The mind that has not been developed or trained is very scattered. That's the normal state of affairs, but it leaves us out of touch with a great deal in life, including our bodies.

The challenge for mindfulness is to be present for your experience as it is rather than immediately jumping in to change it or try to force it to be different.

In giving birth to our babies, we may find that we give birth to new possibilities within ourselves.

Mindfulness is to pay attention in a particular way: on purpose, at the present time and without judging.

Sometimes shutting off the sound on the television can allow you to actually watch the game and take it in in an entirely different and more direct way -- a first-order, first-person experience -- rather than filtered through the mind of another.

One small shift in the way we each conduct ourselves, and the crystal lattice structure of the world is already different. In this way, we are the world, and when we take responsibility for our small but not insignificant part of it, the whole is already different—the flowering we manifest emotionally and in every other way of some importance, potentially enormous.

It is healing simply to be heard, to be met, to be seen, to be known.

When we commit ourselves to paying attention in an open way, without falling prey to our own likes and dislikes, opinions and prejudices, projections and expectations, new possibilities open up and we have a chance to free ourselves from the straitjacket of unconsciousness.

The present is the only time that we have to know anything.

It's very important as a beginner that you understand right from the start that meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way.

Rather, it is bearing in mind what is most important to you so that it is not lost or betrayed in the heat and reactivity of a particular moment.

Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience.

There is a price we pay for being attached to a narrow view of being "right.

Awareness is not the same as thinking. It is a complementary form of intelligence, a way of knowing that is at least as wonderful and as powerful, if not more so, than thinking.

Guess what? When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are. Whatever you wind up doing, that’s what you’ve wound up doing. Whatever you are thinking right now, that’s what’s on your mind. Whatever has happened to you, it has already happened. The important question is, how are you going to handle it? In other words, "Now what?

Give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are.

Discipline provides a constancy which is independent of what kind of day you had yesterday and what kind of day you anticipate today.

We are continuously bombarded with information, appeals, deadlines, communications... We are continually being squeezed or projected into the future as our present moments are assaulted and consumed in the fires of endless urgency.

Simply put, mindfulness is moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness.

The only way we have of influencing the future is to own the present, however we find it.