Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold of your mind again.

There are many good forms of meditation practice. A good meditation practice is any one that develops awareness or mindfulness of our body and our sense, of our mind and heart.

Breathing meditation can quiet the mind, open the body, and develop a great power of concentration.

Breathing is central to every aspect of meditation training. It's a wonderful place to focus in training the mind to be calm and concentrated.

An instructor once told me that when there's resistence in your body, it's only because of the resistence in your mind. It's about getting inside the pose. Being the breath.

To control the breathing is to control the mind. With different patterns of breathing, you can fall in love, you can hate someone, you can feel the whole spectrum of feelings just by changing your breathing.

Your breathing should flow gracefully, like a river, like a watersnake crossing the water, and not like a chain of rugged mountains or the gallop of a horse. To master our breath is to be in control of our bodies and minds. Each time we find ourselves dispersed and find it difficult to gain control of ourselves by different means, the method of watching the breath should always be used.

Do not let the body be dragged along by mind nor the mind be dragged along by the body

Let thy mind's sweetness have its operation upon thy body, clothes, and habitation.

You go in the weight room and you lift weights and you do all these things to strengthen your body. This is strengthening your mind. When you can stay focused and you can use that focus to always come back with your breath to center yourself, so that you're kind of floating in the moment, in the spirit.

I teach that the foundation for our practice is being able to go inward and disconnect from the busyness of our thoughts, that focusing the mind on bodily sensations and breath will ground us in the present moment. Yoga is about realizing who you really are, aside from your persona.

Each full, deep inhale creates more space in your body and mind. Each long, exhale moves you directly into that space. The deeper you breathe, the more opens up. It's like opening a door and walking through with each breath. The fuller your breaths the more and more doors open on up, leaving you with the space to walk on in!

Why do people do yoga? To clear their minds? I embrace the clutter in my head.

He who has learned to do nothing with his whole mind and body will have everything done for him.

Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.

Keep belly lightly loaded, if mind would wisdom see;For bodies crammed to bursting, make empty souls to be.

I'm a firm believer in slowing down to improve my state of mind when I'm training, and yoga and meditation have been paramount to my success in this way.

Meditation is a vital way to purify and quiet the mind, thus rejuvenating the body.

You use the body as a medium to bring the mind back to the brain. Perfect married between body and mind. Then, you can knock the door to the spirit.

But I would assert that despite the wide variety of yoga options and individual preferences, there is one universal element: the union of consciousness and movement, breath and awareness.

Runners and yogis are alike in lots of ways, and not just because some of us need yoga to unkink what running jams. Runners and yogis are also alike because of this tortoise shell idea, this 'home' we can access inside ourselves.

Conscious breath control is a useful tool for achieving a relaxed, clear state of mind.

There is no doubt that breath control is the means for mind control because the mind, like breath, is a part of air; because the nature of mobility is common to both; because the place of origin is the same for both; and because when one of them is controlled, the other gets controlled.

Yoga is excellent! It not only keeps me healthy physically but mentally and spiritually also.

Yoga is a part of who I am. It has given me a permanent relationship. A relationship between my body, my mind, and my emotions.