"[Mindfulness] is simply the practice of bringing ourselves fully into the present moment and continuing to bring ourselves back to it whenever we notice we've drifted away.

All of our training relies on these two practices: mindfulness and awareness. Awareness is our consciousness of being in the present. Mindfulness means "to remember" or "not to forget" to watch the mind and see when it drifts away from the present.

Of the two, mindfulness is usually emphasized more because it's responsible for maintaining the continuity of our awareness. Mindfulness means to remember again and again." 

Rebel Buddha - p. 69

"We struggle here and there in our life with the same unconscious patterns of aggression, desire, jealousy or denial, until we're caught in a web of our own making. These are precisely the things from which we work to free ourselves on the buddhist path: the habitual patterns that dominate our life and make it hard to see the awakened state of mind.

Buddhism is primarily a study of mind and a system for training the mind. It is spiritual in nature, not religious. Its goal is self-knowledge, not salvation; freedom, not heaven. It relies on reason and analysis, contemplation and meditation, to transform knowledge about something into knowledge that surpasses understanding.


Although Buddhism can be practiced religiously, in many respects, it isn't really a religion. Because of its emphasis on questioning and working with the mind, it is spiritual in nature. But because it relies on logical analysis and reasoning, as well as on meditation, many buddhist teachers regard Buddhism as a science of mind rather than a religion.


Our confusion is created by our own mind, and it can only be transformed by our mind. So the most powefull entity in the buddhist path is the mind."

Rebel Buddha - p. 20, 24

"Ironically, what blocks your view of your mind's true nature - your buddha mind - is also your own mind, the part of your mind that is always busy, constantly involved in a steady stream of thoughts, emotions and concepts. This busy mind is who you think you are.

You identify yourself with the contents of this busy mind - your thoughts, emotions, ideas - and end up thinking that all of this stuff is "me" and "how I am"."

Rebel Buddha - p. 11

"Mindfulness is attention to experience as it is happening - that is, in the present moment.  p. 9

Can you separate your conceptual framework from your experience? If you can, what would you see?  p. 9

Mindfulness is a tool we can use to examine conceptual frameworks, to lessen the influence of preconceptions and to experience "what is" by choice rather through drugs or neurological damage.  p. 10

Minfulness is the art of observing your physical, emotional and mental experiences with deliberate, open and curious attention.  p. 11

By practicing present-time awareness, even in the midst of a difficult situation, you can become aware of your impulses (your reactive patterns), stop, perhaps take a breath, and respond skillfully in a way that does not lead to more harm.  p. 15


Mindfulness is an accepting and kind attitude toward yourself and your present-moment experience.  p. 16


When you are aware of the present moment in a kind and curious way, accepting it as it is, then you have the direct experience of mindfulness.  p. 16


Judgments arise unbidden in our minds, so we don't need to judge our judgements! Instead, recognize them for what they are: thoughts passing through your mind.  p. 16

It is simple to be mindful, but remembering to be mindful can be very difficult.  p. 17 


With mindfulness, we simply notice. We become aware.  p. 20


In meditation we use an anchor to keep our minds from being tossed and turned by the ocean of thoughts, stimuli, sensations, sounds and emotions. In the mindfulness practice taught in this book, we use the breath as our anchor, although it is possible to use other anchors, such as sounds or bodily sensations. Other meditation practices use an image, a candle flame, another body part or mantra (a repeating word).  p. 45


The key to mindfulness in breathing practice is feeling the breath.  p. 47


When you have ideas about pain, you may be so caught in the ideas that you miss the reality of the experience (and this is true in general of bringing mindfulness to any experience).  p. 87


Mindfulness is about being present in a curious manner with whatever emotion arises - good or bad.  p. 97


The mindful approach to emotions is neither expressive nor repressive per se; the mindful approach is to recognize your emotions, feel them fully, and then let them go so that they don't control you or lead you to act in ways that are harmful to others.  p. 111

To learn working mindfully with emotions, RAIN:  p. 112

- Recognition: in the midst of an emotion, you may find that by identifying and labeling it you are not so overwhelmed by it.

