Give your mind a break from thinking
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Being able to still the mind holds great benefits
- Your degree of absence of thought is your measuring stick on the spiritual path. Ramana Maharshi
- Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious and anything self- conscious is lousy. You cannot try to do things. You simply must do things. Ray Bradbury
- When you are willing to stop looking for something in thought, you find everything in silence. Gangaji
- The mind has to be empty to see clearly. Jiddu Krishnamurti
- I sink into the gaps between thoughts to experience stillness and peace. Eckhart Tolle
- The first thing to remember is how to drop thoughts and become thoughtless — thoughtless but alert. Osho
- Keep your head clear. It doesn’t matter how bright the path is if your head is always cloudy.
- Stop thinking and end your problems. Lao Tzu
- Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it. Anthony de Mello
- Oh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts. John Keats
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Learn to watch your thoughts in a detached way
- Be the witness of your thoughts. You are what observes, not what you observe. Buddha
- When the mind is quiet, we come to know ourselves as the pure witness. Deepak Chopra
- I am present as the watcher of my mind – my thoughts, emotions and reactions – without judging or analysing. I feel the still, observing presence within. Eckhart Tolle
- Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself. Jon Kabat-Zinn
- The first thing to remember is how to drop thoughts and become thoughtless — thoughtless but alert. Osho
- We may not be able to control the thoughts our mind throws at us, but we can choose to remain conscious and observe these thoughts rather than instantly reacting to them. Tina Su
- You don’t have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you. Dan Millman
- I’m simply saying that there is a way to be sane. I’m saying that you can get rid of all this insanity created by the past in you. Just by being a simple witness of your thought processes. It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness. The moment you say “this is good, this is bad,” you have already jumped onto the thought process. It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great suprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, A watcher. And this process of watching is the very alchemy of real religion. Because as you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty. That’s the moment of enlightenment. That is the moment that you become for the first time an unconditioned, sane, really free human being. Osho
- When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. Eckhart Tolle
- Non-attachment, Awareness
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Stop grasping at your thoughts
- The power of calm: In matters of the mind, the more mental effort you apply to any given situation, the less will be the result. Richard Carlson
- A thought has exactly as much power as you give it. Michael Jeffreys
- Whenever you are immersed in compulsive thinking, you are avoiding what is. You don’t want to be where you are. Here, Now. Eckhart Tolle
- That which is left when there is no more grasping is the Self. Panchadasi
- There is no need to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought. David Allen
- The more stress we feel, the more important it is to drop the thoughts that are on our mind.
- Be ever so still, all movement is mind – one thought is a cloud, do not stir it about the sky. Rafael Stoneman
- You don’t have to stay trapped in your thoughts just because you think them. Doug Dillon
- If you want peace, stop fighting. If you want peace of mind, stop fighting with your thoughts. Peter McWilliams
- The fixation on achieving exactly the right frame of mind is usually a big distraction from doing what matters, and frequently hugely counterproductive. All these efforts at thought control are the exact opposite of the wonderful Buddhist notion of becoming less attached to thoughts, of “grasping” them less and thus being grasped by them less. Oliver Burkeman
- Thoughts are not the problem… it’s the thing that goes out and grabs them and makes them ‘yours’ that’s the problem. Jac O’keeffe
- Any thought that makes you feel uncomfortable – be it fear, guilt, anger, worry, frustration – is backed by a negative belief. Let it go! Che Garman
- Detachment doesn’t mean I’m trying less hard. It just means that fears and emotions that used to torment and paralyze me no longer have the same power over me. Getting to this point hasn’t always been easy; it took me years to really learn to silence my mind. But as you move through your career and your life, you will have to learn that if you’re not what you do, then what you do has no business keeping you entertained at night. Kelly Cutrone, Meredith Bryan
- Letting go
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Allow thoughts to be without identifying with them
- Your thoughts are nothing but temporary electrical impulses. If you don’t identify them with self (or your story), they cannot harm you. Eckhart Tolle
- Not all thinking and all emotion are of the ego. They turn into ego only when you identify with them and they take you over completely, that is to say, when they become “I.” Eckhart Tolle
- Thought itself is harmless, an empty concept until we fill it with meaning. Wayne Dyer
