Anne Lamott Quotes

When you take away the phone and e-mail and you don't have a million things to run around to, it allows your mind the space to think more expansively about the things that matter.

Through faithful practice, layer after layer of the mind opens before us, and each reveals new facts to us.

Meditation is a rich and powerful method of study for anyone who knows how to examine his mind.

By going out of your mind, you come to your senses

When we look at external things, we can usually distinguish those that are useful and valuable from those that are not. We must learn to look at our mind in the same way.

Don't judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction. Don't make a personal problem out of them. You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher.

Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also.

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.

The only reason your mind won't stop its endless chattering is because you won't stop listening to it!

The more aware you become, the more you shed from day to day what you have learned so that your mind is always fresh and uncontaminated by previous conditioning.

Only when the mind is still, tranquil, not expecting or grasping or resisting a single thing, is it possible to see what is true. It is the truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.

When you start meditating on your ego, on your thoughts, on your mind, you are suddenly separate, because whatsoever you meditate on, you are separate from it. That has become the object and you have become the subject.

A quiet mind does not mean that there will be no thoughts or mental movements at all, but that these will be on the surface, and you will feel your true being within, separate from them, observing but not carried away

Meditation means to go beyond the limitations of body and mind.

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.

As you go about your life, don't give 100 percent of your attention to the external world and your mind. Keep some within.

Can you use the rational mind to transcend itself?

A man were better relate himself to a statue or picture than to suffer his thoughts to pass in smother.

Meditation is not to escape from society, but to come back to ourselves and see what is going on. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. With mindfulness, we know what to do and what not to do to help.

Mind is just in the middle. You are nothing but a mess. If you can go beyond it, intelligence grows in you; if you go below it, any intelligence that you had disappears.

If you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.

If you can become a mirror you have become a meditator. Meditation is nothing but skill in mirroring. And now, no word moves inside you so there is no distraction.

To ask the mind to kill itself is like making the thief the policeman. He will go with you and pretend to catch the thief, but nothing will be gained. So you must turn inward and see where the mind rises from, and then it will cease to exist.

Mind is something unnatural; it never becomes your natural state. But meditation is a natural state - which we have lost.

I didn't fight or shame my thoughts, I questioned them, and they stopped shaming me.