Mindfulness 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 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"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"When I feel at home (or when someone else truly makes me feel at home), I feel comfortable, supported, safe, and relaxed, like I don’t need anything. At those times, my past ceases to be a neon marquee of regrets, and my future is no longer an unending to-do list, bullet-pointed by unrealistic expectations. Feeling at home is the feeling that I can just be myself."
~ Ethan Nichtern
Read MoreMindfulness involves cultivating familiarity and intimacy with aspects of everyday experience that we often take for granted.
~Jon Kabat-Zinn
Read MoreFirst, you must let your heart
be broken open
in a way you have never
felt before,
cannot imagine.
~ Dorothy Walters
Read More"Fiction, like poetry, works at its best when it brings together emotion as well as idea, passion as well as characters in the illusory unfolding we call time—when it works close to the timing of the human pulse, to the flow of our blood, to the beat of our heart."
~ Alan Cheuse
Read MoreThinking your way through unpleasant emotions takes time while a single repetition of any mindfulness exercise only takes a few seconds. The skills of attention strengthened by mindfulness practice enhance both the resolving of unpleasant emotions and the acceptance of them.
Read MoreOne of the things I’ve found so remarkable about the approach to mindfulness I practice and teach, is the way it has gradually, yet significantly changed the way I relate to the physicality of my emotions—including the unpleasant ones.
Read More"I think one of my gifts is also one of my weaknesses. Which is, I have a kind of antenna for other people. My friends and my producers might disagree with me about this, but I think an antenna that picks up on what other people are feeling. But there's something good and bad about that."
~ Terry Gross
Read Moreyù yī - 玉衣
n. the desire to see with fresh eyes, and feel things just as intensely as you did when you were younger—before expectations, before memory, before words.
Read More"We have this strong idea, in the culture and in the language, that emotion and touch are deeply linked, and I think the neuroanatomy bears this out."
~ David Linden
Read MoreLet it come closer, let it engulf you if it must.
Until there is no division between self and sadness.
Until you cannot call it sadness at all.
Until there is only intimacy.
~ Jeff Foster
Read More"Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. And this is where I think language came from."
Read MoreTranscendence isn't an escape plan, but an engagement strategy: liberation through intimacy. Transcending the self and the world begins with deeply accepting the self and the world. It grows naturally out of countless direct experiences of life as it is being lived and an intimate familiarity with how its composition constantly fluctuates.
Read More"This simple act of acceptance – which may only last a few seconds – offers a taste of that open space of essence love, an acceptance of the warmth that is your basic nature, the heart of your own being."
~ Tsoknyi Rinpoche
Read More"Because I write poetry, I can sit down and write things that I don’t have proof of, or even know the end of the sentence. I can feel around and nobody gets hurt, right? It’s a poem. And so I wrote this poem out of grief and an attempt to make it very plain to myself, the argument that I’d come up with."
~ Jennifer Michael Hecht
Read More
