Life is a beautiful thing.
Just take it all in and breathe,
breathe, breathe.

~ Creola Johnson

"The success of Homo sapiens as a species is built on our inability to tell the difference between a fiction and a reality."

~ Yuval Noah Harari

"Do I think one minute is going to be the thing that changes your life? It could be really powerful, but...what I love about one minute is it's a very low-cost option. Very few barriers to entry.

Because if you start saying, Oh, I don't have a minute to meditate, we really got to start evaluating some things going on in your life, because you definitely need more than meditation if you make that argument. 

It's hard to argue yourself out of it."

~ Cory Muscara 

Broken streaks are demoralizing. This is why shooting for unbroken streaks leads so easily to feeling disappointed in ourselves and giving up on the whole project. 

What can you do when you break your attentional fitness training streak? 

Comparing mindfulness practice to what we already understand about physical fitness can help you adjust your expectations and increase the chances that you will stick with the exploration long enough to experience its numerous beneficial effects.

"Why meditate? As you suffer less, are more fulfilled, as you understand who you are, and as you have a handle on changing how you carry yourself, all of that sums up ultimately in how you contribute to making this world a better place." 

~ Shinzen Young

"I have a very hard time with things, you know, just being quiet. Like, if I sit alone, you know, for ten minutes with nothing happening, you know, which I guess some people would call meditating, I just lose my mind. I'm, like — how does anyone deal with this horrible silence and awareness that everything's almost over?"

~ Marc Maron

i’ll run the risk
of being intimate with brokenness.

~ Sleeping At Last

"The implication here is that every moment of your life becomes an opportunity for changing your worldview and facilitating a sustainably healthy mind."

~ David R. Vago, Ph.D.

Mindfulness practice doesn’t eliminate my personal narrative. It gradually changes my relationship to it.

Mindfulness meditation is extraordinarily simple to describe, but it isn't easy to perform. True mastery might require special talent and a lifetime devotion to the task, and yet a genuine transformation in one's perception of the world is within reach for most of us. Practice is the only thing that will lead to success.

~ Sam Harris

On a mindfulness retreat, Anderson Cooper puts down the microphone and learns to love silence, as well as life without a cell phone.

"Nightline anchor Dan Harris embarks on an unexpected, hilarious, and deeply skeptical odyssey through the strange worlds of spirituality and self-help, and discovers a way to get happier that is truly achievable."

"Meditating on the body means meditating on body sensation, not mental images of the body."

~ Michael Taft

When it comes to developing any new skill, it is more important to be clever than to be disciplined.

People tell me they find it satisfying to pay closer attention to the sensory details of ordinary experience, but that they get frustrated with themselves when they forget to practice.

What makes it so difficult to establish a habit even when we’re convinced of its benefits?

"Most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind. But actually it's. . . about stepping back, seeing the thought clearly, witnessing it coming and going. . . And it's only in learning to watch the mind in this way that we can start to let go of those storylines and patterns of mind."

~ Andy Puddicombe 

Stories and our individual lives share the same elements: protagonists, antagonists, conflict, plot, action, climax, and resolution.  What are the atomic components that make these narrative elements possible? 

"Getting lost will help you find yourself."