Bringing our awareness to the present moment seems deceptively simple. Yet, mindfulness empowers us to make our lives better in many ways.
For example, through mindfulness, we can decrease stress, improve cognitive flexibility, improve our relationships, discover our authentic selves, learn to feel lighter and happier, and empower new choices.
This is why I love to share mindfulness as an important component of health and wellbeing!
Today I am sharing some of my favorite quotes about mindfulness. Enjoy!
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is paying attention on purpose and in a particular way in the present moment and without judgment.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience.
Sylvia Boorstein
In mindfulness one is not only restful and happy, but alert and awake. Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Paying attention here and now with kindness and curiosity so we can actively choose our behavior and who we want to be in that world
Amy Salzman
Give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is and allow yourself to be exactly as you are.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Mindful presence in the moment helps us to see the world with awe and wonder
People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.
Thich Nhat Hanh
The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.
Tara Brach
Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts.
Pema Chodron
Look past your thoughts so you may drink the pure nectar of this moment.
Rumi
Release yourself from the past and/or the future
Life only unfolds in moments. The healing power of mindfulness lies in living each of those moments as fully as we can, accepting it as it is as we open to what comes next—in the next moment of now.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Be happy in this moment, that’s enough. Each moment is all we need, not more.
Mother Teresa
Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life. Don’t be attached to the future. Don’t worry about things you have to do. Don’t think about getting up or taking off to do anything. Don’t think about “departing”.
Thich Nhat Hanh
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence.
Eckhart Tolle
Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life.
Thich Nhat Hanh
The future is always beginning now.
Mark Strand
We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.
Jack Kornfield
Forever is composed of nows.
Emily Dickinson
Recognize who you authentically are
Our true nature is like a precious jewel: although it may be temporarily buried in mud, it remains completely brilliant and unaffected. We simply have to uncover it.
Pema Chodron
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. All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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 of what was done to us or what was not done for us in the past, nor do we have to be helpless in the face of what we may be suffering now. We are also what was present before the scarring—our original wholeness, what was born whole. And we can reconnect with that intrinsic wholeness at any time, because its very nature is that it is always present. It is who we truly are.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
You are awareness disguised as a person.
Eckhart Tolle
There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind – you are the one who hears it.
Michael A. Singer
For all of us, love can be the natural state of our own being; naturally at peace, naturally connected, because this becomes the reflection of who we simply are.
Sharon Salzberg
You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.
Pema Chodron
Make peace with yourself and your inner critic
It’s actually a shocking realization when you first notice that your mind is constantly talking. You might even try to yell at it in a feeble attempt to shut it up. But then you realize that’s the voice yelling at the voice.
Michael A. Singer
You don’t fight the mind. In fact, you don’t even try to change it. You just make a game out of relaxing in the face of its melodrama.
Michael A. Singer
Once we are honest about our feelings, we can invite ourselves to consider alternative modes of viewing our pain and can see that releasing our grip on anger and resentment can actually be an act of self-compassion.
Sharon Salzberg
You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
Sharon Salzberg
As we practice meditation, we get used to stillness and eventually are able to make friends with the quietness of our sensations.
Sharon Salzberg
When you recognize and reflect on even one good thing about yourself, you are building a bridge to a place of kindness and caring.
Sharon Salzberg
Discover your power to choose your life path
Only you can take inner freedom away from yourself or give it to yourself. Nobody else can.
Michael A. Singer
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Karl Jung
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response likes our growth and our freedom.
Viktor E. Frankl
Mindfulness gives you time. Time gives you choice. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom.
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
Improve relationships
Look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them…. Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
Pema Chodron
The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Improve your quality of life!
You can’t stop the waves but you can learn to surf.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
As long as we’re caught up in always looking for certainty and happiness, rather than honoring the taste and smell and quality of exactly what is happening, as long as we’re always running from discomfort, we’re going to be caught in a cycle of unhappiness and discomfort, and we will feel weaker and weaker. This way of seeing helps us develop inner strength. And what’s especially encouraging is the view that inner strength is available to us at just the moment when we think that we’ve hit the bottom, when things are at their worst.
Pema Chodron
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes … including you.
Anne Lamott
Training your mind to be in the present moment is the #1 key to making healthier choices.
Susan Albers
The difference between misery and happiness depends on what we do with our attention.
Sharon Salzberg
We find greater lightness and ease in our lives as we increasingly care for ourselves & other beings.
Sharon Salzberg
