Be Still and Get Going Quotes

“Meditation is always becoming. Meditation is always transformation. Meditation always moves us from one place to another; from unconsciousness to awareness, from tension to relaxation, from being scattered to being centered, from a shallow relationship with our environment and ourselves to a deeper one, from sleep to wakefulness, from a sense of God’s absence to the sense that God was in this place all along and I didn’t know it!”
― Alan Lew, Be Still and Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life

“As impossible as sustained focus, for example. We resolve to anchor our awareness in our breathing and our body, and we do, to a certain extent, but the more we succeed in focusing our awareness on these things, the more we discover how impossible it is to sustain. The mind continuously produces thoughts, and eventually these thoughts carry our awareness away. So it is that we experience that the world is in flux, that there are no stopping points. So it is that we experience the truth. Still, silent, balanced, and focused, we experience the impossibility of these states. Yet without being still, silent, balanced, and focused, we cannot enter this flow. Moving around, making noise, unbalanced, and unfocused, we come to believe in a false world, a static world full of fixed objects, fixed states with beginnings, middles, and ends.”
― Alan Lew, Be Still and Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life

“This, I think, is the most significant moment of personal transformation we ever reach in our lives—the moment when we realize that the thing we can’t stand about ourselves is our divine name; the moment when we realize that the thing about ourselves we have been avoiding, the thing we hate to see, is the very thing that makes us unique, that gives us our unique power as human beings. This is the second stage of transformation that meditation brings about in us.”
― Alan Lew, Be Still and Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life

“As children, we are born to a world of breath and pure sound. At first everyone responds to our breathing, and then to the noises we make, but as time goes on, and little by little, these sounds acquire form and become words and concepts. No one pays attention to the sounds we make anymore. We become so infatuated with, so attached to language, concept, and form that we forget all about the world of breath, sound, and gesture they emerged from.”
― Alan Lew, Be Still and Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life