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Meditation is an interesting practice. It is so simple that anyone can learn how to do it. You sit still, relax, concentrate, gently struggle with the mind, and create moments of peace. That’s it. I have revealed my trade secret. Of course there is a little more to it, but not much. However, that doesn’t mean that meditation is easy. By comparison, swimming is also simple, yet, it takes years of practice to become good at swimming, especially if you want to swim at sea. Running is even simpler. Nonetheless, we all know that in order to become a good runner, practice is imperative. And for both you need coaches. The same is true about meditation. Simple is not the same as easy.
— Gudjon Bergmann
Although the repetition of a word or phrase is a preparatory practice and is itself not meditation, choosing a word or phrase that honors your belief system can be the linchpin you need for your mediation practice, providing both motivation and philosophical coherency.
— Gudjon Bergmann
Meditation is a state, often defined as deep dreamless sleep awake. But, in the same way that you cannot sleep on demand, you cannot meditate on demand—that is, you can’t reach the state instantly in the same way that you can raise your right hand. The practices preceding meditation are relaxation, stillness and mental focus. Those are all things you can do. They are the preparation. Then, if you the circumstances are right, you can transition from the waking to the meditative state.
— Gudjon Bergmann
If people think they can “do” meditation, then they become frustrated every time they don’t achieve the state. In the same way that making more of an effort to fall asleep—trying to force yourself to sleep—often backfires, the meditative state becomes more elusive the more you try. On the other hand, if people understand that meditation is a state, then their only job is to create the right circumstances. They focus on what they can do—relax, sit still, concentrate—and then sometimes the state comes, while sometimes it does not. Either one is fine.
— Gudjon Bergmann
Meditation should be on the same list as brushing your teeth, sleeping and eating. Meditation is an addition to your routine, not a final goal to accomplish. Once meditation is in your routine, then your mind will feel fuzzy if you don’t meditate, in the same way that your teeth feel fuzzy when you don’t brush.
— Gudjon Bergmann
In its purest form the term meditation means two things; (1) the state of meditation, which resembles deep dreamless sleep while awake, and, (2) the practices that lead to the state, usually a combination of relaxation and concentration techniques.
— Gudjon Bergmann
All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional.
— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Meditation is good for the elderly, great for adults, even greater for children, and greater still for pregnant women. So, meditate and be well.
— Abhijit Naskar
Meditation consists of generating three kinds of energy: mindfulness, concentration, and insight. These three energies give us power to nourish happiness and take care of our suffering. Suffering may be there. But with the energy of mindfulness, concentration, and insight, we can embrace and take care of that suffering and nourish happiness at the same time.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Love
Silence—true silence is universal. It is the profound stillness at the center of everything, at the center of every relationship—at the center of yourself. While it is always there, it can only be experienced beyond the veil of judgment, expectation, and attachment. From time to time, a person can spontaneously enter into a perfect moment of silence when dancing, watching a sunset, holding an infant, or making love; but for most,true silence remains elusive at best. Yet through various forms of meditation and prayer this veil can be lifted, allowing that inner silence to wash through you, leaving in its wake a cleansed mind and a compassionate heart.
— Darren Main, The River of Wisdom: Reflections on Yoga, Meditation, and Mindful Living
Mindfulness is the bedrock of all spiritual practice. With mindfulness, the simple becomes profound, and the common becomes extraordinary. Without mindfulness, even gold and silver will quickly lose their luster.
— Darren Main, The River of Wisdom: Reflections on Yoga, Meditation, and Mindful Living
All great myths and stories follow a similar pattern. The hero gets distracted and questions his power. He struggles and flounders until he is able to face his perceived weakness. Ironically, it is the struggle that makes himstronger and enables him to meet his destiny. Without the struggle, without missing the mark, without getting lost in the mire of the journey, growth would not be possible. We tend to think of life’s struggles as the cause of oursuffering, when in fact, struggle reveals our true power and unlocks our latent potential.
— Darren Main, The River of Wisdom: Reflections on Yoga, Meditation, and Mindful Living
Gratitude is both a vaccine and an antidote for grief. Grief may be an inevitable fact of life, but gratitude has the power to transform the experience of grief from agonizing suffering to profound joy.
— Darren Main, The River of Wisdom: Reflections on Yoga, Meditation, and Mindful Living
Meditation is the alchemist of the soul. It transforms disappointment into acceptance
—  betrayal into forgiveness
Sculpting the future and healing the past can only happen through mindful action in the present moment.
