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awareness - awareness
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awareness 4 - awareness
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mindfulness
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If
I were to begin life again, I should
want it as it was. I would only
open my eyes a little more.
Jules
Renard |
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When I was six or seven years old, growing up
in Pittsburgh, I used to take
a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to
find. I was
greatly excited. . . at the thought of the first lucky
passerby who would receive
in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the
universe.
I've been thinking about seeing. There are
lots of things to see, unwrapped
gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded
and strewn with pennies
cast broadside from a generous hand.
Annie
Dillard
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The
secret of seeing things as they are is to take off our colored
spectacles. That being-as-it-is, with nothing extraordinary about it,
nothing wonderful,
is the great wonder. The ability to see things normally
is no small thing; to be
really normal is the unusual. In that normality
begins to bubble up inspiration.
Sessan |
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The
world reflects what you need to see,
not only what you want to see.
Stephen C.
Paul
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There is one thing we can do, and the happiest
people
are those who do it
to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present.
We can be all here. We can give all our attention to the opportunity before us.
Mark van Doren
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The best way to make your dreams come true is to
wake up.
J.M. Power
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Imagine how our lives might be if everyone had even a bit more
of the Wisdom that comes from seeing clearly. Suppose
people
everywhere, simultaneously, stopped what they were doing
and
paid attention for only as long as it took to recognize
their shared
humanity. Surely the heartbreak of the
world's pain, visible to all,
would convert everyone to
kindness. What a gift that would be.
Sylvia Boorstein
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The
aim of life is to live, and to live
means to be
aware, joyously, drunkenly,
serenely, divinely aware.
Henry
Miller
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Seeing,
in the finest and broadest sense, means using your senses,
your intellect, and your emotions. It means encountering
your
subject matter with your whole being. It means looking
beyond the
labels of things and discovering the remarkable world around
you.
Freeman Patterson
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There
are so many things that can
provide us with peace.
Next time
you
take a shower or a bath, I
suggest
you hold your big
toes in
mindfulness.
We pay attention to everything except
our
toes. When
we hold our toes
in mindfulness
and smile at them, we will
find that
our bodies have been very
kind to us. We know that any
cell in
our
toes can turn cancerous, but our
toes have been behaving
very well,
avoiding that kind of problem. Yet,
we have not been
nice to them
at all. These kinds of practices
can bring us
happiness.
Thich Nhat
Hanh
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Bring
a heightened state of awareness to your daily life by noticing
your surroundings and thinking of their history. For
example,
imagine the history of a wooden table. Think back to
when it
was a tree in the woods. Look at the grain and see the
lines,
each signifying a year, and think of that tree standing all
that time
in one place. Then imagine it being cut down, taken to a
mill, made
into lumber, shipped to a furniture factory, sawed, glued,
and finished. Imagine the table on the transport truck,
and then
in a store, and think of the people walking by and touching
it.
Then remember when it came into your life.
It has a history, the same as we do.
A
heightened state of awareness comes when we look,
and then look again, and then relax into whatever situation
we are in. When we have a capacity for fascination with
simple things, we are able to sit peacefully for hours on a
park bench, or in an airport, engrossed by the different gaits
and gestures of people as they walk, talk, and stand. We
develop
the ability to be patient as we stand in line at the grocery
store because we have the ability to look with fascination
and wonder at all that surrounds us.
Charlotte
Davis Kasl
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Sometimes
we forget to pay close attention, and because we're
not doing so, we forget what we're missing. Paying close
attention
to anything in our lives helps to remind us of the beauty and
wonder
of this world, two elements of our lives that thoroughly
enrich our
experience here. But only if we allow it to, and we can
allow it
to only by paying attention to it.
tom walsh |
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It
was as if I had worked for years on the wrong side
of a tapestry, learning accurately all its lines and
figures, yet always missing its color and sheen.
Anna
Louise Strong
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Often
we tell ourselves, "Don't just sit there, do
something!" But when
we practice
awareness, we discover something unusual. We
discover
that the opposite may be more
helpful: "Don't just do something, sit
there!" We must learn to stop from time
to time in order to see clearly.
At first,
"stopping" may look like a kind of
resistance to modern life, but
it is not. It
is not just a reaction; it is a way of life.
Humankind's
survival depends on our ability to stop
rushing. "Stopping" is not only
to
stop the negative, but to allow positive healing to
take place.
That is the purpose of our
practice--not to avoid life, but to
experience and
demonstrate that happiness in life is
possible now
and also in the future.
Thich Nhat
Hanh
Peace Is Every Step
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I
suspect we are all recipients of cosmic love notes.
Messages, omens,
voices, cries, revelations, and appeals are homogenized into
each day's
events. If only we knew how to listen, to read the
signs.
Sam
Keen
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awareness - awareness
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awareness 4 - awareness
5
mindfulness
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Look
deeply. Don't miss the inherent quality and value of
everything.
