Our ability to touch love and kindness and be touched by them lies buried below our own fears and hurts, below our greed and our hatreds, below our desperate clinging to the illusion that we are separ...
No matter how many scars we carry from what we have gone through and suffered in the past, our intrinsic wholeness is still here: what else contains the scars? None of us has to be a helpless victim o...
Meditation is not so concerned with how much thinking is going on as it is with how much room you are making for it to take place within the field of your awareness from one moment to the next.
Maybe we have an exaggerated belief that we have to stay in bed just to get through the day or that we can’t go out of the house and do things. Views like these lead readily to what is sometimes refer...
It's not that God, the environment, and other people cannot help us to be happy or find satisfaction. It's just that our happiness, satisfaction, and our understanding, even of God, will be no deeper...
It would not be hard to imagine that a happy hermit, living in isolation, might feel connected to everything in nature and all people on the planet and not be at all affected by a dearth of human neig...
It does provide a greater basket for tenderly holding and intimately knowing our suffering in any and all circumstances, and that, it turns out, is transformative, and can make all the difference betw...
In all the meditative traditions of the world, visualizations and imagery are used to invoke particular qualities of mind and heart.
If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants. SIR ISAAC NEWTON
But you cannot have harmony without a commitment to ethical behavior. It’s the fence that keeps out the goats that will eat all the young shoots in your garden.
Awareness requires only that we pay attention and see things as they are. It doesn't require that we change anything.
Immersed in a seemingly never-ending stream of thoughts, coming willy-nilly one after another in rapid succession.
Discernment
Are using the word practice here in a special way. It does not mean a rehearsal or a perfecting of some skill so that we can put it to use at some other time. In the meditative context, practice means...
[W]hat seems to be happening at the moment is never the full story is really going on. [...] [F]or the honey bee, it is the honey that is important. But the bee is at the same time nature's vehicle fo...
You might become aware of how addicted we can be to our devices, and to that 24/7 connectivity that has us always available and immediately responsive to everybody else, clutching our phones as if the...
We all have limitations. They are worth befriending. They teach us a lot. They can show us what we most need to pay attention to and honor. They become our cutting edge for learning and growing and ge...
There is a price we pay for being attached to a narrow view of being right.
The whole point of this book, and of MBSR, is that there is a lot that you can do to gently, lovingly, and firmly—through non-striving and non-doing, coupled with doing when taking action with awarene...
The practice of mindfulness involves finding, recognizing, and making use of that in us which is already okay, already beautiful, already whole by virtue of our being human—and drawing upon it to live...