Mindfulness Meditation Quotes & Sayings

It's very important as a beginner that you understand right from the start that meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

True mindfulness is the awareness that everything you encounter
is a vigorous expression of the same living universe as you. — Brad Warner

We can use meditation as a way to experiment with new ways of relating to ourselves, even our uncomfortable thoughts. — Sharon Salzberg

By accepting and learning to embrace the inevitable sorrows of life, we realize that we can experience a more enduring sense of happiness. — Sharon Salzberg

Meditate five minutes each morning and see it wake up your entire life. — Waylon H. Lewis

When our focus is on seeking, perfecting, or clinging to romance, the charge is often generated by instability, rather than by an authentic connection with another person. — Sharon Salzberg

Rest as the awareness that is aware without using thought. — Loch Kelly

We need to maintain an awareness of our awareness, of what we are paying attention to, in order to discriminate between higher and lower forms of love. — Paul O'Brien

In reality, love is fluid; it's a verb, not a noun. — Sharon Salzberg

The innumerable phenomena of life are temporary manifestations of LifeParticles.Once we know that everything comes and goes in a flux of LifeParticles, we can watch ourselves and the world with tranquility. — Ilchi Lee

Love is a living capacity within us that is always present, even when we don't sense it. — Sharon Salzberg

Do not speak about anyone who is not physically present. — Allan Lokos

Wholehearted acceptance is a basic element of love, starting with love for ourselves, and a gateway to joy. Through the practices of loving kindness and self-compassion, we can learn to love our flawed and imperfect selves. And in those moments of vulnerability, we open our hearts to connect with each other, as well. We are not perfect, but we are enough. — Sharon Salzberg

Full minds create chaos. — David W. Jones

That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I'm as confused as anyone else. — Sam Harris

We must not fall asleep in the present because the now moment is the only reality we truly have. — Kat Lahr

In meditation we discover our inherent restlessness. Sometimes we get up and leave. Sometimes we sit there but our bodies wiggle and squirm and our minds go far away. This can be so uncomfortable that we feel's it's impossible to stay. Yet this feeling can teach us not just about ourselves but what it is to be human ... we really don't want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience. It goes against the grain to stay present. These are the times when only gentleness and a sense of humor can give us the strength to settle down ... so whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to "stay" and settle down. Are we experiencing restlessness? Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay! What's for lunch? Stay! I can't stand this another minute! Stay!" — Pema Chodron

If you meditate in perfect peace and then flash someone an irritable look because they make noise or their child cries, you are entirely missing the point. — Khandro Rinpoche

Mindfulness is a quality that's always there. It's an illusion that there's a meditation and post-meditation period, which I always find amusing, because you're either mindful or you're not. — Richard Gere

Buddha taught, "Breathing in, I recognize my feeling. Breathing out, I calm my feeling." If you practice this, not only will your feeling be calmed down but the energy of mindfulness will also help you see into the nature and roots of your anger. Mindfulness helps you be concentrated and look deeply. This is true meditation. The insight will come after some time of practice. You will see the truth about yourself and the truth about the person who you thought to be the cause of your suffering. This insight will release you from your anger and transform the roots of anger in you. The transformation in you will also help transform the other person. Mindful speaking can bring real happiness, and unmindful speech can kill. When someone tells us something that makes us happy, that is a wonderful gift. But sometimes someone says something to us that is so cruel and distressing that we feel like committing suicide. We lose our joie de vivre. — Thich Nhat Hanh

The practice of concentration is like acquiring a lampshade to help us concentrate our mind on something. While doing sitting or walking meditation, cutting the future, cutting the past, dwelling in the present time, we develop our own power of concentration. With that power of concentration, we can look deeply into the problem. This is insight meditation.
First we are aware of the problem, focusing all our attention on the problem, and then we look deeply into it in order to understand its real nature [ ... ]. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Metta is the ability to embrace all parts of ourselves, as well as all parts of the world. Practicing metta illuminates our inner integrity because it relieves us of the need to deny different aspects of ourselves. We can open to everything with the healing force of love. When we feel love, our mind is expansive and open enough to include the entirety of life in full awareness, both its pleasures and its pains, we feel neither betrayed by pain or overcome by it, and thus we can contact that which is undamaged within us regardless of the situation. Metta sees truly that our integrity is inviolate, no matter what our life situation may be. — Sharon Salzberg

