Quotes about Practice

By repeatedly bringing your attention back to the breath each time it wanders off, concentration builds and deepens, much as muscles develop by repetitively lifting weights.

Mindfulness has been called the heart of Buddhist meditation.

Finally, I would like to close with a Buddhist practice of dedicating merit. Whatever benefit and merit may have arisen here, we dedicate it for the benefit of all beings.

Meditation is the process by which we go about deepening our attention and awareness, refining them, and putting them to greater practical use in our lives.

L]ive life as if each moment was important, as if each moment counted and could be worked with, even if it was a moment of pain, sadness, despair, or fear. This work involves above all the regular, disciplined practice of moment-to-moment awareness or mindfulness, the complete owning of each moment of your experience, good, bad, or ugly. This is the essence of full catastrophe living.

Parenting and family life can be a perfect field for mindfulness practice, but it's not for the weak-hearted, the selfish or lazy, or the hopelessly romantic. Parenting is a mirror that forces you to look at yourself. If you can learn from what you observe, you just may have a chance to keep growing yourself.

In this regard, cultivating mindfulness is not unlike the process of eating. It would be absurd to propose that someone else eat for you. And when you go to a restaurant, you don't eat the menu, mistaking it for the meal, nor are you nourished by listening to the waiter describe the food. You have to actually eat the food for it to nourish you. In the same way, you have to actually practice mindfulness in order to reap its benefits and come to understand why it is so valuable.

Nothing makes a man so virtuous as belief of the truth. A lying doctrine will soon beget a lying practice. A man cannot have an erroneous belief without by-and-by having an erroneous life. I believe the one thing naturally begets the other.

It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.

The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.

We all agree that forgiveness is a beautiful idea until we have to practice it.

Live forgiveness every day rather than just talking about it on Sunday.