— Darren Main, The River of Wisdom: Reflections on Yoga, Meditation, and Mindful Living
So many people confuse attachment with love. Attachment to someone implies control; loving someone assumes unconditional acceptance. Attachment leads to grief and loneliness when the person is no longernear—or even sometimes when he or she is in the very same room. Love is the realization that there is no distance between you and the other—whether they are across the room, around the world, or beyond the veil of death.
— Darren Main, The River of Wisdom: Reflections on Yoga, Meditation, and Mindful Living
True power—not to be confused with worldly power—is found at that beautifuland sacred spot where will and surrender merge into an unstoppable force.
— Darren Main, The River of Wisdom: Reflections on Yoga, Meditation, and Mindful Living
Enlightenment is tuning our consciousness to music of the universe.
— Amit Ray, Enlightenment Step by Step
So, are there other paths, lifestyles or value systems to consider? Of course, there are plenty. I suggest one alternative here: a meditative life centred on God, which means to have Him in mind in our thoughts, words and deeds as much as we humanly can. And that is where ‘God-centred meditation’ comes in. Simply put, God plays the central role in my perspective on life and in my meditation philosophy and techniques. I believe that unless we connect to God through His Name and His life-giving, transformative Word found in the primary sources of the world’s great religions, we will not experience true, lasting joy and peace in life.
— Farnaz Masumian, The Divine Art Of Meditation: Meditation and visualization techniques for a healthy mind, body and soul
Today, many of us seem to live our lives like honeybees collecting honey which, at the end, we will leave to others for their enjoyment! Our values are often twisted. Our success is largely measured by the size of our bank account, how beautiful or handsome we are, or how luxurious are our homes, cars or boats. Reality TV shows continue to appeal to millions of us who choose to live vicariously through others, rather than taking charge of our own lives and focusing on manifesting the hidden resources that are invested in our souls.Women are often encouraged to seek superficial and temporary beauty, at the risk of endangering their health, even killing themselves, while men are encouraged to appreciate and chase a life of pleasure. In contrast, those whose lives are centered on spirituality are frequently ridiculed as old-fashioned or at least looked down upon. We seek surgical procedures to fight the natural aging process and enjoy ‘borrowed youth’ a bit longer, even though we know, deep in our hearts, that it is ultimately a losing battle.
— Farnaz Masumian, The Divine Art Of Meditation: Meditation and visualization techniques for a healthy mind, body and soul
Meditation is a secular practice, not a religious practice.
— Abhijit Naskar
Within your mind, there are hardly any lines at all. All its contents flow into each other, sensations becoming thoughts, feelings, desires, actions, and more sensations. This stream of consciousness correlates with a cascade of fleeting neural assemblies, each assembly dispersing into the next one[.]
— Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom
The apparent wall between your body and the world is more like a picket fence. And between your mind and the world, it's like a line painted on the sidewalk.
— Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom
Writing is mental exercise and the preeminent method to train the mind to achieve a desirable state of mental quietude. Meditative writing, a single pointed concentration of mental activity, induces an altered state of consciousness. Writing is studious rumination, a means to converse with our personal muse. Writing entails a period of forced solitude that enables us to meet and conduct a searching conversation with our authentic self. This contemplative dialogue with our true self is transformational. Writing is not a mere act but a journey of the mind into heretofore-unknown frontiers of the self.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Meditation is the vitamin for your mind.
— Abhijit Naskar, I Am The Thread: My Mission
Do not force your mind to get rid of random thoughts, because your brain is simply not capable of doing so. Instead, when you sit to practise meditation, let the thoughts come and go, just don’t serve them tea. Over time, that background noise inside your head would disappear.
— Abhijit Naskar, I Am The Thread: My Mission
Zazen is the dragons roar. This dragons roar is the wind passing and whistling through a hollow tree. This can be a metaphor for your Zazen practice and or even your life. If you can let go, greatly let go, this dragons roar can manifest through you. It is much bigger than the individual.
— Shoryu Bradley
The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements—an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken, might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though monotonous, might be of a cheerful cast.
— Henry James, The American
But these trees don’t grow impatiently. They move with a grace, with patience, with trust. There is no hurry anywhere else except in your mind. If you really want to be in a state of peace and joy, you will have to unlearn your old habit for achieving things quickly
— Osho, Watch and Wait: relaxing and waking up - instinct and intuition
Meditation is to understand that one breath, which connects all beings.
— Amit Ray, Beautify your Breath - Beautify your Life
Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait 'til the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.
