“I think a lot of the work comes out of that—turning what starts as claustrophobia or containment into something that is releasing and infinite, the paradox that we live within a body that has a skin that is our bounding condition and yet have this faculty of imaginative extension into endless space.”

~ Antony Gormley

“The enemies of liberal democracy, they have a method: They hack our feelings. Not our emails, not our bank accounts—they hack our feelings of fear and hate and vanity, and then use these feelings to polarize and destroy democracy from within.” 

~ Yuval Noah Harari

“If we don't become aware of our own reactions so that we can short-circuit precisely the kind of addictive and reflexive response that we have to these things, and if we're unwilling to turn them off, we will participate in the continuing debasement of our democracy.”

~ Brooke Gladstone

"Stories about gradual improvements rarely make the front page even when they occur on a dramatic scale and affect millions of people. And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear about more disasters than ever before. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite." 

~ Hans Rosling

What does it mean to let our thoughts drift by like clouds?

Shifting our awareness from what our thoughts mean to how they fluctuate is an attentional exercise that develops liberating abilities over time. 

Observing the movement of clouds can provide a glimpse into how we can relate to mental activity more objectively, but it oversimplifies things when the analogy is taken too literally.

"There's a lot more going on in your brain and your body than you can ever be aware of. And yet, most people identify themselves with this little flash-lit area of consciousness."

~ Rae Armantrout 

"No matter how confident you are about your ability to read other people, your brain is always just guessing, and then it's checking those guesses against what's going on in the world and either correcting them or not."

~ Lisa Feldman Barrett

"You are the awareness of your thoughts. You are not your thoughts. You can let your thoughts happen. Just know that the real you is the awareness."

~ RuPaul

"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 began to realize that the only place where things were actually real was at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you." 

~ David Whyte

An attention exercise on the theme of rest barely disguised as a poem. 

"Half of what’s about to occur is unknown, both inside you and outside you."

~ David Whyte

"I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent." 

~ Lisel Mueller

"The paradox here is that mindfulness is just about being really interested in getting close and personal with what's actually happening in our bodies and minds from moment to moment."

~ Dr. Judson Brewer

"As conscious human beings, we know we die, and we therefore know our clock ends on, some level. So time just seems foundational. And I think a lot of the gymnastics that we do as human beings has to do with our relationship to the clock, or lack of a relationship to the clock. We squander time until it’s too late, et cetera. I love looking at the building blocks, the raw material, the irreducibles."

~ B.J. Miller

"If I could explain what the one biggest shift has been from when I was 17 and suicidal to today and 22 and a lot healthier place, it's just that before I used to try to run away from my pain and tell no one about it, and now I try and run right into it and tell the people closest to me about it."

~ Kevin Breel

"This is something you do find in Quaker meetings, actually, and in Buddhist meetings as well. The whole herd, and that may be 50 animals, will suddenly be still, completely still. And it's not just a stillness of voice, it's a stillness of body."

~ Katy Payne

What is amazing is that as history unfolded, fictional reality became more and more powerful so that today, the most powerful forces in the world are these fictional entities."

~ Yuval Noah Harari

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

What is it like up there
above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?

~ Lisel Mueller