Michael Franti Quotes

There are so many surprises in my life; I don't take anything for granted. I enjoy every experience that comes; I don't think too far ahead.

We explore within postures everything we deal with in life: the interplay between resistance and surrender; establishing stability and maintaining flexibility; learning to receive and release; being present to all the complexities of our lives, and returning to the fundamentals of our "beginner's mind" again and again.

I never decide if an idea is good or bad until I try it. So much of what gets in the way of things being good is thinking that we know. And the more that we can remove any baggage we're carrying with us, and just be in the moment, use our ears, and pay attention to what's happening, and just listen to the inner voice that directs us, the better.

I keep my ears open. The world can change overnight; that's what happens in this world. You never know. You have to keep your eyes and ears open. If you can't keep up, you ain't gonna catch up. I've been making records since 1953, and you just have to keep up.

People ask what my goal is. I don't have a goal.

The position that I take partly as a result of living in Asia is where you stop living according to your expectations and you become available to experience things as they are.

I take it season by season. I don't like looking too far ahead, because you never know what can happen.

As you walk, you simply walk. Don't go ahead, don't jump here and there. Mind always go ahead or lag behind. Remain with the moment.

When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you're not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You're drinking your projects, you're drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.

Use all of your senses.

Attending fully and becoming supple, Can you be as a newborn babe?

So, it's good to be here, wherever I am.

You can't mastermind everything. You'll go crazy. Just show up and play.

I think it's so important to have a practice, because the consciousness isn't perfection or enlightenment or any of that bullshit. The consciousness is, "Oh, I'm walking down the street and I'm doing nothing."

When my master and I were walking in the rain, he would say, 'Do not walk so fast, the rain is everywhere.'

See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.

First, let us light the torch of our awareness and learn again how to drink tea, eat, wash dishes, walk, sit, drive, and work in awareness. We do not have to be swept along by circumstances. We are not just a leaf or a log in a rushing river. With awareness, each of our daily acts takes on a new meaning, and we discover that we are more than machines, that our activities are not just mindless repetitions. We find that life is a miracle, the universe is a miracle, and we too are a miracle.

You look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is.

To the man whose senses are alive and alert there is not even the need to stir from one's threshold.

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

Flow in the living moment. — We are always in a process of becoming and nothing is fixed. Have no rigid system in you, and you’ll be flexible to change with the ever changing. Open yourself and flow, my friend. Flow in the total openness of the living moment. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo.

Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. Hear the music of voices, the song of birds, the mighty strains of an orchestra as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow . . . Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. Glory in all the facts of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you.

Everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it was somewhere else. No one seems to have noticed this fact. But grasping this firmly, one must pile experience upon experience. And once one has come to this understanding he will be a different person from that point on, though he may not always bare it in mind. When one understands this settling into single-mindedness well, his affairs will thin out.

You need only look at what's in front of you and find something there to appreciate.

Can you look at a flower without thinking?