Marcus
Aurelius
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The majority of people are not awake; it is only
here and there
that we find one even partially awake. Practically all of us,
as a result,
are living lives that are unworthy almost the name of lives,
compared
to those we might be living, and that lie within our easy
grasp.
While it is true that each life is in and of Divine Being,
hence always
one with it, in order that this great fact bear fruit in
individual lives,
each one must be conscious of it; he or she must know it in
thought,
and then live continually in this consciousness.
Ralph
Waldo Trine
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A
person is alive only to the degree that he or she is aware.
To make the most of life we must constantly strive to be aware
of the importance of being aware. Be aware of your
senses and
use them: So often we are distracted and unconscious of
the riches our senses can pour into our lives. We eat
food without
tasting it, listen to music without hearing it, smell without
experiencing the pungency of odors and the delicacy of
perfumes,
touch without feeling the grain or texture, and see
without appreciating the beauty around us.
Wilferd
A. Peterson
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Awareness
is the first step on the path to change.
With awareness,
you gain
insight into the facets
of your life that need balance, the
parts of
yourself that yearn for calm, and the times and
situations in
which your
heart is tempted to close.
Important insights can lead
to equally important
actions that improve your life exponentially.
Bringing
an intentional and
nonjudgmental
awareness to yourself and your environment
opens
your
mind and heart to the best choices
available. Such
awareness empowers you to
make
wise, healthy, and mature choices based
on real and
appropriate needs and desires.
Sue
Patton Thoele
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If you bring five
percent more awareness to your work tomorrow,
or to your most important relationship, what might you do
differently? Are you willing to find out?
Nathaniel
Branden
Self-Esteem
Every Day |
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The
words which one might be tempted to use for a silent and
wide-open
mind are mostly terms of abuse--thoughtless, mindless,
unthinking, empty-
headed, and vague. Perhaps this is some measure of an
innate fear of
releasing the chronic cramp of consciousness by which we grasp
the facts
of life and manage the world. It is only to be expected
that the idea of an
awareness which is something other than sharp and selective
fills us with
considerable disquiet. We are perfectly sure that it
would mean going
back to the supposedly confused sensitivity of infants and
animals, that we
should be unable to distinguish up from down, and that we
should certainly
be run over by a car the first time we went out on the street.
Alan Watts |
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Those flickering
leaf-shadows playing over the heap of cut grass. The shadows
are blue or green, I don't know which, but I feel
them
in my bones. Down
into the shadows of the gully, across
it through
glistening space, space that hangs
suspended filling the
gully, so that
sounds wander there, lose themselves, and
are drowned; beyond,
there's a splash of sunlight leaping out against the
darkness
of forest,
the gold in it flows richly in my eyes, flows through my brain
in still
pools of light. That pine, my eye is led up and down the
straightness of its
trunk, my muscles feel its roots spreading wide to hold it so
upright against the
hill. The air is full of sounds, sighs of wind in the
trees, sighs which fade back
into the overhanging silence. A bee passes, a golden ripple in the quiet air.
Marion Milner |
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Once
upon a time there was a woman who longed to find out
what
heaven is like.
She prayed constantly,
"O, God, grant me in this life
a vision of
paradise." She
prayed in this way for
years until one
night she had a dream. In her
dream
an angel came and led her
to heaven.
They walked down a street in paradise
until they
came
to an ordinary-looking house. The angel,
pointing toward
the house said, "Go and look
inside."
So
the woman walked in the house and found a person
preparing
supper, another
reading the newspaper, and
children playing with
their toys. Naturally,
she was
disappointed and returned to the
angel on
the street. "Is this all there is to
heaven?"
The
angel replied, "Those people you saw in that
house
are not in paradise--paradise is in
them!"
Edward
Hays |
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awareness - awareness
2
awareness 4 - awareness
5
mindfulness
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The earth has music for those who listen.
George
Santayana |
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The "burning
bush" was not a miracle. It was a test. God
wanted to find out
whether or not Moses could pay attention to something for more
than
a few minutes. When Moses did, God spoke. The
trick is to pay attention to
what is going on around you long enough to behold the miracle
without
falling asleep. There is another world, right here
within this one,
whenever we pay attention.
Lawrence Kushner |
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An
aware person is in tune with all the powers
of God and makes them his or her own.
Donald
Curtis |
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It
is said that the Christian mystic Theresa of Avila found
difficulty
at first in
reconciling the vastness of the life of the spirit
with the
mundane tasks of her
Carmelite convent: the washing of
pots,
the
sweeping of floors, the folding of
laundry. At some
point of
grace,
the mundane became for her a sort of prayer, a
way she
could
experience her ever-present connection to the divine pattern
which
is the source of life. She began then to see
the face of
God in the folded sheets.
Rachel
Naomi Remen |
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