. Just be. Just being in the moment in this place is the deepest practice of meditation. Most people cannot believe that just walking as though you have nowhere to go is enough. They think that striving and competing are normal and necessary. Try practicing aimlessness for just five minutes,and you will see how happy you are during those five minutes.

Thich Nhat Hanh

The challenge for mindfulness is to be present for your experience as it is rather than immediately jumping in to change it or try to force it to be different.

Everyone wants to be happy, and there is a strong energy in us pushing us toward what we think will make us happy. But we may suffer a lot because of this. We need the insight that position, revenge, wealth, fame, or possessions are, more often than not, obstacles to our happiness. We need to cultivate the wish to be free of these things so we can enjoy the wonders of life that are always available — the blue sky, the trees, our beautiful children.

Thich Nhat Hanh

O happiness! O happiness! Wilt thou perhaps sing, O my soul? Thou liest in the grass. But this is the secret, solemn hour, when no shepherd playeth his pipe.Take care! Hot noontide sleepeth on the fields. Do not sing! Hush! The world is perfect.Do not sing, thou prairie-bird, my soul! Do not even whisper! Lo—hush! The old noontide sleepeth, it moveth its mouth: doth it not just now drink a drop of happiness——An old brown drop of golden happiness, golden wine? Something whisketh over it, its happiness laugheth. Thus—laugheth a God. Hush!"For happiness, how little sufficeth for happiness!" Thus spoke I once and thought myself wise. But it was a blasphemy: that have I now learned. Wise fools speak better.The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye-glance—little maketh up the best happiness. Hush!

Friedrich Nietzsche

The challenge for each of us is to find out who we are and to live our way into our own calling.we do this by paying close attention to all aspects of life as they unfold in the present moment.

True wealth is contentment, and happiness is forgetting to worry how you are and how much you have.

I sit watching until dusk, hypnotized. I think of the sea as continually sloshing back and forth, repetitive, but my psyche goes with the river- always loping downhill, purposeful, listening only to gravity.

The ultimate experience of being mindful occurs when we forget about everything, even the mindful self and doing. In that mode we are full of energy, utterly self-generated.

Habitually we are caught between the play of mind and heart: mindfulness versus heartfulness! We create this polarity within. Is it possible to reconcile?When the heart is right, there will always be an unquestioning agreement between the mind and the heart. In fact, a perfect synchronicity exists between them and they function as one. Integrating these two principal players in our life eases our burden of existence. By ignoring either one, we cannot move ahead purposefully in life.

Daaji

Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 … 19 Next