“I think a lot of the work comes out of that—turning what starts as claustrophobia or containment into something that is releasing and infinite, the paradox that we live within a body that has a skin that is our bounding condition and yet have this faculty of imaginative extension into endless space.”
~ Antony Gormley
Read More“Mindfulness is about stepping outside yourself, looking at yourself, and knowing that it’s going to be okay.
So it may be Buddhism, but maybe Buddhists just discovered something that mothers have known all along.”
Dr. Jeffrey Smith
Read MoreMindfulness doesn’t provide some kind of magical exemption from discomfort. Not at all. It's actually the opposite.
It means when practiced consistently — with or without meditation — we can sometimes change the degree to which we fight against some present discomfort.
Read More“Can we tell ourselves when we need to walk away from chatter, turn it off entirely for half a day, or a full day, or a whole weekend, ease into a realm of something slower, but more tangible?
Can we go outside and listen?"
~ Naomi Shihab Nye
Read More“There usually isn’t a quick fix to what makes our lives so challenging, and that’s okay. A meditation practice, even as brief as a couple of minutes a day, can teach us how to accept the discomfort instead of trying to calm it down.”
~ Jinger Moore
Read More"Stories about gradual improvements rarely make the front page even when they occur on a dramatic scale and affect millions of people. And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear about more disasters than ever before. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite."
~ Hans Rosling
Read MoreIt wasn’t until I stumbled clumsily toward a daily mindfulness practice in my mid-thirties that I discovered that there were ways I could get better at feeling my feelings.
Before intentionally working on my attentional skills, I had no idea how often I escalated my unpleasant feelings and zipped past the pleasant and subtler ones.
The kind of self-awareness that mindfulness exercise develops has helped me become more objective about my subjective experiences.
Read More"Holiness is reached not through effort or will, but by stopping; by an inward coming to rest; a place from which we can embody the spirit of all our holy days, a radical, inhabited simplicity, where we live in a kind of ongoing surprise and with some wonder and appreciation."
~ David Whyte
Read MoreWhat 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"A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order."
~ Leonard Cohen
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"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"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"We have this idea now in our society that are never supposed to feel bad. We’re never supposed to feel anxious. We’re never supposed to feel exhausted."
~ Alex Lickerman
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 MoreAn attention exercise on the theme of rest barely disguised as a poem.
Read More"The paradox here is that mindfulness is just about being really interested in getting close and personal with what's actually happening in our bodies and minds from moment to moment."
~ Dr. Judson Brewer
Read More"When you penetrate a mystery, it doesn’t become less mysterious. It becomes, if anything, more mysterious."
~ Stephen Batchelor
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