Quotes about mindfulness and meditation
Buddhist meditation, personal insight,
is central to the Buddha’s advice — not ritual or belief.
We cannot be present and run our story-line at the same time.
When your thoughts go wandering,
just sit there and let them go,
but don’t go with them.
Keep sitting.
When covered by seeing, hearing, touching, and thinking,
the brightness of original mind cannot be seen.
The Buddha taught that
greed, anger, and misunderstanding are the causes that give rise to suffering.
If we ourselves are not yet acquainted with
greed, anger, and misunderstanding, then there is no way we can believe this.
When we know ourselves what
greed, anger and delusion are like,
and that whenever they arise in the mind,
they produce suffering like a fire burning us,
then we can believe it on the basis of our own experience.
Playing with words and ideas is like trying to catch rain in buckets.
Just allow your consciousness to receive the rain,
and the seeds buried deep within will have a chance to be watered.
I realize all forms are but illusions.
I thus free myself from the illness of ego-clinging.
Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience.
Just remain in the center; watching.
And then forget that you are there.
As rain does not break into a well-thatched house,
so craving does not break into a well-trained mind
If you teach others, do what you teach.
To train others, train yourself.
Self-control is not easy.
Detach, let go.
Whenever there is any feeling of clinging,
we detach from it
because we know that feeling is just as it is.
All delusions begin in the mind.
All delusions are based on various ways we’re talking to ourselves
and then believing what we are saying.
When there is mindfulness and right understanding,
then I can’t find any suffering at all in this moment, now.
There is no way that we can guarantee that anything is definitely like this or like that, so the Buddha said to just leave it be. Leave it be as uncertain. However much you like it or dislike it, you should understand it as uncertain.
As a bee gathering nectar
does not harm or disturb the color and fragrance of the flower;
so do the wise move through the world.
We stand in our own shadow
and wonder why it is dark.
Rather than being your thoughts and emotions,
be the awareness behind them.
Like a cup, you are full
of your own opinions and speculations.
How can you learn wisdom
unless you first empty your cup?
Leave the front and back door open
allow the thoughts to come and go
just don’t serve them tea.
When it storms outside, feel free to watch.
You don’t need to open the window.
No matter what happens when you practice,
your practice is meditation.
If you watch thoughts,
that is meditation.
If you can’t watch your thoughts,
that is meditation, too.
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.
We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
“Right effort” is not the effort to make something particular happen.
It is the effort to be aware and awake each moment.
If we wish to understand the nature of reality,
we have an inner hidden advantage:
we are ourselves little portions of the universe
and so carry the answer within us.
All teachings are mere references.
The true experience is living your own life.
Meditation is sitting quietly
while paying attention to your experience,
allowing everything to be just as it is.
When you don’t have anything else, you have your breath.
Where does buddha dharma sangha live? In your heart.
Whenever you are thinking, or stressing, or in the grip of an emotion — or being anything at all — just stop, and do this:
ana = “breathe in”
pana = “breathe out”
sati = “be in the present”, “pay attention”
Then: Do your work. (“Do your duty”).
And always: Metta first.
With mindfulness, you learn to look at things from an existential point of view — allowing things to exist — rather than trying to even them out or bulldoze the whole landscape. With this view, fighting or resistance isn’t necessary.
While meditating we are simply seeing what the mind has been doing all along.
Meditation. There is nothing to do. It is about undoing.
If you have time to breathe, you have time to meditate. You breathe when you walk. You breathe when you stand. You breathe when you lie down.
Meditation is a skillful letting go: gently but with resolution.
The way out of suffering is meditation itself.
Let go of the story — and return to the only place of power: the present moment
Truly, just sit …
That’s all there is.
If you give it attention, there is no limit to delusion.
So quit creating delusions and just sit.
In sitting meditation we practice dropping whatever story we are telling ourselves.
Meditation isn’t about getting it right or attaining some ideal state.
It’s about being able to stay present with ourselves.
Whenever you are able to observe your mind,
you are no longer trapped in it.
By giving your full attention to this moment,
an intelligence far greater than the egoic mind enters your life.
When you are present,
you can allow the mind to be as it is
without getting entangled in it.
We try many ways to be awake,
but our society still keeps us forgetful.
Meditation is to help us remember.
Just as the dog loves to chew bones,
the human mind loves its problems.
The one and only way
for the purification of beings,
for overcoming sorrow and lamentation,
for the complete destruction of pain and distress,
for attainment of the Noble Path, and
for the realization of Nibbāna,
is the practice of the four methods of Steadfast Mindfulness:
Keeping our mind steadfastly
on the body,
on sensation,
on the mind,
on the dhamma.
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.
One conscious breath is enough to make some space
where before there was the uninterrupted succession of one thought after another.
One conscious breath (two or three would be even better), taken many times a day,
is an excellent way of bringing space into your life.
Looking within can change the world around you.
Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.
Why meditate? You start to unhook the automatic cycle of reactivity and gain some freedom.
Never miss a good chance to shut up.
Proper effort is not the effort to make something particular happen.
It is the effort to be aware and awake each moment.
What a liberation to realize that the voice in my head is not who I am.
Who am I then?
The one who sees that.
If my mind doesn’t go out to disturb the noise,
the noise won’t disturb me.
Let go and just do your own work.
Do what you do, and give the fruit of your actions to me.
When you sit, let it be.
Grasp at nothing.
Resist nothing.
Enlightenment — full enlightenment — is perceiving reality with an open, unfixated mind, even in the most difficult circumstances. It’s nothing more than that, actually.
You are awareness, disguised as a person.
You have to make your life a good place for the meditation to seep through.