By Thich Nhat Hahn

Don’t view your time as divided into time for your friend, for work, for your family, etc. View it all as your time. Be present and deliberate in how you spend your time

When you’re washing the dishes, focus on washing the dishes. If you’re washing the dishes in order to get the cup of tea after. You don’t get to experience washing the dishes and you also don’t get to experience the tea after because you’re trained to always be looking forward towards the next thing.

Mindfulness is keeping your consciousness alive to the present reality

People usually consider walking on water or on air a miracle. The miracle isn’t to walk on either but rather to simply walk on earth.

Mindfulness is the miracle by which we can master and restore ourselves.

The breath is the connection between body and mind. Focusing on your breath is an age old method to enter a state of mindfulness.

Meditating for an hour a day is not enough. You must practice meditation every waking hour. Be mindful of every action you take. Do not wash the dishes so you can drink tea afterwards. Be fully immersed in what you’re doing.

Don’t do any task in order to get it over with.

Take one day a week to immerse yourself in the practice of mindfulness. Be mindful of every action you take. Limit talking and other actions that might disrupt your peace of mind.

If you cannot live in the present without being distracted by the future, you will not be able to live in the future when it becomes the present either.

Sit in the lotus position, left palm over your right, half smile, and think about a pebble being thrown into a river. Imagine it slowly sinking until it comes to rest on the river bed.

“If the practitioner knows his own mind clearly he will obtain results with little effort. But if he does not know anything about his own mind, all of his effort will be wasted.”

If you want to know your own mind, there is only one way: to observe and recognize everything about it.

Allow all thoughts to come as they will. Do not fight them or try chase them away. Acknowledge them but do not entertain them. Remain focused on the breath.

You do not have two minds. The observing mind and the thinking mind. They are the same. By acknowledging thoughts but not identifying with them, you will begin the process of integrating them into one mind.

“True mind is our real self, the pure oneness that cannot be cut up by the illusory divisions of separate selves created by concepts and language.”

Most of the unpleasant sensations in life (fear, depression, anxiety) stem from our inability to grasp the oneness of life. We live with a sense of separation between ourselves and the rest of the world.

Look at a table and come to know all the processes that brought it there. The sun and rain that nourished the tree that then became the wood. The parents who nurtured the wood worker who crafted the design. The molten iron that became the nails.

I see that if one doesn’t know how to die, one can hardly know how to live—because death is part of life.