Vernon Howard Quotes

There are times I am happy. There are times I am sad. But I always try to separate emotion from the need to reach for something stronger, deeper. And then no matter the emotion, I can reach for a stability that helps me accomplish what is the goal.

You have to be able to center yourself, to let all of your emotions go... Don't ever forget that you play with your soul as well as your body.

The goal of meditation is precisely to make your mind smooth and manageable so that it can be concentrated or relaxed at will; and especially to free it from the tyranny of mental afflictions and confusion

The goal is to be the observer of your thoughts and not let your thoughts control you.

There is a place in you that you don't even know exists, where you can simply stand back and watch without feeling any pain.

Non-judgment quiets the internal dialogue, and this opens once again the doorway to creativity.

Meditation is enough. Everything else follows on its own.

Meditation is the alchemy of transforming. The unconscious into the conscious. It gives you a tremendous power, Far greater than anger, greed and lust.

The goal of fasting is inner unity.

If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace. If peace mattered to you more than anything else and if you truly knew yourself to be Spirit rather than a little me, you would remain nonreactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging people or situations. You would immediately accept the situation and thus become one with it rather than separate yourself from it.

Meditation is helping me learn to sit still. Twenty minutes of meditation in the morning is a nice way to start my day. If you can actually sit still and really get to that place of silence, you realize what's important and what's not important. Little things don't usually get to me anymore.

Because of watching your breath and thoughts you have come to know now that you are neither thoughts nor your breath, you are the watcher, the witness. This is awareness. This is what I call meditation. Once you have known this awareness you are unidentified with your body, with your mind. Now you experience a vastness inside you, in one sense utterly empty and in another sense overflowingly full. Because of its emptiness you will remain calm and quiet. And because of its overflowing fullness you will be creative.

As meditation deepens, compulsions, cravings and fits of emotion begin to lose their power to dictate our behavior. We see clearly that choices are possible; we can say yes or we can say no. It is profoundly liberating.

Mindfulness is a way to rebalance ourselves. Instead of being lost in thought, or caught up in emotional upheaval, we can tip the scale in the direction of greater equanimity, clarity, wisdom, and self-compassion by actually learning how to inhabit that other dimension of our being.

It is you who are choosing, in any moment, to be happy or choosing to be sad, or choosing to be angry, or forgiving, or enlightened, or whatever. You are choosing.

Meditation does not mean just sitting quietly for five or ten minutes. It requires conscious effort. The mind has to be made calm and quiet; at the same time, it has to be vigilant so as not to allow any distracting thoughts or desires to enter.

As we practice meditation, we get used to stillness and eventually are able to make friends with the quietness of our sensations.

The still lake without ripples is an image of our minds at ease, so full of unlimited friendliness for all the junk at the bottom of the lake that we don't feel the need to churn up the waters just to avoid looking at what's there.

Detachment doesn't mean I'm trying less hard. It just means that fears and emotions that used to torment and paralyze me no longer have the same power over me. Getting to this point hasn't always been easy; it took me years to really learn to silence my mind. But as you move through your career and your life, you will have to learn that if you're not what you do, then what you do has no business keeping you entertained at night.

That's what I call meditation. You simply stand aloof and just see the mind disappearing, like a cloud on a faraway horizon, leaving the sky clean and pure. And in that state arises your consciousness in its full glory, in its full celebration.

It’s a trick Ben taught me to help settle my Noise. You close yer eyes and as clearly and calmly as you can you tell yerself who you are, cuz that’s what gets lost in all that Noise.

I felt totally myself, nothing like the emptiness and horrible feeling I had then [pulling out the Olympics] - no dizziness.

Rise above the deceptions and temptations of the mind. This is your duty. You are born for this only; all other duties are self-created and self-imposed owing to ignorance.

Meditation means ultimate freedom within you.