“Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.”

Paying attention and awareness are universal capacities of human beings.

Meditation is really a non-doing. It is the only human endeavor I know of being where you already are.

When you’re walking, just walk. When you’re eating, just eat. Not in front of the TV, not with the newspaper. It turns out, that’s huge.

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.

Dying without actually fully living, without waking up to our lives while we have the chance, is an ongoing and significant risk.

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.

You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.

He who dies before he dies does not die when he dies.

We take care of the future best by taking care of the present now.

Note that this journey is uniquely yours, no one else’s. So the path has to be your own. You cannot imitate somebody else’s journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?

Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

No one can listen to your body for you. To grow and heal, you have to take responsibility for listening to it yourself.

Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.

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.

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.

When someone leaves, it’s because someone else is about to arrive.

I truly believe that one day we will get there, we will arrive. And if we do it right in America, maybe, just maybe, we can serve as a model for the rest of the world.

The way must be in you; the destination also must be in you and not somewhere else in space or time. If that kind of self-transformation is being realized in you, you will arrive.

Poetry arrived in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don’t know how or when.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

To arrive at the simplest truth requires years of contemplation.

The soul takes flight to the world that is invisible but there arriving she is sure of bliss and forever dwells in paradise.

Without your past, you could never have arrived.