"Mental health
is not simply the absence of mental illness." Matthieu Richard
"If we're
unwise, then most often the only way we know how to deal with pain is to escape
from it through absorbing the mind into something pleasurable, which leads to
the blind pursuit of sensory pleasure.
Yet that contributes to a greater sense of stress and dislocation."
Ajahn Amaro
Stopping and opening
one's field of awareness is, ultimately, a radical act of self-compassion and
wisdom.
"The
fulfillment of one's aspiration for happiness really lies in the transformation
of one's undisciplined state to a more disciplined state of mind". Dalai
Lama
"There's an
enormous emphasis in Buddhism on creating community. It is said that on one occasion the Buddha's
attendant Ananda, being very impressed by the importance of community for one's
own individual spiritual practice, said, "Lord, it seems like half the
practice is sangha" (sangha being the community). And Buddha responded, "Say not so,
Ananda. The sangha is the whole of the
practice". Alan Wallace
"People are
stuck in suffering and can't move on to the good news that there's relief from
suffering". Dr Jan Chozen Bays
"The Buddhist
psychological training, or treatment, if you will, shifts us from what is
suboptimal -- the entanglement in confusion, addiction, rigidity, and so forth
-- toward what is normal, with a greater increase of healthy states and,
finally, to extraordinary mental health, well-being, and inner freedom".
Jack Kornfield
"We're not
designed as an organism to take in the suffering of the whole world." Dr
Jan Chozen Bays
"The antidote
of media fasting could be a very powerful treatment for our mental health,
collectively and individually." Dr Jan Chozen Bays
"Meditation is
full of mistakes, heartaches, and boring moments, and the feeling of getting
nowhere. It's doing it every day,
preferably twice a day, that makes all the difference. Then it becomes a divine therapy that does
two things. It spontaneously affirms our
basic goodness, hence addressing the whole panorama of low self-esteem that is
epidemic in Western culture. The other
thing meditation addresses is the unconsciousness and all the repressed
emotional junk of a lifetime. That
repressed material is warehoused in the body and causes all kinds of
problems." Father Keating
"The greatest
step toward happiness that we can make is to recognize that happiness and
pleasure are not the same thing."
Father Keating
"Heedlessness
is thought to be one of the core conditions that give rise to all sorts of
destructive behavior". Dalai Lama
"The starting
point of Buddhism is really the nature of reality and the fact of one's
existence, the human condition". Dalai Lama
"The problems
of mind are very complex, so the antidote also must be comprehensive. Mindfulness is just one part of that."
Dalai Lama
"Many problems
are essentially due to ignorance.
Ignorance brings with it an unrealistic attitude and unrealistic
attitude brings a lot of mental problems.
Accept reality, and approach it more realistically." Dalai Lama
