Susan Griffin Quotes

The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.

Well, I was passionately curious about what my body was doing, and when I got the lessons on how to meditate, it seemed really solid to me. It seemed real.

Self-awareness includes awareness of your body.

We tend to think of meditation in only one way. But life itself is a meditation.

I'm aware of my body.

I found meditation. It was more out of pure desperation: I just started to wake up at 5 and sit for one hour, and suddenly, day after day, piece by piece, I could really feel I was coming back into me.

Go deep into meditation. and be meditation I mean silence, awareness, witnessing. You can meditate any time of the day, you can meditate working, walking, doing things. Meditation is not something separate from life; it should not be separate, otherwise it remains a little artificial. Meditation should be spread all over life. You should walk in meditation, you should sit in meditation; that means silently, fully aware. Slowly slowly it becomes your very flavour, then the bridge is created.

I have never got on with the quietist movements: they lapse too easily into self-congratulations: I have found the oneness, you have not. I prefer to look outside myself if I possibly can, not inside. Meditation reminds me too forcibly of being made to lie on a mat at nursery school and take an hour's nap.

Be the witness of your thoughts.

Except witnessing, I don't teach anything else. So just witness your mind and the meditation will be happening. And once you have got in tune with your being, you know the way, you know the how. Then it does not matter where you are. Alone or in the crowd, in the silences of the forest or in the noises of a marketplace, it is all the same. You can simply close your eyes and disappear inwards.

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.

The real meditation is how you live your life.

We try many ways to be awake, but our society still keeps us forgetful. Meditation is to help us remember.

As you you deeply into your own awareness, and relax the self-contraction, and dissolve into the empty ground of your own primordial experience, the simply feeling of Being-right now, right here-is it not obvious at once?

Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what's vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.

I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.

Mind is elusive, you cannot hold it in your hand. You cannot force it into a test-tube. The only way to know it is to know it from within, from your witnessing self. The more you become aware, the more you can watch your mind - its subtle functioning. The functioning is tremendously complex and beautiful. Mind is the most complex phenomenon on the earth, the most subtle flowering of consciousness. If you want to really understand what the mind is, then you will have to detach yourself from your mind, and you will have to learn how to be just a witness. That's what meditation is all about.

Self-inquiry is the process and the goal also. 'I am' is the goal and the final reality. To hold to it with effort is self-inquiry. When spontaneous and natural it is realization.

But the very act of pausing in a busy day to pray is an act of weakening pride in my life, acknowledging that I am a dependent creature. I am not self sufficient.

There is no enlightenment outside of daily life.

Forget the dancer, the center of the ego; become the dance. That is meditation.

Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you awaken you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life.

There are a lot of different ways to talk about mindfulness, but what it really means is awareness.

Meditation is the process of understanding your own mind.

The moment I am aware that I am aware, I am not aware. Awareness means the observer is not.