— Isaac Newton
History, is a conscious, self-meditating process — Spirit emptied out into Time; but this externalization, this kenosis, is equally an externalization of itself; the negative is the negative of itself. This Becoming presents a slow-moving succession of Spirits, a gallery of images, each of which, endowed with all the riches of Spirit, moves thus slowly just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance. As its fulfilment consists in perfectly knowing what it is, in knowing its substance, this knowing is that withdrawal into itself in which it abandons its outer existence and gives its existential shape over to recollection. Thus absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the night of its self-consciousness; but in that night its vanished outer existence is perserved, and this transformed existence — the former one, but now reborn of the Spirit's knowledge — is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit. In the immediacy of this new existence the Spirit has to start afresh to bring itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded were lost and it had learned nothing from the experience of the earlier Spirits. But recollection, the inwardizing, of that experience, has perserved it and is the inner-being, and in fact the higher form of the substance. So although to bring itself to maturity, it is none the less on a higher level that it starts. The realm of Spirits which is formed in this way in the outer world constitutes a succession in Time in which one Spirit relieved another of its charge and each took over the empire of the world from its predecessor.
— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Back when he had first come to the monastery, they had given him a very simple ritual called Forgiving the Day. Even the youngest child could do this; all it required was looking back over the day and dismissing the day’s pains as a thing that were past while choosing to remember as gains lessons learned or moments of insight. As initiates grew in the ways of Sa, it was expected they would grow more sophisticated in this exercise, learning to balance the day, taking responsibility for their own actions and learning from them without indulging in either guilt or regrets."p. 240
— Robin Hobb, Ship of Magic
At the cost of efficiency always choose awareness, and you will create the situation in which meditation will become possible. You are not here just to become more and more efficient—you are here to become more and more alive; you are here to become more and more intelligent; you are here to become more and more happy, ecstatically happy. But that is totally different from the ways of the mind.
— Osho, Learning to Silence the Mind: Wellness Through Meditation
We are part of a holy community that for three thousand years and more has been formed inside and out by these words of God, words that have been heard, tasted, chewed, seen, walked. Reading Holy Scripture is totally physical. Our bodies are the means of providing our souls access to God in his revelation: eat this book. A friend reports to me that one of the early rabbis selected a different part of our bodies to make the same point; he insisted that the primary body part for taking in the Word of God is not the ears but the feet. You learn God, he said, not through your ears but through your feet: follow the Rabbi.
— Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
Language is not primarily informational but revelatory. The Holy Scriptures give witness to a living voice sounding variously as Father, Son and Spirit, addressing us personally and involving us personally as participants. This text is not words to be studies in the quiet preserves of a library, but a voice to be believed and loved and adored in workplace and playground, on the streets and in the kitchen. Receptivity is required.
— Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
But sooner or later we find that not everything is to our liking in this book. It starts out sweet to our taste; and then we find it doesn't sit well with us at all, it becomes bitter in our stomachs. Finding ourselves in this book is most pleasant, flattering even, and then we find that the book is not written to flatter us, but to involve us in a reality, God's reality, that doesn't cater to our fantasies of ourselves.
— Eugene H. Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
Meditation is simply awareness without any effort, an effortless alertness; it does not need any technique. But your mind is so full of thoughts, so full of dreams, so much of the past, so much of the future—it is not here and now, and awareness has to be here and now. The techniques are needed to help you to cut your roots from the past, to cut your dreams from the future, and to keep you in this moment as if only this moment exists. Then there is no need of any technique. After Shiva’s Vigyan Bhairava Tantra, in these five or ten thousand years, nobody has developed a single method. The cathartic methods are simply to throw all your impatience, your speediness, your hurry, your repressions.
— Osho, Learning to Silence the Mind: Wellness Through Meditation
Your mind is the most powerful thing in your control.
— Keith R. Holden M.D., Power of the Mind in Health and Healing
Remember, whenever you have two things, two alternatives, choose the new one, choose the harder, choose the one in which more awareness will be needed.
— Osho, Learning to Silence the Mind: Wellness Through Meditation
In our spreading materialist wasteland, more and more people thirst for contemplation, including political wheel-dealers, tycoons, and military top brass, stressed out by the rigors of their professions. Are we to suppose that everyone doing deep breathing on a meditation pillow is communing with the God of Christians? Not necessarily. What unites us to God is the practice of love. If prayer, or any other religious act, is not grounded in that, it is an offense to God.
— Dean Brackley, The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times: New Perspectives on the Transformative Wisdom of Ignatius of Loyola
Watch. Whenever mind says something, see that it is again putting you into a routine. Try to do something new and the mind will have less a grip on you.
