“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“Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds
of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder
or a safe spare tire?”
~ Tony Hoagland
Read More“If we don't become aware of our own reactions so that we can short-circuit precisely the kind of addictive and reflexive response that we have to these things, and if we're unwilling to turn them off, we will participate in the continuing debasement of our democracy.”
~ Brooke Gladstone
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 MoreWhile I’m waiting impatiently for the rest of the world to calibrate to my ideal technology habits, I’ve started to watch myself watch other people peer into their devices as they walk down the street, sit in coffee shops, and stand at urinals.
This impulse has grown into a challenging, but fascinating attention exercise that has lead to some liberating insights that have shifted my reactions to other people’s observable tech habits.
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 More"No matter how confident you are about your ability to read other people, your brain is always just guessing, and then it's checking those guesses against what's going on in the world and either correcting them or not."
~ Lisa Feldman Barrett
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"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 More"In some of my research on cochlear implants, I learned that when they are turned on for the first time, patients often say the sound is kind of 'digital' or 'mechanical' sounding, which is entirely normal. I guess the ears and brain eventually normalize the signal and things begin to sound more natural. I thought that was entirely fascinating, so I made it a part of my song."
~ Ryan O'Neal, from "HearingI & How It Was Made"
Read MoreAny perception you can observe directly in real time can be used to train a variety of attention-related skills.
I like to make a game out of turning ordinary activities into opportunities for practice.
There are a number of exercises I use when watching a film — whether it’s one I enjoy, dislike, or have seen before.
Read Morethe strangest things can conjure up the past,
and forgotten time will find its long way back.
as thin as air, as light as snow
some combination of the unknown,
but it doesn’t matter, i just know i need more.
~ Sleeping at Last
Wisdom is seeing the shape of your life
without obliterating (getting over) a single
instant of it.
~ Albert Huffstickler
Read MoreThe human voice can sing a vowel to break your heart.
Read MoreForget everything you've ever done.
Make no comparisons. Simply listen.
