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.

"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

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

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

~ David Whyte

"Wearing a futuristic headset embeded with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, Lisa Park moniters her own brain activity during meditation and transposes this energy onto dishes of water to reveal zen-like vibrations."  

Picturing stories is making reductions. Through reductions, we create meaning. 

These reductions are the world as we see it – they are what we see when we read, and they are what we see when we read the world. 

~ Peter Mendelsund

"Mindfulness is more like the large hadron collider in that it’s a real tool for making some fundamental discoveries about the nature of the mind." 

~ Sam Harris

"I think that the reason they want to have music in a funeral home is that the silence lets our mind just be free to run around with whatever thoughts that we have. And if somebody's in a funeral home, they're very likely to be having sad thoughts."

~ David Young