— Osho, Learning to Silence the Mind: Wellness Through Meditation
While Lou loved the raucous music, loud voices, and chaotic movement of a dinner rush, the calm of prep-work soothed her soul and gave her time to think. Some people did downward dog, some burned incense in front of a Buddha statue, some prayed the rosary; Lou chopped the vegetables into tiny squares, filleted fish, and reduced veal stock. Her meditation smelled better, and even if she didn't find a solution, at least she got to eat.
— Amy E. Reichert, The Coincidence of Coconut Cake
Meditation is to leave the noise and to meet with the silence.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
You can't stop the waves but you can learn to surf.
— Swami Satchitananda
I think there is a difference between aloneness and loneliness. Aloneness is necessary for the soul to thrive - even to come alive. Not loneliness.
— Steve Goodier
The fact that you have unlimited texts does not necessarily mean that you cannot stop talking
— Dmitry Dyatlov, The fact that you have unlimited texts does not necessarily mean that you cannot stop talking
Meditative thoughts assist people escape a vapid fantasy life and reconnect with ultimate reality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Engaging in meditative self-reflection and gaining increased control of inner experiences provides a person with a sense of control over fear and trembling and the chaos of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Master the ability to quieten your mind, and your thoughts, and understand your emotions. Meditate, cultivate mindfulness and awareness, be in the now. This will heighten your vibration
— Ana Rangel & Gerry O'malley
Reflect, reflect.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
you talk so much, I don't know when to pay attention
— Dmitry Dyatlov
There’s no denying that it takes effort to set the intention to see our fundamental connected-ness with others.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
If we have nothing material to give, we can offer our attention, our energy, our appreciation. The world needs us. It doesn’t deplete us to give.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
We’re in charge of our own forgiveness, and the process takes time, patience, and intention.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Kindness is really at the core of what it means to be and feel alive.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Any time we find ourselves relying on the ideas of an absolute, frozen state of right and wrong—or fairness versus unfairness—that we are used to, we can compare the habit to distraction during meditation.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The mind is a useful tool but not a very good friend.
— Stephen Levine
Heaven is the natural spaciousness of our mind before we make it small with self-protection.
— Sakyong Mipham, Ruling Your World: Ancient Strategies For Modern Life
If we truly loved ourselves, we’d never harm another. That is a truly revolutionary, celebratory mode of self-care.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The more we practice mindfulness, the more alert we become to the cost of keeping secrets.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
We’re capable of much more than mediocrity, much more than merely getting by in this world.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
As human beings, we’re capable of greatness of spirit, an ability to go beyond the circumstances we find ourselves in, to experience a vast sense of connection to all of life.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Our minds tend to race ahead into the future or replay the past, but our bodies are always in the present moment.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The skills available to us through mindfulness make it possible to bring love to our connections with others.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Keeping secrets is a consequential act for all involved.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The environment we create can help heal us or fracture us. This is true not just for buildings and landscapes but also for interactions and relationships.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
So often, fear keeps us from being able to say yes to love—perhaps our greatest challenge as human beings.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Learning to treat ourselves lovingly may at first feel like a dangerous experiment.
— Sharon Salzberg
By accepting and learning to embrace the inevitable sorrows of life, we realize that we can experience a more enduring sense of happiness.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The journey to loving ourselves doesn’t mean we like everything.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle.
— Sharon Salzberg
When we approach the journey acknowledging what we do not know and what we can’t control, we maintain our energy for the quest.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
When we relate to ourselves with loving kindness, perfectionism naturally drops away.
— Sharon Salzberg
Wholehearted acceptance is a basic element of love, starting with love for ourselves, and a gateway to joy. Through the practices of loving kindness and self-compassion, we can learn to love our flawed and imperfect selves. And in those moments of vulnerability, we open our hearts to connect with each other, as well. We are not perfect, but we are enough.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Wherever the responsibility lies, shame creates a solid and terrible feeling of unworthiness that resides in our bodies: the storehouse of the memories of our acts, real or imagined, and the secrets we keep about them.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The heart contracts when our bodies are overcome by shame.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Shame weakens us. It can make us frightened to take on something new. We start to withdraw from whatever might give us pleasure, self-esteem, or a sense of our value.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
To imagine the way we think is the singular causative agent of all we go through is to practice cruelty toward ourselves.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
It’s affirming that we can look at any experience from the fullness of our being and get past the shame we carry.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Mindfulness allows us to shift the angle on our story and to remember that we have the capacity to learn and change in ways that are productive, not self-defeating.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
We can use meditation as a way to experiment with new ways of relating to ourselves, even our uncomfortable thoughts.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
if we really look at our actions with eyes of love, we see that our lives can be more straightforward, simpler, less sculpted by regret and fear, more in alignment with our deepest values.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing—or more complicated—than it is today.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Causing harm is never just a one-way street.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
If we harm someone else, we’re inevitably also hurting ourselves. Some quality of sensitivity and awareness has to shut down for us to be able to objectify someone else, to deny them as a living, feeling being—someone who wants to be happy, just as we do.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
When we do our best to treat others with kindness, it’s often a struggle to determine which actions best express our love and care for ourselves.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
When we feel conflicted about a particular decision or action, our bodies often hold the answer—if we take the time to stop and tune in.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
You can see your thoughts and emotions arise & create space for them even if they are uncomfortable.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
The breath is the first tool for opening the space between the story you tell yourself about love.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Just as you can never squeeze water out of the water, you can never squeeze the good out of goodness: You simply tap into the good by positioning yourself and allowing it.