Studies show that our moods plummet toward anxiety and depression the more we spend time online.1 When we're busy tweeting and checking our Facebook feeds, we're constantly comparing ourselves to others rather than listening to and trusting our own inner wisdom. When we zone out to surf the Web, we're not resting in our spacious awareness, and our bully inner selves sneak in and take over. Unless we train our minds to rest in the present moment, through daily periods of kindhearted mindfulness meditation and active communication with our inner selves, we will become more and more disconnected from our highest Selves. — Sara Avant Stover

When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle. — Sharon Salzberg

Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience. — Sharon Salzberg

If every day you practice walking and sitting meditation and generate the energy of mindfulness and concentration and peace, you are a cell in the body of the new Buddha. This is not a dream but is possible today and tomorrow. — Nhat Hanh

There is no reason good enough for us to ever be out of alignment with Peace, and there is no reason good enough for us to ever be out of alignment with Love. — Alaric Hutchinson

The ultimate expression of meditation comes when we can feel all the pains of the world, experience them with mindfulness and equanimity so they dissolve into energy, and then recolor that energy and radiate it out as unconditional love, moment by moment, through every pore of our being. — Shinzen Young

The whole present moment was a celebration; it always had been; all I needed was fresh eyes to see it. — Narissa Doumani

There is a wager that we must all make; for the small stake of some rewarding mental training, we can attain lasting contentment and contribute to a positive outcome for our planet. — Neil Hayes

Once I was running and there was someone on the treadmill next to me who stopped running to answer a question I asked and flew of the back of the treadmill. Being fully engaged has many benefits. — Sakyong Mipham

Sanskrit has different words to describe love for a brother or sister, love for a teacher, love for a partner, love for one's friends, love of nature, and so on. English has only one word, which leads to never-ending confusion. — Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness can play a big role in transforming our experience with pain & other difficulties; it allows us to recognize the authenticity of the distress & yet not be overwhelmed by it. — Sharon Salzberg

Another way to look at meditation is to view thinking itself as a waterfall, a cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness, we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantage point in a cave or depression in the rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

We need never be bound by the limitations of our previous or current thinking, nor are we ever locked into being the person we used to be, or think we are. — Allan Lokos

Your anger is like a flower. In the beginning you may not understand the nature of your anger, or why it has come up. But if you know how to embrace it with the energy of mindfulness, it will begin to open. You may be sitting, following your breathing, or you may be practicing walking meditation to generate the energy of mindfulness and embrace your anger. After ten or twenty minutes your anger will have to open herself to you, and suddenly, you will see the true nature of your anger. It may have arisen just because of a wrong perception or the lack of skillfulness. — Nhat Hanh

The breath is the first tool for opening the space between the story you tell yourself about love. — Sharon Salzberg

Be mindful, which is more of a passive meditation practice. It is passive when you are active. Then there is active meditation, when you are passive, sitting still. — Frederick Lenz

Discussing God is not the best use of our energy. If we touch the Holy Spirit, we touch God not as a concept but as a living reality. In Buddhism, we never talk about nirvana, because nirvana means the extinction of all notions, concepts, and speech. We practice by touching mindfulness in ourselves through sitting meditation, walking meditation, mindful eating, and so on. — Thich Nhat Hanh

In sitting meditation, we train in mindfulness and unconditional friendliness: in being steadfast with our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts. — Pema Chodron

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way. — Thich Nhat Hanh

with each measured step,
we know
this earth is only as solid
as we are. — Sheniz Janmohamed

Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what's happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what's happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self. — Sharon Salzberg

Causing harm is never just a one-way street. — Sharon Salzberg

The central feature of the practice of meditation and hard work known as Zen is that, as Matthiessen says, it "has no patience with mysticism, far less the occult." Nor does it have any time with moralism, the prescriptions or distortions we would impose on the world, obscuring it from our view. It asks, it insists rather, that we take this moment for what it is, undistracted, and not cloud it with needless worries of what might have been or fantasies of what might come to be. It is, essentially, a training in the real ... "the Universe itself is the scripture of Zen." Pico Iyer from introduction. — Peter Matthiessen

All forms of meditation strengthen & direct our attention through the cultivation of three key skills: concentration, mindfulness & compassion or lovingkindness. — Sharon Salzberg

Looking at beauty in the world, is the first step of purifying the mind. — Amit Ray

