Full Catastrophe Living, Revised Edition: How to cope with stress, pain and illness using mindfulness meditation

The point is that we don’t always know what our true limits are. However,

When you are immersed in doing without being centered, it feels like being away from home. And when you reconnect with being, even for a few moments, you know it immediately.

Meditation is not so concerned with how much thinking is going on as it is with how much room you are making for it to take place within the field of your awareness from one moment to the next.

Each time you sit in an alert and dignified posture and turn your attention to your breathing, for however long, you are returning to your own wholeness, affirming your intrinsic balance of mind and body, independent of the passing state of either your mind or your body in any moment.

“stimulus-independent thought” or “mind wandering” appears to be the brain’s default mode of operation.

Imagine the mind as a “sound mirror,” simply reflecting whatever arises in the domain of hearing.

We tend to take the ordinary for granted and fail to grasp the extraordinariness of the ordinary.

A strong belief in your ability to succeed at whatever you decide to do can influence the kinds of activities in which you will engage in the first place, how much effort you will put into something new and different before giving up, and how stressful your efforts to achieve control in important areas of your life will be.

When you notice thoughts about getting somewhere, about wanting something, or about having gotten somewhere, about “success” or “failure,” are you able to honor each one as you observe it as an aspect of present-moment reality? Can you see it clearly as an impulse, a thought, a desire, a judgment, and let it be here and let it go without being draw