— Dr. Jacinta Mpalyenkana, Ph.D, MBA
I see real love as the most fundamental of our innate capacities, never destroyed no matter what we might have gone through or might yet go through.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
I believe that there is only one kind of love—real love—trying to come alive in us despite our limiting assumptions, the distortions of our culture, and the habits of fear, self-condemnation, and isolation that we tend to acquire just by living a life.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Mindfulness practice helps create space between our actual experiences and the reflexive stories we tend to tell about them.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Loving kindness practice helps us move out of the terrain of our default narratives if they tend to be based on fear or disconnection. We become authors of brand-new stories about love.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Meditation is about mindfulness and learning to strip away the illusion, revealing your authentic self and connectedness to everything and everyone.
— Nanette Mathews
Our senses are often the gateway to our stories.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Sure, I've had times it was hard to meditate....But even then I still end up being more calmly agitated.
— Nanette Mathews
Looking for some peace? Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths....That inner connection and peace are always available to you, at any moment.
— Nanette Mathews
If we define ourselves by each of the ever-changing feelings that cascade through us, how will we ever feel at home in our own bodies and minds?
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Meditation can be a refuge, but it is not a practice in which real life is ever excluded. The strength of mindfulness is that it enables us to hold difficult thoughts and feelings in a different way—with awareness, balance, and love
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Keep Calm and Find Your Zen-ity
— Nanette Mathews
But the character of a man is not to be judged from the pictures which he may draw or from the antics which he may play in his solitary hours. Those who act generally with the most consummate wisdom in the affairs of the world, often meditate very silly doings before their wiser resolutions form themselves.
— Anthony Trollope, The Belton Estate
I hear the most music in the depths of silence.
— Meeta Ahluwalia
Will and Love practicedto invoke her Majesty KundaliniIn the world where Adepts die and bloom as LotusesThe perfection of Union is Silence
— Nataša Nuit Pantović, Art of 4 Elements
Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
If one is not a meditator, howsoever good one is it is all useless.
— Osho, Books I Have Loved
Another way to look at meditation is to view the process of thinking itself as a waterfall, a continual cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantagepoint in a cave or depression in a rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.
— Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
We resonate with one another’s sorrows because we are interconnected. Being whole and simultaneously part of a larger whole, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. If I become a center of love and kindness in this moment, then in a perhaps small but hardly insignificant way, the world now has a nucleus of love and kindness it lacked the moment before. This benefits me and it benefits others.
— Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
Nirvana is too simple an experience to be depicted by diagrams.
— Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Buddha: The First Sapiens
Holy intimacy is fostered with the marriage to two commitments: one to sitting in quiet solitude with the inner Self
—  the other to sitting in rapt attention with one's mortal Beloved
Have you ever wanted More? Not more stuff . . . or success . . . or fame . . . but more intimacy, more connection, more mystery, more awe
— Mariah McKenzie, More: Journey to Mystical Union Through the Sacred and the Profane
If you meditate in perfect peace and then flash someone an irritable look because they make noise or their child cries, you are entirely missing the point.
— Khandro Rinpoche
From my heel to my toe is a measured space of 29.7 centimetres or 11.7 inches. This is a unit of progress and it is also a unit of thought. 'I can only meditate when I am walking,' wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the fourth book of his 'Confessions', 'when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.' Søren Kierkegaard speculated that the mind might function optimally at the pedestrian pace of three miles per hour, and in a journal entry describes going out for a wander and finding himself 'so overwhelmed with ideas' that he 'could scarcely walk'. Christopher Morley wrote of Wordsworth as 'employ[ing] his legs as an instrument of philosophy' and Wordsworth of his own 'feeling intellect'. Nietzsche was typically absolute on the subject - 'Only those thoughts which come from 'walking' have a value' - and Wallace Stevens typically tentative: 'Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around the lake.' In all of these accounts, walking is not the action by which one arrives at knowledge; it is itself the means of knowing.
— Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
One time Marian showed me some sand. When she gave it to me, she said, "These are very interesting stones." It just looked like sand, but she asked me to took through a magnifying glass. Then those small stones were as interesting as the stones I have in my office. The stones in my office are bigger, but under the glass the sand was quite similar.If you say, "This is a rock from the moon", you will be very much interested in it. Actually I don't think there is a great difference between rocks we have on the earth and those on the moon. Even if you go to Mars, I think you will find the same rocks.I am quite sure about it.So if you want to find something interesting, instead of hopping around the universe like this, enjoy your life in every moment, observe what you have now, and truly live in your surroundings.
— Shunryu Suzuki, Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen
There is really no natural limit to the practice of loving kindness in meditation or in one’s life. It is an ongoing, ever-expanding realization of interconnectedness. It is also its embodiment. When you can love one tree or one flower or one dog or one place, or one person or yourself for one moment, you can find all people, all places, all suffering, all harmony in that one moment. Practicing in this way is not trying to change anything or get anywhere, although it might look like it on the surface. What it is really doing is uncovering what is always present. Love and kindness are here all the time, somewhere, in fact, everywhere. Usually our ability to touch them and be touched by them lies buried below our own fears and hurts, below our greed and our hatreds, below our desperate clinging to the illusion that we are truly separate and alone. (
— Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
Every part of the system of Reiki is ultimately about meditation and compassion as keys to healing.
— Kathleen Prasad, Everything Animal Reiki: A Simple Guide to Meditating with Animals for Healing
When we learn to relax and simply be present for the animal without judgment, we will find it much easier to connect with animals, and in turn, we will begin to see better responses from them.
— Kathleen Prasad, Reiki for Dogs: Using Spiritual Energy to Heal and Vitalize Man's Best Friend
By simply relaxing, being quiet, breathing and having a heartfelt intention to help another being, you create a sacred space. In this space, all things are possible.
— Kathleen Prasad, Reiki for Dogs: Using Spiritual Energy to Heal and Vitalize Man's Best Friend
The most important component of the system of Reiki at any level is one’s own daily personal practice, meditation and self-healing. This is the foundation from which all healing experiences with the animals willgrow.
— Kathleen Prasad, Everything Animal Reiki: A Simple Guide to Meditating with Animals for Healing
When we are in a true Reiki space, species differences melt away and profoundinterspecies connections are forged.
— Kathleen Prasad, Everything Animal Reiki: A Simple Guide to Meditating with Animals for Healing
At some point in life every person encounters haunting feelings of loneliness, because the feeling of being alone and withdrawing deeply into the inner self is part of the human condition. A person might choose to countenance or even cultivate their loneliness and turn the poignant hours of unerring solitude into poetry of their soul.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Don’t go outside your house to see the flowers.My friend, don’t bother with that excursion.Inside your body there are flowers.One flower has a thousand petals.That will do for a place to sit.Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beautyinside the body and out of it,before gardens and after gardens.
— Kabir
acing the difficulty, there are 2 types of people:1 - Damn it!2 - Challenge accepted!
— 1 Minuto na Palma da Mão
In each of the early surahs, God spoke intimately to the individual, often preferring to pose many of his teachings in the form of a question - 'Have you not heard?' 'Do you consider?' 'Have you not seen?'. Each listener was thus invited to interrogate him or herself. Any response to these queries was usually grammatically ambiguous or indefinite, leaving the audience with an image on which to meditate but with no decisive answer. This new religion was not about achieving metaphysical certainty; the Quran wanted people to develop a different kind of awarness.
— Karen Armstrong, Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time
Repose is not a discipline or practice. To experience Repose, you do not need to adhere to any specific philosophy or become proficient in any technique. There is no learning curve and no wrong way to be in Repose.
— Victor Shamas, Repose: The Potent Pause
There are 2 types of people on face the difficulty,:1 - Damn it!2 - Challenge accepted!
— 1 Minuto na Palma da Mão
Breath control is crucial to most of the contemplative traditions... Qur'anic reciters chant long phrases for meditation. It is natural for the audience to adjust their breathing too and find that this has a calming, therapeutic effect, which enables them to grasp the more elusive teachings of the text.
— Karen Armstrong, Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time
The self, when confined into the usual wakeful state of consciousness, is human, but when enters into the transcendental state of Absolute Oneness, becomes God.