We use mindfulness to observe the way we cling to pleasant experiences & push away unpleasant ones. — Sharon Salzberg

As human beings, we're capable of greatness of spirit, an ability to go beyond the circumstances we find ourselves in, to experience a vast sense of connection to all of life. — Sharon Salzberg

Let the breath lead the way. — Sharon Salzberg

Keeping secrets is a consequential act for all involved. — Sharon Salzberg

When you have learned, through discipline, to simplify your life, and so practiced the mindfulness of meditation, and through it loosened the hold of aggression, clinging, and negativity on your whole being, the wisdom of insight can slowly dawn. And in the all-revealing clarity of its sunlight, this insight can show you, distinctly and directly, both the subtlest workings of your own mind and the nature of reality. — Sogyal Rinpoche

When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences - good and bad alike - are opportunities to learn and grow. — Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness isn't difficult, we just need to remember to do it. — Sharon Salzberg

(from now on I'll use the term "mindfulness" to refer to keeping one's consciousness alive to the present reality), then one must practice right now in one's daily life, not only during meditation sessions. When — Thich Nhat Hanh

Although much of the work we do in committed relationships we do with our partners, sometimes it's necessary to start with ourselves. — Sharon Salzberg

Though it may sound paradoxical, identifying our thoughts, emotions, and habitual patterns of behavior is the key to freedom & transformation. — Sharon Salzberg

The environment we create can help heal us or fracture us. This is true not just for buildings and landscapes but also for interactions and relationships. — Sharon Salzberg

The journey to loving ourselves doesn't mean we like everything. — Sharon Salzberg

Every day seems to reveal a new piece of research about meditation, or new clinical applications of mindfulness or compassion practice, or new corporations or foundations or non-profits bringing mindfulness to work. — Sharon Salzberg

If we harm someone else, we're inevitably also hurting ourselves. Some quality of sensitivity and awareness has to shut down for us to be able to objectify someone else, to deny them as a living, feeling being - someone who wants to be happy, just as we do. — Sharon Salzberg

When we identify the thoughts that keep us from seeing others as they truly are we prepare the ground for real love. — Sharon Salzberg

Clinging to our ideas of perfection isolates us from life and is a barrier. — Sharon Salzberg

Respond; don't react.
Listen; don't talk.
Think; don't assume. — Raji Lukkoor

You are a Buddha, and so is everyone else. I didn't make that up. It was the Buddha himself who said so. He said that all beings had the potential to become awakened. To practice walking meditation is to practice living in mindfulness. Mindfulness and enlightenment are one. Enlightenment leads to mindfulness and mindfulness leads to enlightenment. — Nhat Hanh

Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment. — Sharon Salzberg

Famed basketball coach Phil Jackson, a meditator himself, arranged to have his players - first the Chicago Bulls, and then the L.A. Lakers - learn meditation as a way to improve their focus and teamwork. Jackson finds that mindfulness assists players in paying attention to what's happening on the court moment by moment. Such precise training in attention has paid off during tense playoffs; Jackson has led more teams to championships than any coach in NBA history. Meditation — Sharon Salzberg

We yearn for there to be meaning to our lives, balanced with a sense of inner peace & joy. — Allan Lokos

Meditation is a microcosm, a model, a mirror. The skills we practice when we sit are transferable to the rest of our lives. — Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness meditation is the embrace of any and all mind states in awareness, without preferring one to another. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

I believe that there is only one kind of love - real love - trying to come alive in us despite our limiting assumptions, the distortions of our culture, and the habits of fear, self-condemnation, and isolation that we tend to acquire just by living a life. — Sharon Salzberg

When you reach a calm and quiet meditative state, that is when you can hear the sound of silence. — Stephen Richards

A key barometer to help us weigh the rightness of our actions is self-respect. — Sharon Salzberg

We resonate with one another's sorrows because we are interconnected. Being whole and simultaneously part of a larger whole, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. If I become a center of love and kindness in this moment, then in a perhaps small but hardly insignificant way, the world now has a nucleus of love and kindness it lacked the moment before. This benefits me and it benefits others. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Ironically, we may discover that death meditation is not a morbid exercise at all. Only when we lose the use of something taken for granted (whether the telephone or an eye) are we jolted into a recognition of its value. When the phone is fixed, the bandage removed from the eye, we briefly rejoice in their restoration but swiftly forget them again. In taking them for granted, we cease to be conscious of them. In taking life for granted, we likewise fail to notice it. (To the extent that we get bored and long for something exciting to happen.) By meditat- ing on death, we paradoxically become conscious of life. — Stephen Batchelor

