Listening to your own heart is really very interesting. This untrained heart races around following its own habits. It jumps about excitedly, randomly, because it has never been trained. Train your heart!…Meditation is about the heart; it’s about developing the heart or mind, about developing your own heart. This is very, very important.
Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart
Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to being present. There is no “performance”. There is just this moment. We are not trying to improve or get anywhere else. We are not even running after special insights or visions. Nor are we forcing ourselves to be non-judgmental, calm, or relaxed. And we are certainly not promoting self-consciousness or indulging in self-preoccupation. Rather, we are simply inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness and equanimity right here and right now.
Jon Kabat Zinn
It is useless to force the rhythms of life. If I live with the anxiety to go fast, I will not live well. My addiction to speed will make me sick. The art of living is about learning how to give time to each and every thing. If I have sacrificed my life to speed, then that is impossible. Ultimately, slow means to take the time to reflect. It means to take the time to think. With calm, you arrive everywhere.
Carlo Petrini, Founder, The Slow Food movement
Where shall beginners begin? The obvious starting point is surprise. You will find that you can grow the seeds of gratefulness just by making room. Let’s follow Alice Walker’s advice: “Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.” To expect nothing may mean not taking for granted that your car will start when you turn the key. Try this and you will be surprised by a marvel of technology worthy of sincere gratitude. Or you may not be thrilled by your job, but if for a moment you can stop taking it for granted, you will taste the surprise of having a job at all, while millions are unemployed. If this makes you feel a flicker of gratefulness, you’ll be a little more joyful all day, a little more alive. From there it is only a small step to seeing the whole universe and every smallest part of it as surprising. From the humble starting point of daily surprises, the practice of gratefulness leads to these transcendent heights.
David Steindl-Rast
There is only this moment in which you are either awake or not awake, causing suffering or not for yourself or others; therefore, the most skillful means for finding ultimate freedom is not to focus on some future aim but rather to liberate this moment. And by constantly repeating this process, you will gradually come to reside in freedom without it being anything special. There is only this time, and your only choice is to work with life just as it is at present.
Phillip Moffitt, Loving Life’s Questions
We have lived,
not in proportion to the number of years that we have spent on the earth,
but in proportion as we have enjoyed
Henry David Thoreau, Journals