- Thoughts are not the problem… it’s the thing that goes out and grabs them and makes them ‘yours’ that’s the problem. Jac O’keeffe
- Thoughts are just moving through consciousness. They have no power. Nothing has reality until you reach it, grab it, and somehow impregnate it with the power of belief. Adyashanti
- Thoughts are just what is. They appear. They’re innocent. They’re not personal. They’re like the breeze or the leaves on the trees or the raindrops falling. Thoughts arise like that, and we can make friends with them. Would you argue with a raindrop? Byron Katie
- The mind should be kept independent of any thoughts that arise within it. If the mind depends on anything, it has no sure haven. Buddha
- Learn to let thoughts pass through without experiencing them as “me” or the whole of my reality. Eckhart Tolle
- When you do not identify with thought, it becomes fruitful, not addictive. Thinking becomes powerful when you no longer rely on it to know who you are. Eckhart Tolle
- You think, you become that thought. And consciousness, or the state of pure awareness, is lost. Barry Long
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Become the space for your thoughts
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Get in touch with the feelings underlying the thoughts and let them go through mindfulness
- Much of the mind’s activity is designed to avoid feeling. For instance, any form of repetitive, compulsive thinking is usually a sign that just below its surface lies an uncomfortable well of feelings. Rupert Spira
- Mindfulness
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Don’t believe every thought you have …
- A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years. Byron Katie
- You don’t have to believe everything your thoughts tell you. Just become familiar with the particular thoughts you use to deprive yourself of happiness. Becoming familiar with your stressful thoughts will show you the way home to everything you need. Byron Katie
- Don’t believe everything you think. Byron Katie
- Who told you to believe your thoughts? Why only another thought! Michael Jeffreys
- It was at this point in my life that I began to realize my mind was nothing but a projection machine. More often than not, what I was thinking had no basis in reality. Kenny Johnson
- Thinking is something that you do by virtue of being human, and you need not confuse thinking with reality. Wayne Dyer
- You’ve heard “Don’t believe everything you read.” Here are some useful spinoffs: Don’t believe everything you think. Don’t believe everything you tell yourself. And most especially, don’t believe everything you feel. O.M. Bastet
- Just because you have a self-defeating thought, does not mean that it is true, or that you need to follow its lure. Trust me, you are not your thoughts, you are not your mind, you are not your ego. You are divine, you are precious, and you have it within yourself to fulfill your heart’s deepest desires. Tina Su
- Most thoughts are just rubbish, but we believe them anyway. Ayya Khema
- The best use one can make of his mind is to distrust it. Francois Fenelon
- After a few years of meditation practice we can even learn how to occasionally ignore ourselves. And what relief that can be! Wes Nisker
- When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are. Eckhart Tolle
- Belief
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… and don’t take all your thoughts so seriously
- Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don’t take your thoughts so seriously. Eckhart Tolle
- Pick and choose which thoughts you wish to react to. We don’t always have to take our thoughts seriously. Wayne Dyer
- Learn to see negative thoughts as a form of mental static, and you can stop paying so much attention to them. Wayne Dyer
- The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want. Byron Katie
- Your thoughts are like grooves in a record. They are there from years of conditioning. They are passed on from your parents and others. Pay them no heed. Think of them as neither good not bad. Let go of them. Adyashanti
- You can alnalyze your negative thoughts – ponder, think through, study, think some more – or you can learn to ignore them – dismiss, pay less attention to, not to take so seriously. The latter option is infinitively more effective in terms of learning to be more peaceful. Richard Carlson
- Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace. Robert Sawyer
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Learn to perceive without thought
- Can you take the thinking out of the perceiving? Can you look without the voice in your head commenting, drawing conclusions, comparing, or trying to figure something out? Eckhart Tolle
- Go slow. Stop thinking. Look around. You’ll see something beautiful if you open yourself. Sermon of Vincent van Gogh
- Let go of the need to label and name
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Learn to do without thought
- Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen. Bodhidharma
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Switch on your mind when you need it
- Mind is really a tape recorder. But it is not continuously on, not twenty-four hours on. When needed, the witness, the man of meditation, the man of awareness, is capable of putting the mind on or off. He puts it on when there is some need. Rajneesh
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Affirmations
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