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December 20, 2016 - August 24, 2017
Mindfulness is defined by Jon Kabat-Zinn as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”
When your meta-attention becomes strong, you will be able to recover a wandering attention quickly and often, and if you recover attention quickly and often enough, you create the effect of continuous attention, which is concentration.
When the mind becomes highly relaxed and alert at the same time, three wonderful qualities of mind naturally emerge: calmness, clarity, and happiness.
happiness is not something that you pursue; it is something you allow.
The more we are able to create space between stimulus and reaction, the more control we will have over our emotional lives.
“The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.”
Tony’s insight suggests we should be doing precisely the reverse. We should be spending most of our time and energy working on higher purpose, sometimes enjoying flow, and every now and then, savoring rock-star pleasure. This is the most logical path toward sustainable happiness, at least in relation to our work.
Once upon a time, a disciple asked, “Master, is half the holy life associating with people?” The master replied, “No, the whole of holy life is associating with people.”
In fact, you can even say that empathy relies on self-awareness, and if our self-awareness is weak, our empathy will be weak too.
Compassion is a mental state endowed with a sense of concern for the suffering of others and aspiration to see that suffering relieved.
our brains respond far more strongly to negative experiences than comparable positive ones.
He found that for a marriage to succeed, there must be at least five times as many positive interactions in the relationship as negative ones, a 5:1 ratio that Gottman dubbed the “magic ratio,”5
the one and only experience in life that makes people sustainably happy over time is the quality and quantity of social connections.
