10 powerful quotes to inspire your meditation practice

Author: Derek Beres / Source: Big Think

Meditation can have a profound impact in reducing anxiety and stress.
While there are many ways to meditate, the ability to sustain your attention on one thing for a period of time is the foundation of them all.
The more you practice, the more results you get, though quality of time is more important than quantity

Nothing is created in a vacuum. The emergence of meditation as a cultural staple in America is in large part a response to the continual fragmentation of attention.

How one meditates can vary widely; different practices suit varying temperaments. Carving time into your day to focus on one thing for a sustained period does everyone good, for a clear mind is a healthy one. Reduce the stress of your own life and you tend to share that reward by being kinder to others.

Beyond anxiety reduction, there is the attentional deficit many of us are suffering from. As we offload more information to our devices, opportunities for sustained attention are dwindling. Why remember the route you’re taking when a map will carry you along? Why remember anything at all? Unfortunately, memory is critical for healthy cognitive functioning. Lose that and we lose everything.

Whether five minutes or five hours, the quality of time you put into a meditation practice matters. As with many practices, the more, the better, but even as little as ten minutes a day can be highly beneficial.

Where to begin

If you’re new to meditation, you might ask: Where to start? With something we all share, as advised by someone who’s been mediating his entire life.

The great advantage of choosing one’s breath as the object of mindfulness training is that breathing is an instinctive and effortless activity, something which we do as long as we are alive, so there is no need to strive hard to find the object of this practice.

The Dalai Lama, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality

Defining meditation

But what is it? As mentioned, meditation means different things to different people, though I appreciate this definition by a master, which discusses the importance of presence.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence. Silence put together by thought is stagnation, is dead, but the silence that comes when thought has understood its own beginning, the nature of itself, understood how all thought is never free but always old—this silence is meditation in which the meditator is entirely absent, for the mind has emptied itself of the past.

Krishnamurti, Freedom From the Known