Quotes about Mindfulness

The truth that many people never understand is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more your suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things start to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.

Monastic prayer begins not so much with "considerations" as with a "return to the heart," finding one's deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being

It can be said, without fear of error, that our meditation is as good as our faith.

We should not, however, judge the value of our meditation by "how we feel." A hard and apparently fruitless meditation may in fact be much more valuable than one that is easy, happy, enlightened and apparently a big success.

Some of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more fully until we have the courage to do and see and taste and experience much less than usual... And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform.

There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.

How I pray is breathe.

The function of a university is to teach a [person] how to drink tea, not because anything is important, but because it is usual to drink tea, or for that matter anything else under the sun. And whatever you do, every act, however small, can teach you everything, provided you see who is acting." ? Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton On Prayer

There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality

There is only now.

Over and over again I have to make small decisions here and there, in regard to one or other. Distractions and obsessions are resolved in this way. What the resolution amounts to, in the end: letting go of the imaginary and the absent and returning to the present, the real, what is in front of my nose.

If you don't want the effect, do something to remove the causes. There is no use loving the cause and fearing the effect and being surprised when the effect inevitably follows the cause.