We all need a place that is safe and wholesome enough for us to return for refuge. In Buddhism, that refuge is mindfulness.
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.
Each step along the Buddha's path to happiness requires practising mindfulness until it becomes part of your daily life.
Simply put, mindfulness is moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness.
Look past your thoughts, so you may drink the pure nectar of This Moment.
Mindfulness is the primary tool in that we get a little space between ourselves and the thoughts and then we actually can be more responsive, as in: Do I want to listen to that? Do I want to ignore it? Do I want to say "no thank you". Do I want to inquire if that's really true or helpful? So we start with mindfulness and we're not engaging, because as soon as we do that, we've given the critic authority. Instead, we want to notice the critic but not give it any attention, not really give it much value.
Mindfulness is loving all the details of our lives, and awareness is the natural thing that happens: life begins to open up, and you realize that you're always standing at the center of the world.
Sure, you need enormous amounts of technical expertise to be the best in the world. But to accomplish mindfulness, you just need something you already have: the willingness to quiet down, clear the crap and trust yourself.
Restore your attention or bring it to a new level by dramatically slowing down whatever you're doing.
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
Mindfulness is the key to everything, and this is especially true when one approaches the cultural portal known as "middle age. " This is when people mindlessly believe that it's normal to get diseases and start to fall apart. But the truth is that midlife is the time when people need to wake up and be far more mindful about their everyday habits and thinking patterns.
The only time that any of us have to grow or change or feel or learn anything is in the present moment. But we're continually missing our present moments, almost willfully, by not paying attention.
You don't have to do anything to meditate. That's what makes it so difficult. Everybody wants to do something.
Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilization were to be based on the gruesome glory of war.
Our life stories are largely constructed and without mindfulness can prove destructive.
Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.
There's only one reason why you're not experiencing bliss at this present moment, and it's because you're thinking or focusing on what you don't have. . . . But, right now you have everything you need to be in bliss.
No one teaches mindfulness better than Thich Nhat Hanh.
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.
Time is not a line, but a series of now-points.