201 Quotes Tagged: mindfulness

Fifteen years ago, a business manager from the United States came to Plum Village to visit me. His conscience was troubled because he was the head of a firm that designed atomic bombs. I listened as he expressed his concerns. I knew if I advised him to quit his job, another person would only replace him. If he were to quit, he might help himself, but he would not help his company, society, or country. I urged him to remain the director of his firm, to bring mindfulness into his daily work, and to use his position to communicate his concerns and doubts about the production of atomic bombs.

In the Sutra on Happiness, the Buddha says it is great fortune to have an occupation that allows us to be happy, to help others, and to generate compassion and understanding in this world. Those in the helping professions have occupations that give them this wonderful opportunity. Yet many social workers, physicians, and therapists work in a way that does not cultivate their compassion, instead doing their job only to earn money. If the bomb designer practises and does his work with mindfulness, his job can still nourish his compassion and in some way allow him to help others. He can still influence his government and fellow citizens by bringing greater awareness to the situation. He can give the whole nation an opportunity to question the necessity of bomb production.

Many people who are wealthy, powerful, and important in business, politics, and entertainment are not happy. They are seeking empty things - wealth, fame, power, sex - and in the process they are destroying themselves and those around them. In Plum Village, we have organised retreats for businesspeople. We see that they have many problems and suffer just as others do, sometimes even more. We see that their wealth allows them to live in comfortable conditions, yet they still suffer a great deal.

Some businesspeople, even those who have persuaded themselves that their work is very important, feel empty in their occu

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we don’t have to feel it’s happening because we personally made the wrong move. In reality, however, when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong. As long as we’re addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot.

The mind which is created quick to love, is responsive to everything that is pleasing, soon as by pleasure it is awakened into activity. Your apprehensive faculty draws an impression from a real object, and unfolds it within you, so that it makes the mind turn thereto. And if, being turned, it inclines towards it, that inclination is love; that is nature, which through pleasure is bound anew within you.

Look deeply at your anger, as you would look at your own child. Don’t reject it or hate it. The point of meditation is not to turn yourself into a battlefield, one side opposing the other. Conscious breathing soothes and calms the anger, and mindfulness penetrates it. Anger is just an energy, and all energies can be transformed. Meditation is the art of using one kind of energy to transform another.

A sunny disposition is worth more than fortune.
Young people should know that it can be cultivated; that the mind like the body can be moved from the shade into sunshine.

Meditation can be a refuge, but it is not a practice in which real life is ever excluded. The strength of mindfulness is that it enables us to hold difficult thoughts and feelings in a different way — with awareness, balance, and love

Suffering has its beneficial aspects. It can be an excellent teacher.

The teachings of the Buddha could be summarized in four short sentences. ... [The Buddha] said ...
The bad things, don't do them.
The good things, try to do them.
Try to purify, subdue your own mind.
That is the teaching of all buddhas.

Everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality.

We use mindfulness to observe the way we cling to pleasant experiences & push away unpleasant ones.

We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence. The basic teaching of Buddhism is the teaching of transiency, change. That everything changes is the basic truth of each existence. When we realize the everlasting truth of “everything changes” and find our composure in it, we find ourselves in Nirvana.

"We do so much, we run so quickly, the situation is difficult, and many people say, "Don't just sit there, do something." But doing more things may make the situation worse. So you should say, "Don't just do something, sit there." Sit there, stop, be yourself first, and begin from there."

If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it. (12)

We spend most of our time seeking to become happy, as if something important needs to be found or accomplished, or otherwise added to our experience in the present moment. We're always solving problems, meeting deadlines, running errands, fulfilling desires, defending opinions, and every implied end to our efforts reveals itself to be a mirage. There is simply no resting place. In some basic sense, we never arrive, and the question of finding meaning in life is a component of this search. We want to be able to tell ourselves a satisfying story about who we've been, and who we are, and who we're becoming. Of course it makes sense to do whatever you can to secure a good life, to find satisfying work, to maintain your health, to create a happy family, but it is also terrifying to have one's wellbeing entirely depend upon the shifting sands of experience and the stories we tell ourselves. The great power of mindfulness is that it can connect you with a sense of wellbeing that is intrinsic to simply being conscious in each moment, and this is a deeper discovery than finding meaning in one's life, though it's entirely compatible with that. Through mindfulness you can discover that whatever you seek to accomplish, you can never truly become happy, you can only be happy...

The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.