Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It is a way of entering into the quiet that is already there, buried under the 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day.
~Deepak Chopra
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Mindfulness meditation doesn't change life. Life remains as fragile and unpredictable as ever. Meditation changes the heart’s capacity to accept life as it is. It teaches the heart to be more accommodating, not by beating it into submission, but by making it clear that accommodation is a gratifying choice.
~Sylvia Boorstein
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The purpose of meditation, paradoxically, is to learn to be without purpose. Since nearly everything we do in life is done with some goal in mind, most of our actions are only means to an end, pointing us continually toward a future that does not exist. But meditation, when no goal distracts it, allows us to discover the richness and profundity of the present moment. We begin to realize the miraculous power of our own lives - not as they will be, or as we might imagine they once were at some golden time in the past, but as they actually are. Meditation is one of the few things in life that is not about DOING but about BEING.
- Rick Fields
from "Chop Wood, Carry Water"