"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? 

"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

"Sadness is poetic. You're lucky to live sad moments...Because we don't want that first bit of sad, we push it away...You never feel completely sad or completely happy. You just feel kind of satisfied with your product, and then you die." 

~ Louis C.K. 

"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

"Getting people to pause and wait and not act on their immediate desire is actually one way in which we can get them to be more patient in the long run."

Ayelet Fishbach

"I do know enough as a psychologist about learning and memory. And I know that we learn. How much of this I need to do in order to change, I cannot say. But I can say that there is a point at which this brain is not just elastic in moving to what is being suggested, but that it may be plastic in that it can be reset into a new mold."

~ Mahzarin Banaji

"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 inner voice always used to be an outer voice. We absorb the tone of others. A harassed or angry parent. The menacing threats of an elder sibling keen to put us down. The words of a schoolyard bully or teacher who seemed impossible to please. We internalize the unhelpful voices, because at certain key moments in the past, they sounded compelling. The authority figures repeated their messages over and over until they got lodge in our own way of thinking." 

~ The School of Life

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

"When you penetrate a mystery, it doesn’t become less mysterious. It becomes, if anything, more mysterious."

~ Stephen Batchelor

Forget everything you've ever done.
Make no comparisons. Simply listen.

"Poetry is a lot more important than poets."

~ Ted Kooser