Spacious Mind Quotes & Sayings

It is possible to cultivate a mind so spacious that it can be passionate and awake and responsive and involved and care about things, and noty struggle [p. 23] — Sylvia Boorstein

I felt my way up the cliffs to the south until I found a patch of machair a few yards long and a few wide, where I pitched my tent and settled to sleep. The stars stood sharp above. It felt odd to be on rock again, not sea, to think of the ground on which I lay extending down to the floor of the Minch. Lying there, I could still feel the day at sea, blood and water slopping about in my bag of skin, the tidal churn of my liquid body, a roll and sway in the skull. My mind beat back north against the current, thinking of the puffins' flight, the lines we leave behind us, the spacious weave, our wake, then sleep. — Robert Macfarlane

Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature. — Sogyal Rinpoche

The substance of mind is the substance of heaven. A joyful thought is an auspicious star or a felicitous cloud. An angry thought is a thunderstorm or a violent rain. A kind thought is a gentle breeze or a sweet dew. A stern thought is a fierce sun or an autumn frost. Which of these can be eliminated? Just let them pass away as they arise, open and unresisting, and your mind merges with the spacious sky. — Zicheng Hong

The wonderful paradox about the truth of suffering is that the more we open to it and understand it, the lighter and freer our mind becomes. Our mind becomes more spacious, more open, and happier as we move past our avoidance and denial to see what is true. We become less driven by compulsive desires and addictions, because we see clearly the nature of things as they are. — Joseph Goldstein

Yes, I'd love to have a garden of my own
spacious, and full of everything that is fragrant and flowering. But if I don't succeed, never mind
I've still got the dream. — Ruskin Bond

Dedicating some time to meditation is a meaningful expression of caring for yourself that can help you move through the mire of feeling unworthy of recovery. As your mind grows quieter and more spacious, you can begin to see self-defeating thought patterns for what they are, and open up to other, more positive options. — Sharon Salzberg

This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer. — Jeanette Winterson

When you completely accept this moment, when you no longer argue with what is, the compulsion to think lessens and is replaced by an alert stillness. You are fully conscious, yet the mind is not labeling this moment in any way ... It is a shift from identification with form
the thought or the emotion
to being and recognizing yourself as that which has no form
spacious awareness. — Eckhart Tolle

Meditation is the tool you use to "upgrade your operating system," to move from that "either/or" thinking of the binary mind into the more spacious heart awareness that sustains the wisdom way of knowing. — Cynthia Bourgeault

This state of mind brings a contentment he never finds with any passive form of entertainment. Books, cinema, even music can't bring him to this. Working with others is one part of it, but it's not all. This benevolent dissociation seems to require difficulty, prolonged demands on concentration and skills, pressure, problems to be solved, even danger. He feels calm, and spacious, fully qualified to exist. It's a feeling of clarified emptiness, of deep, muted joy. — Ian McEwan

People always break the law, but for the most part the rule of law triumphed and illegal immigrants were found and deported. The case was not made for them to stay. — Rush Limbaugh

We climbed up the stairs to the jet. As I entered, the first thing that came to my mind was, 'Holy shit, I'm on an episode of Criminal Minds.' The jet was super posh. Cream-colored leather seats in groups of four, with real wood tables in between, filled the spacious interior. The plush carpeting underfoot make our steps soundless, muffling the noises of our boarding. I was willing to bet that those chairs could recline all the way. This is about as far from coach class as I was ever going to get. — Elle Casey

After a quarter of a century of personal experience and professional observation, I have come to understand that peace of mind is the true goal of the considered life. I know now that the sum of all other possessions does not necessarily add up to peace of mind; on the other hand, I have seen this inner tranquility flourish without the material supports of property or even the buttress of physical health. Peace of mind can transform a cottage into a spacious manor hall; the want of it can make a regal residence an imprisoning shell. — Joshua L. Liebman

Thomas Jefferson creates the Marines for the Islamic pirates that were happening. — Glenn Beck

Meditation is not a matter of trying to stop thinking or make your mind go blank but rather to realize when your attention is wandering and to simply let go of the thoughts and begin again. It is a way of changing our relationship to our thoughts, so we're not so consumed by them, with no sense of space. Having a newly spacious relationship to our thoughts brings both peace and freedom. — Sharon Salzberg

For the fact is that organisms are creative and make their environments in such a way as to become virtually part of it themselves. But at the same time environments (nature and other people) are active in the making of organisms. In many respects each one of these elements, organism and environment, form part of one another. — Peter Dickens

I think she looked at Vivien the same way. Of course you can. You know. And, and yet with great respect, because she knew how hard it must have been. And that it was even harder for him, of course, than for her. — Mary Stuart Masterson

If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict. If stillness is there, it can contain anything. — Eckhart Tolle

In working with those who are dying, I offer another human being a spacious environment with my mind in which they can die as they need to die. I have no right to define how another person should die. I'm just there to help them transition, however they need to do it. — Ram Dass

You wouldn't be twisting yourself into knots like this, Harry, if you didn't care."
"So?"
"Monsters don't care," Michael said. "The damned don't care, Harry. The only way to go beyond redemption is to choose to take yourself there. The only way to do it is to stop caring. — Jim Butcher

Fundamentally there is just open space, the basic ground, what we really are. Our most fundamental state of mind, before the creation of ego, is such that there is basic openness, basic freedom, a spacious quality; and we have now and have always had this openness. Take, for example, our everyday lives and thought patterns. When we see an object, in the first instant there is a sudden perception which has no logic or conceptualization to it at all; we just perceive the thing in the open ground. Then immediately we panic and begin to rush about trying to add something to it, either trying to find a name for it or trying to find pigeonholes in which we could locate and categorize it. Gradually things develop from there. This development does not take the shape of a solid entity. Rather, this development is illusory, the mistaken belief in a "self" or "ego." Confused mind is inclined to view itself as a solid, ongoing thing, but it is only a collection of tendencies, events. — Chogyam Trungpa

Don't let us take doubts with exaggerated seriousness nor let them grow out of proportion, or become black-and-white or fanatical about them. What we need to learn is how slowly to change our culturally conditioned and passionate involvement with doubt into a free, humorous, and compassionate one. This means giving doubts time, and giving ourselves time to find answers to our questions that are not merely intellectual or "philosophical," but living and real and genuine and workable. Doubts cannot resolve themselves immediately; but if we are patient a space can be created within us, in which doubts can be carefully and objectively examined, unraveled, dissolved, and healed. What we lack, especially in this culture, is the right undistracted and richly spacious environment of the mind, which can only be created through sustained meditation practice, and in which insights can be given the change slowly to mature and ripen. 129-130 — Sogyal Rinpoche

Few minds are spacious; few even have an empty place in them or can offer some vacant point. Almost all have narrow capacities and are filled by some knowledge that blocks them up. What a torture to talk to filled heads, that allow nothing from the outside to enter them! A good mind, in order to enjoy itself and allow itself to enjoy others, always keeps itself larger than its own thoughts. And in order to do this, these thoughts must be given a pliant form, must be easily folded and unfolded, so that they are capable, finally, of maintaining a natural flexibility.
All those short-sighted minds see clearly within their little ideas and see nothing in those of others; they are like those bad eyes that see from close range what is obscure and cannot perceive what is clear from afar. Night minds, minds of darkness. — Joseph Joubert