What does it mean to let our thoughts drift by like clouds?
Shifting our awareness from what our thoughts mean to how they fluctuate is an attentional exercise that develops liberating abilities over time.
Observing the movement of clouds can provide a glimpse into how we can relate to mental activity more objectively, but it oversimplifies things when the analogy is taken too literally.
Read MoreThe real magic happens when we become intimately familiar with the moment-by-moment experience of being alive. Instead of trying to force complete experiences to happen. I focus on setting the stage for them to happen by exercising my attention.
When remembering to notice that we're alive becomes a habit, we begin to erode the internal friction that obscures our view of the richness we're swimming in every day.
Read MoreThere are many obstacles to establishing a consistent mindfulness routine. Three big ones are finding time to practice, being distracted by thoughts, and feeling bored.
I discovered an exercise that obliterates all three simultaneously, but I’m pretty sure you’re going to hate the idea of it.
As with any good attention exercise, it leverages an ordinary activity as an opportunity to build capacities that for responding more effectively to the challenges of ordinary life.
Read More"Right as rain, soft as snow,
It grows and grows and grows,
Our home sweet home."
~ Sleeping at Last
Read More"You're going to die, too! Someday. And how will that be? Have you thought about it? What would you die for? Who I am is where I stand. Where I stand is where I fall."
~ Doctor Who
Read More"The trouble with the present is
that it's always in a state of vanishing.
Take the second it takes to end
this sentence with a period – already gone."
~ Billy Collins
Read More"My life is an open book. It lies here
on a glass tabletop, its pages shamelessly exposed,
outspread like a bird with hundreds of thin paper wings.
It is a biography, needless to say,
and I am reading and writing it simultaneously
in a language troublesome and private."
~ Billy Collins
Read More"Do I think one minute is going to be the thing that changes your life? It could be really powerful, but...what I love about one minute is it's a very low-cost option. Very few barriers to entry.
Because if you start saying, Oh, I don't have a minute to meditate, we really got to start evaluating some things going on in your life, because you definitely need more than meditation if you make that argument.
It's hard to argue yourself out of it."
~ Cory Muscara
Read MoreBroken streaks are demoralizing. This is why shooting for unbroken streaks leads so easily to feeling disappointed in ourselves and giving up on the whole project.
What can you do when you break your attentional fitness training streak?
Read More"You are the awareness of your thoughts. You are not your thoughts. You can let your thoughts happen. Just know that the real you is the awareness."
~ RuPaul
Read More“What led me to mindfulness was my own relationship to anxiety. So for this particular film, I felt it was important for the viewer to be able to experience the transformation a mindful meditation practice can have on an individual’s state of mind.”
~ Julie Bayer
Read More"Sadness is poetic. You're lucky to live sad moments...Because we don't want that first bit of sad, we push it away...You never feel completely sad or completely happy. You just feel kind of satisfied with your product, and then you die."
~ Louis C.K.
Read More"Why meditate? As you suffer less, are more fulfilled, as you understand who you are, and as you have a handle on changing how you carry yourself, all of that sums up ultimately in how you contribute to making this world a better place."
~ Shinzen Young
Read More"Getting people to pause and wait and not act on their immediate desire is actually one way in which we can get them to be more patient in the long run."
Ayelet Fishbach
Read More"In my experience, there’s just no substitute for actually going and seeing things."
~ Matt Damon
Read More"I do know enough as a psychologist about learning and memory. And I know that we learn. How much of this I need to do in order to change, I cannot say. But I can say that there is a point at which this brain is not just elastic in moving to what is being suggested, but that it may be plastic in that it can be reset into a new mold."
~ Mahzarin Banaji
Read More"I have a very hard time with things, you know, just being quiet. Like, if I sit alone, you know, for ten minutes with nothing happening, you know, which I guess some people would call meditating, I just lose my mind. I'm, like — how does anyone deal with this horrible silence and awareness that everything's almost over?"
~ Marc Maron
Read More"I began to realize that the only place where things were actually real was at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you."
~ David Whyte
Read More"An inner voice always used to be an outer voice. We absorb the tone of others. A harassed or angry parent. The menacing threats of an elder sibling keen to put us down. The words of a schoolyard bully or teacher who seemed impossible to please. We internalize the unhelpful voices, because at certain key moments in the past, they sounded compelling. The authority figures repeated their messages over and over until they got lodge in our own way of thinking."
Read MoreAn attention exercise on the theme of rest barely disguised as a poem.
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