Too much of the education system orients students toward becoming better thinkers, but there is almost no focus on our capacity to pay attention and cultivate awareness.
The only time that any of us have to grow or change or feel or learn anything is in the present moment. But we’re continually missing our present moments, almost willfully, by not paying attention.
The awareness is not part of the darkness or the pain; it holds the pain, and knows it, so it has to be more fundamental, and closer to what is healthy and strong and golden within you.
Mindfulness is a way of paying attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally, to what goes on in the present moment in your body, mind and the world around you.
Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.
One way to look at meditation is as a kind of intrapsychic technology that’s been developed over thousands of years by traditions that know a lot about the mind/body connection.
Mindfulness is about love and loving life. When you cultivate this love, it gives you clarity and compassion for life, and your actions happen in accordance with that.
Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more.
Healing is a coming to terms with things as they are, rather than struggling to force them to be as they once were, or as we would like them to be, to feel secure or to have what we sometimes think of as our own way.
