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

~ Creola Johnson

“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

"Every living thing
has preferences."

~ Jim Dollar

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? 

"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

"Poetry is a lot more important than poets."

~ Ted Kooser

When I talk to people about finding stories in their life, I'm talking about finding things that are almost in their everyday that they can bring great meaning to and connect to audiences or to people around the lunch table.

~ Matthew Dicks

"When blind people learn to see, sighted people seem inspired to want to learn to see their way better, more clearly, with less fear, because this exemplifies the immense capacity within us all to navigate any type of challenge, through any form of darkness, to discoveries unimagined when we are activated."

~ Daniel Kish

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

The dilemmas related to attentional fitness are similar to the more familiar dilemmas that make physical fitness easier to discuss than to turn into habits. A mindfulness teacher has to sell you on the possible outcomes, but also has to steer you back again and again to the slippery path that leads to them.

"The significance of the labyrinth is that it forces you — in order to get to the center — to go around the entire space. And familiarity with the entire path is very important when we’re walking a path."

~ Soryu Scott

Caretake this moment.
Immerse yourself in its particulars.
Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed.

~ Epictetus

"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

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.

Musician Emily Caudill believes that life is a song, and the music is composed by our stories. Her life-saving chemotherapy treatment causes her to lose her hearing. Her response to this obstacle is an inspiration to anyone engaged in daily practice regardless of the day-to-day results.