“An open question people are asking about meditation apps is: If you’re outsourcing attention to the technology itself, is it really attention that you’re developing as a skill for yourself?”

~ Rebecca Jablonsky

“When people go to the gym, for example, they know pretty much what’s going to happen, and how it’s going to happen. Lifting weights causes muscles to stretch and even tear a little, causing lactic acid to build up, causing the muscles to rebuild themselves bigger and with more capacity than they had before. It’s a physical process, and while trainers will debate the best methods until the end of time, the basic operation is clearly understood.

Meditation is similar. If you do the work, predictable changes in the mind and the brain tend to result, in a fairly reliable way. This, in a sense, is the very opposite of spirituality—and it’s certainly not religion either. It’s more like working out: Each time I come back to the breath, I’m strengthening very specific neural networks.”

~ Jay Michaelson

“Meditation, so I've heard, is best accomplished
if you entertain a certain strict posture.
Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.
So why should I think I could ever be successful?”

~ Mary Oliver

“There usually isn’t a quick fix to what makes our lives so challenging, and that’s okay. A meditation practice, even as brief as a couple of minutes a day, can teach us how to accept the discomfort instead of trying to calm it down.”

~ Jinger Moore

“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

"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

"Meditation practice supports mindfulness, but meditation is not mindfulness; meditation merely helps train the mind to be in a mindful state."

~ Manuel A. Manotas

"I think mindfulness meditation is very well suited to becoming more aware of our how minds work and doing something about it."

~ Robert Wright

"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 

"I mean, it works. All you have to do is do it. You don’t even have to do it well – or right."

~ Mary Karr

"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

"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

"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.

"It just makes me wonder what was happening in our minds, or inwardly then, or even in terms of our relationship to the world we were standing in that is completely gone now."

~ Krista Tippett

"What I propose is that we take the concept of physical fitness and just move it over wholesale into the realm of the benefits of meditation....It seems to me that now, with the way we understand the benefits of meditation, we're pretty much where we were in the 1960's with physical fitness."

~ Kenneth Folk

How exactly does meditation affect your body?