- Acceptance: from the perspective of mindfulness, whatever you are experiencing is okay.

- Investigation: to investigate an emotion is to feel it in your body, discovering how it manifests itself.

- Non-identification: it means not taking your emotions so personally, having some space around them. With it, you have come to the point with your emotions where they have stopped being your emotions that are causing you so much suffering and become instead the emotions - that is, something that is passing through you ("energy in motion").

The mindful approach: don't get on the train [of thoughts].  p. 184"

Fully present: the science, art and practice of mindfulness

"Sitting zazen, you really become intimate with the limitations of language, of narrative, of thought itself. With every thought there’s a “Yes, but....” With every idea comes another idea. This is the labyrinth of thought. Ultimately, you realize that “truth” is not to be found in words."

No words - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Winter 2009

"One of the radical aspects of Buddhist meditation is that it invites us to suspend the habit of reflexively ascribing existence to everything experienced and return to the perceptual simplicity of a phenomenological view. When we attend merely to what appears, as the famous teaching to Bahiya puts it, then “in the seen there will be just the seen, in the heard just the heard, in the felt just the felt, and in the thought, just the thought.” (Udana 1.10) As even a passing encounter with meditation will demonstrate, it does not take long in this mode for the reality of the external world to dissolve into irrelevance amid a swirling sea of changing phenomena. The appearances are so apparently real, insofar as they arise and pass away with such astonishing immediacy, that the question of whether or not they are “really real” becomes a mere conceptual curiosity, more distracting than meaningful."

Appearance And Reality - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Fall 2009

"When we hear the word consciousness in English, we immediately speculate that there is a person to whom this consciousness belongs, an agent who wields it, or a self that consists of it. Yet early Buddhist texts speak of consciousness only as a process unfolding when certain conditions are met: “In dependence on an organ and an object there arises consciousness.” (Samyutta Nikaya 35.93) Or, more specifically, “When internally the eye is intact and external forms come into its range, and a corresponding conjunction occurs, then the manifestation of a corresponding instance of consciousness occurs.” (Majjhima Nikaya 28)

The role of consciousness is to serve up an appearance, either from the incoming data of the sense doors or from internal channels of memory, imagination, or conception. Backing this appearance up with a constructed sense of reality is a flourish added by perception. Consciousness is merely an event—the awareness of an object— while perception is the fabrication of an accompanying image or interpretive marker. Both are impersonal activities that occur naturally under certain conditions, and both the agent behind consciousness and the reality behind appearances are convenient but illusory concoctions of the mind."

Appearance and reality - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Fall 2009

"Causality lies behind this structuring of events into plots. We arrange our lives into stories by positing causal relationships between the things that happen to us. And, as Western philosophers like David Hume and Immanuel Kant have been pointing out since the eighteenth century, causality is not present in the world as we perceive it directly with our senses; it’s a structure we apply when we think about what we’re seeing and make sense of it. We might go further and say that causality is a tool of the storyteller’s art."

Being Somebody, Going Somewhere - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Spring 2011

"Don’t believe your mind when it structures the brute stuff of the events in your life into a meaningful, coherent sequence with a protagonist at its center, struggling with problems, successes, and failures, influencing and being influenced by events, moving meaningfully from past to future in a narrative arc."

Being Somebody, Going Somewhere - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Spring 2011 

"We might view Buddhist awakening, then, as seeing through the lies of stories. Enlightenment is a flight from the shifting, anxious, fundamentally dishonest ground of stories and the historical, linear narrative sense of time, to the pure wholehearted honesty of the eternal now, where thoughts and sensations just rise and fall without needing to mean anything beyond themselves, and we are free to be nobody, going nowhere."

Being Somebody, Going Somewhere - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Spring 2011