Sylvia Boorstein Quotes

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.

Surrender means wisely accommodating ourselves to what is beyond our control.

The mind is like tofu. It tastes like whatever you marinate it in.

Spirituality doesn't look like sitting down and meditating. Spirituality looks like folding the towels in a sweet way and talking kindly to the people in the family eve though you've had a rough day.

Life is painful, suffering is optional.

May I meet each moment fully and meet it as a friend.

Ultimately ... it's not the stories that determine our choices, but the stories that we continue to choose.

If we can keep at least a bit of the mind clear about temporality, we can mange complicated, even difficult, times with grace.

Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience. It isn't more complicated than that.

People are realizing that what seemed important to them in their lives-materialism and consumerism-doesn't work at all to make a happy heart. It actually makes an unhappy heart. And an unhappy world.

When the mind is clear, behavior is always impeccable.

If you take a deep breath and look around, 'Look what's happening to me!' can become 'Look what's happening!' And what's happening? The incredible drama of life is happening. And we're in it!

Steadfast benevolence, sustained by the wisdom that anything other than benevolence is painful, protects the mind from all afflictions.

Suffering is the demand that experience be different from what it is.

I want to feel deeply, and whenever I am brokenhearted I emerge more compassionate. I think I allow myself to be brokenhearted more easily, knowing I won't be irrevocably shattered [p. 59]

Buddha also said that the Dharma, like a bird, needs two wings to fly, and that the wing that balances Wisdom is compassion.

The Buddha taught complete honesty, with the extra instruction that everything a person says should be truthful and helpful.

The prohibition of L'shon Hara is the Jewish equivalent of the Buddhist practice of Right Speech.

Dedication to goodness-dedication in response to an inner moral mandate rather than external restraint-was both the antidote to the pain and the source of great happiness.

My redeemer is always the person next to me.

I think they paid attention to their lives and became wise. For those of us who don’t arrive at wisdom naturally, meditation is one way to get there through practice.

Mindfulness, the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience, is at the heart of what the Buddha taught.

The Buddha’s criteria for Wise Speech include—in addition to the obvious expectation that speech be truthful— that it be timely, gentle, motivated by kindness, and helpful.

The next-to-last sentence that the Buddha is reported to have spoken as he was dying, before his final sentence of encouragement to his community, was “Transient are all conditioned things.