— Abhijit Naskar, Neurons of Jesus: Mind of A Teacher, Spouse & Thinker
Non-doing simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way.
— Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
Christ was an ordinary man who upon the attainment of absolute divinity or Nirvana or Samadhi became a better version of himself. Such an experience of divine ecstasy neurologically transformed him into a great teacher for humanity filled with love, kindness and divinity.
— Abhijit Naskar, Neurons of Jesus: Mind of A Teacher, Spouse & Thinker
Water is sagacious because it carries inside of itself the bottomless profundity of oceans, the cosmic looks of the clouds, subtle wits of the rivers, the inquisitive character of the rains and the silent meditation of the little lakes!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Enlightenment comes when you understand the language of heart - the language of tree, birds and the nature.
— Amit Ray, Enlightenment Step by Step
Meditation is experiencing the self in million ways.
— Amit Ray, Peace Bliss Beauty and Truth: Living with Positivity
To meditate is to sail a course, to navigate, among problems many of which we are in the process of clearing up. After each one looms another, whose shores are even more attractive, more suggestive. Certainly, it requires strength and perseverance to get to windward of problems, but there is no greater delight than to reach new shores, and even to sail, as Camoëns says, “through seas that keel has never cut before.” If you will now open a bank-account of attention for me, I foretell sun-smitten landscapes and promise archipelagoes.
— José Ortega y Gasset, Man and People
Usually, when people hear the term Yoga, many of them associate it with various physical exercises where they need to twist, turn and stretch their body in complex ways that are known as Asanas, but this is only one type of Yoga, called “Hatha-Yoga”. In reality, Yoga is an umbrella term for various physical and mental exercises that lead to the overall well-being of a person.By origin, Yoga has mainly five forms:1.	Raja Yoga - The realization of divinity through intense meditation2.	Karma Yoga – The realization of divine bliss through your own daily activities and duties3.	Hatha Yoga – The realization of divine well-being through various physical exercises4.	Jyana Yoga – The realization of inexplicable bliss in the pursuit of knowledge5.	Bhakti Yoga – The realization of ecstasy through love and devotion for your Personal GodThe purpose of all Yogas is to set your consciousness lose into the vast domain of the unknown, where your brain circuits simulate various fascinating mental states that are usually unimaginable and unattainable in your everyday consciousness. But the whole yoga thing has nothing to do with God or something of that sort. It is all about various states of the human mind.
— Abhijit Naskar, Autobiography of God: Biopsy of A Cognitive Reality
There was something important being overlooked, they argued, in the mainstreaming of meditation - a central plank in the Buddhist platform: compassion.
— Dan Harris, 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works
By mental cultivation I mean a disciplined application of mind that involves deepening our familiarity with a chosen object or theme. Here I am thinking of the Sanskrit term bhavana, which connotes "cultivation," and whose Tibetan equivalent, gom, has the connotation of "familiarization." These two terms, often translated into English as meditation, refer to a whole range of mental practices and not just, as many suppose, to simple methods of relaxation. The original terms imply a process of cultivating familiarity with something, whether it is a habit, a way of seeing, or a way of being.
— Dalai Lama XIV, Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World
In silence, our senses come alive...We see the beauty around us more clearly, learn to listen to the language of silence, touch and smell the earth so pure and taste the sweetness of the air we breathe.
— Margo Vader
Meditation is a deep thought.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Meditation is act of thinking purely.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Meditation is cultivating the potential to transcend your limited self, limited beliefs and limited existence. It is stepping into the exciting territory of limitlessness.
— Banani Ray, Awakening Inner Guru
Thus, on a functional level, your meditation triggers the corresponding neurobiological networks that are responsible for eliciting health effects.
— Abhijit Naskar, The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance
Nearly all samurai practice Zen - it is the Way of Enlightenment." "Possibly the light of Zen is so strong that it has blinded me to its virtue." Yoshitoki smiled. "It is very good discipline for the mind, as the martial arts are for the body." Kenmotsu looked very smug as he said this. "I do Zazen twice a week." "I think it will do no-one any harm, though personally I find it more pleasant to think than to empty my mind of thought.
— Erik Christian Haugaard, The Samurai's Tale
Upon entering into the divine domain of transcendence, all these religious founders truly felt that they had accessed the true meaning of the universe, while in reality, what they had access to, in that state of mind, was their inner self.
— Abhijit Naskar, The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance
He is fifteen and ten and five. He is an instant. He is flying back to her. He is hers again. She feels the weight of him in her chest as he comes into her arms. He is her son, her beloved child, and she takes him back.
— Ann Patchett, Commonwealth
You are the biggest enemy of your own sleep.
