"We have this strong idea, in the culture and in the language, that emotion and touch are deeply linked, and I think the neuroanatomy bears this out."

~ David Linden

May this house shelter your life.
When you come home here,
May all the weight of the world
Fall from your shoulders.

~ John O'Donohue

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled –
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.

How exactly does meditation affect your body?

"The moment of awakening reveals two kinds of self-experience." ~ Evan Thompson

Let it come closer, let it engulf you if it must.
Until there is no division between self and sadness.
Until you cannot call it sadness at all. 
Until there is only intimacy. 

~ Jeff Foster

Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls. And through those holes, we can get a glimpse of the other, and sometimes even like what we see."

~ Elif Shafak

"We are not at home in the world because we imagine it is as we have become, full of nothing but yearning and forgetting and hoping for something so raw we can't describe it."

~ Simon Van Booy

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.

"It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here."

~ John O'Donohue

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

~ David Whyte

Wherever you’re from sucks,
and wherever you grew up sucks

~ Erin Belieu

"Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. And this is where I think language came from."

"How do I understand that I am enough for the mere fact that I exist?"

~ Jennifer Moon

"In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still."

~ Pico Iyer

Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been.

~ Mark Strand

"A new study finds that deeply held beliefs can undermine rationality: When confronted with solutions that challenge deeply held values, people may be inclined to disbelieve the problem."

~ Brandon Keim

"This is just simply asking, again, as if we had arrived for the first time, what is the relationship of the human project to time and space?"

~ Antony Gormley

"In a groundbreaking program, Oregon police officers are learning mindfulness techniques to deal with stress, be more focused on the job, and connect more meaningfully with the people they serve."