The Mindful Catholic Quotes

“True mercy toward others, as with true forgiveness, requires a Christian disposition. As Christ said, even the sinners love their friends. It is easy to show kindness to people who are kind to us. It is easy to be charitable to those who are agreeable to us. The completely counterintuitive, radical proposal of Christianity, the thing that differs from every other world religion and makes us look like fools according to Scripture, is forgiveness of our enemies.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“In the midst of our deepest pain, we want to be in control. We want to be able to ask why and have an answer that is acceptable to us. We want to rely on our own strength of mind. Yet this is not the way of faith, and it is not the path to holiness. It is not being as children who trust in a Father who loves us.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“The path of acceptance is the one you walk with peace, but peace does not mean the alleviation of suffering. Peace is that deep, interior stillness that tells you that no matter what kind of catastrophe might be happening in your life or in the world, everything is going to be OK. It is the sense that there is a meaning to all of this, even if you can’t understand it. It is the sense that someone bigger than you is in charge, that the weight of the world does not rest on your shoulders, and that it is OK to break down and not be “strong enough” (no one is strong enough). The reality is that no matter how much money you make, how great a family you have or come from, how successful you’ve been in life, or how many people count on you to take care of things, you still know deep down that it could all fall apart at any moment. The path of acceptance is the realization that it is OK to be in need, like a child, which resonates with the deep sense that you really are just a child. You actually can’t stop tragedy from happening, you can’t block suffering, and you are not strong enough to protect yourself from every possible danger. This is the sense of being a child, and the only way to peace is to know it is OK to be a child because you have a Father who loves you and takes care of you.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“People’s experience of suffering is very much relative to their own lives. At the end of the day, every person has a choice to make about which path to take when confronted with suffering: avoidance or acceptance. Every difficulty you encounter comes with this choice.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“God made your body with the capacity to feel physical consequences of the mental events occurring in your mind. In fact, he made your body capable of picking up on extremely subtle cues from the environment and other people, and even spiritual realities beyond the material world. God designed the body to act like a radar, detecting movements within and without to help you make informed decisions about your life.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“Ironically, it is by letting go of immediate judgment that we greatly develop our ability to make healthy transcendent judgments.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“Awareness is like naming something: As soon as you name it, you are in control of it.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“Even if we are stuck in a spiral at some level, there is always a higher level where some choice could be made to move one step away from the spiral.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“The simple fact that you have a thought does not mean the thought is true. The simple fact that you have a feeling does not mean the feeling is accurate. Thoughts and feelings happen, but they don’t have the authority to lay claim to truth. Just because they happen doesn’t mean we have to obey them, respect them, or let our lives be run by them.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“Now the twenties are the worst decade of life development in terms of symptoms of anxiety and depression. “Midlife crisis” is statistically no longer the most difficult life stage; it is now “emerging adulthood.” A person’s life in his or her twenties can be the most tumultuous time of the entire life span.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“The loop circles back again when the mind observes what is happening in the body. Adam felt his heart pounding and worried about his health. He started imagining scenarios in which he had a heart attack and left his family abandoned. He imagined what would happen if the firm went under and he didn’t know how to start over. He imagined his sister dying and the grief they would all suffer. These thoughts triggered worse feelings in his body and the cycle only continued.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“EXERCISE Mindfulness of Body and Breath This is a basic exercise to introduce you to some of the principal elements of a mindfulness exercise. Your breath is an anchor that will be revisited often throughout the coming weeks. While there is some spiritual meaning to the breath (Holy Spirit, creation of the world, etc.), the most important thing about the breath for a mindfulness exercise is that it is always with you, and it is always fluctuating. It is generally easier to pay focused attention to things that are moving because they hold your interest a bit more than things that are static. You will develop the ability to focus on static points, but you will always be able to return to the breath.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“You can quickly turn the time you spend being aware of your body as it is into a prayer of gratitude, wonder, and awe at the creation of your own being.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“Having mindful awareness of the other person means hearing and understanding the thoughts and feelings of the person talking to you, without the filter of your own autopilot interpretations. As someone is talking to you about his or her perspective, especially in an emotionally charged conversation, you are certainly going to have all kinds of thoughts that cross your mind. You will be refuting the other perspective if it goes against yours, you will be figuring out where the holes are in the story or how the past events are being misremembered, or you will simply be thinking about how you are so misunderstood. This can happen in a boardroom or a bedroom. It happens anywhere there are two people with different perspectives. Those thoughts are like clouds floating past in the sky, and your practice as someone in the listening role should be to turn back to the present experience of the other person’s thoughts and feelings that are being expressed. Just as you learn how to redirect your focus from critical thoughts about yourself when you are trying to pay attention to your breath, you can turn your focus away from critical thoughts of the person speaking and back to his or her actual thoughts and feelings.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“Most of us are really good at knowing when we are in the expressing role. As St. Teresa of Ávila said, “Many people are good at talking but bad at understanding.” That’s because most of us always want to be in the expressing role. We feel like our perspective or opinion is vital to the conversation, more so than the other person’s, and so the motivation is to make sure that our side is understood.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“The beauty and the hope here is that who we are cannot be diminished by who we think we are.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“Somewhere along the way you may have developed a script for perfectionism, one that says you are not doing enough, are not good enough, or don’t work hard enough. This script perpetuates the doing mode, as it creates a near-constant problem to be solved. If this is true for you at some level, you are living in a perpetual state of escaping the hawk ready to swoop in on you at any moment. This mind-set reduces your creativity, closes off your perspective from the big picture, and prevents you from finding solutions to your actual, solvable problems with any outside-the-box thinking.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“Creativity is an essential element in problem solving, but it doesn’t work very well when anxiety is increasing”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

“Since we can hold only a limited number of things at once in our working memory, we tend to get very frustrated when the memory banks fill up. The more we are expected to accomplish at once, the slower our processing speed gets. It’s like opening multiple windows on the computer. If you start too many programs without shutting others down, the computer slows down.”
― Gregory Bottaro, The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time