— Pawan Mishra
The traditional techniques used in getting sleep aren’t much effective any longer and our sleep techniques need to evolve as rapidly as our life style has, in order to cope with it.
— Pawan Mishra
The Sleep Problem today is not as much about being able to sleep for 7 hours
—  it is more about being able to sleep when you are ready to.
The goal of meditation is awareness, not relaxation.
— Eknath Easwaran
Attention on the breathe, is the best tool, to take of your attention from negative thoughts or negative imagination of mind.
— Roshan Sharma
If the world leaders can afford a 7 hours sleep, most of us probably can too.
— Pawan Mishra
Let’s imagine a running washing machine. Let’s imagine the dirty clothes in the machine and how the liquid detergent is getting the dirt out of clothes and draining it to the waste outlet. Now imagine brain surrounded by a large pool of cleaning fluid called CSF (cerebrospinal fluid). Imagine CSF pulling the wastes from inside the brain and draining it into the blood, which routes it to the waste outlets. CSF clears waste many times faster in sleeping brain than in the waking brain.
— Pawan Mishra
Tonight is going to be a big night, like any other night, because certain 10 million Americans will not be able to sleep well tonight.
— Pawan Mishra
Our current bittersweet relationship with our sleep hasn’t had a long history.
— Pawan Mishra
Our faster than ever evolution has resulted in our undermining certain incredibly important aspects of humanity—like our sleep.
— Pawan Mishra
Lelia gave a dharma talk about letting go of self-definition: I can't do this because of what happened to me in my childhood; I can't do that because I am very shy; I could never go there because I'm afraid of clowns or mushrooms or polar bears. The group gave a gentle, collective laugh of self-recognition. Teresa found the talk helpful, as she had been having an extended interior dialogue during meditation about how septuagenarians from Torrance were fundamentally unsuited for Buddhism.
— Ann Patchett, Commonwealth
Breathing towards a more peaceful day" Pudge xo
— Kimberly A. Rainville, Pudge Learns to Meditate: A Guide for Getting Young Minds Mindful, Happy and at Peace
You are in love with your own reflection of the universe.
— Phoebe Garnsworthy, Lost Nowhere: A journey of self-discovery in a fantasy world
Meditation, godliness, enlightenment, nirvana, they all came into being through love, because through love a glimpse was achieved. And when the glimpse was there, daring souls went on an adventure to find the source from where this glimpse comes.
— Osho, Hsin Hsin Ming, the Book of Nothing: Discourses on the Faith Mind of Sosan
Between the desolate earth and the colorless sky appeared an Image of the ungrateful world in which, for the first time, he came to himself at last. On this earth, restored to the despair of innocence, a traveler lost in a primitive world, he regained contact, and with his list pressed to his chest, his face flattened against the glass, he calculated his hunger for himself and for the certainty of the splendors dormant within him. He wanted to crush himself into that mud, to reenter the earth by immersing himself in that clay, to stand on that limitless plain covered with dirt, stretching his arms to the sooty sponge of the sky, as though confronting the superb and despairing symbol of life itself, to affirm his solidarity with the world at its worst, to declare himself life's accomplice even in its thanklessness and its filth. Then the great impulse that had sustained him collapsed for the first time since he left Prague. Mersault pressed his tears and his lips against the cold pane. Again the glass blurred, the landscape disappeared.
— Albert Camus, A Happy Death
Meditation is the brain's way to exercise.
— Abhijit Naskar
In the non-dual state, God, soul and universe are essentially one absolute system which is all-pervading, uncreated, self-luminous and eternal.
— Abhijit Naskar
The sensation that you experience in the body, is your spirit, but it’s so attached, that it’s hard to imagine, that the sensation can ever be separated from the physical body. In long hours of meditation, you can separate your sensation from the physical body.
— Roshan Sharma
Meditation is the conscious effort towards altering our subconscious mind.
— Xaric
Meditation is the conscious effort towards altering our subconscious mind
— Xaric
Awakening into the God state makes all the perceptual limitations of the mind disappear, just like a bucket of muddy water turns crystal-clear once poured into the ocean.
— Abhijit Naskar
She didn't hear him in any nutty way, they didn't sit around and talk politics, it was more a pleasant feeling, easy enough to achieve at Zen-Dojo Tozan but she could even do it here, in the waiting area of the Lucerne airport. She believed that most of the human population didn't avail themselves to their full psychic potential. They lived in a state of mental clutter, the bombardment of goods and services, information and striving. They wouldn't be able to recognize true happiness if it were standing on their foot.
— Anne Patchett