“There are a lot of different ways to talk about mindfulness, but what it really means is awareness.”

Living in a chronic state of unawareness can cause us to miss much of what is most beautiful and meaningful in our lives.

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.

Patience is a form of wisdom. It demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things must unfold in their own time.

When you pay attention to boredom it gets unbelievably interesting.

Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.

Mindfulness is not about getting anywhere else.

Mindful parenting is the hardest job on the planet, but it’s also one that has the potential for the deepest kinds of satisfactions over the life span, and the greatest feelings of interconnectedness and community and belonging.

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.

See for yourself whether letting go when a part of you really wants to hold on doesn’t bring a deeper satisfaction than clinging.

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.

My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it’ll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It’s like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.

For I now realize that what overcame me that evening was a sudden awareness of the power of intuition, the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer.

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

Example is the softest and least invidious way of commanding.

Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.

The most disgraceful cause of the scarcity [of remedies] is that even those who know them do not want to point them out, as if they were going to lose what they pass on to others.

I don’t know how long a child will remain utterly static in front of the television, but my guess is that it could be well into their thirties.

You think you might know something about yourself or why you act or react in certain ways and then you come to new information and suddenly you see your past and your present in a completely different light.