Meditation is not an escape. It is the courage to look at reality with mindfulness and concentration. Meditation is essential for our survival. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Mindfulness meditation should be more than just watching what you are doing. What you really need to watch is your motivation. — Thubten Zopa Rinpoche

There's no denying that it takes effort to set the intention to see our fundamental connected-ness with others. — Sharon Salzberg

Meditation may be done in silence & stillness, by using voice & sound, or by engaging the body in movement. All forms emphasize the training of attention. — Sharon Salzberg

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the father of MBSR, doesn't look like the kind of person to be selling meditation and mindfulness to America's fast-paced, stressed-out masses. When I met him at a mindfulness conference in April, he was dressed in corduroys, a button-down shirt and a blazer, with wire-rimmed glasses and a healthy head of thick gray hair. He looked more like the professor he trained to become than the mindfulness guru he is. — Kate Pickert

Mindfulness meditation doesn't change life. Life remains as fragile and unpredictable as ever. Meditation changes the heart's capacity to accept life as it is. It teaches the heart to be more accommodating, not by beating it into submission, but by making it clear that accommodation is a gratifying choice. — Sylvia Boorstein

When we do our best to treat others with kindness, it's often a struggle to determine which actions best express our love and care for ourselves. — Sharon Salzberg

Focusing techniques that enhance attentiveness (such as mindfulness meditation) help to increase appreciation for the simple blessings of life and banish incompatible thoughts from consciousness. For that reason, celebrating the ordinary is a practice that requires paying attention. Embrace the temporary. Live in the moment. Be grateful for all the little things. Let your eyes linger on what's right in front of you. — Karen Speerstra

The wholesome pursuit of excellence feels quite different from perfectionism. — Sharon Salzberg

Real Love may run on a lower voltage, but it's also more grounded & sustainable. — Sharon Salzberg

Not everyone wants to take up meditation, but most people can feel an alignment with values like mutual respect, insightful investigation, listening to one another.
Meditation is a way to help those values become real in day-to-day life, helping people to understand themselves more and more and have a way to not get lost in old patterns. — Sharon Salzberg

When we truly allow ourselves to feel our own pain, over time it comes to seem less personal. We start to recognize that what we've perceived as our pain is, at a deeper level, the pain inherent in human existence. — Sharon Salzberg

Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing - or more complicated - than it is today. — Sharon Salzberg

Meditation is, first of all, a tool for surveying our territory so we can know what is going on. With the energy of mindfulness, we can calm things down, understand them, and bring harmony back to the conflicting elements inside us. — Nhat Hanh

Meditation can be a refuge, but it is not a practice in which real life is ever excluded. The strength of mindfulness is that it enables us to hold difficult thoughts and feelings in a different way - with awareness, balance, and love — Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness is that space where you are in touch with life-experience and you are brightly aware. — Bryant McGill

Learning to treat ourselves lovingly may at first feel like a dangerous experiment. — Sharon Salzberg

Patience is both the tool for and the result of, our efforts. — Allan Lokos

The costs of keeping secrets include our growing isolation due to fear of detection and the ways we shut down inside to avoid feeling the effects of our behavior. We can never afford to be truly seen and known - even by ourselves. — Sharon Salzberg

Meditation is to be aware of what is going on: in your body, in your feelings, in your mind, and in the world. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Compassion is born out of lovingkindness.
It is born of knowing our oneness, not just thinking about it or wishing it were so. It is born out of the wisdom of seeing things exactly as they are. — Sharon Salzberg

With attachment all that seems to exist is just me & that object I desire. — Sharon Salzberg

Never feel ashamed of your longing for happiness. — Sharon Salzberg

There is no aloneness. There is only unawareness. — Lynne Cockrum-Murphy

There are an incalculable - even infinite - number of situations in which we can practice forgiveness.

Expecting it to be a singular action - motivated by the sheer imperative to move on and forget - can be more damaging than the original feelings of anger.

Accepting forgiveness as pluralistic and as an ongoing, individualized process opens us up to realize the role that our own needs play in conflict resolution. — Sharon Salzberg