The mind spends most of the time lost in fantasies and illusions, reliving pleasant or unpleasant experiences and anticipating the future with eagerness or fear. While lost in such cravings or aversions, we are unaware of what is happening now, what we are doing now.
— S. N. Goenka
Passioned Unpleasant Experiences quotations
Develop a mind that is vast like space, where experiences both pleasant and unpleasant can appear and disappear without conflict, struggle or harm. Rest in a mind like vast sky.
Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience.
It isn't more complicated that that. It is opening to or recieving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it.
We cannot learn real patience and tolerance from a guru or a friend.
They can be practiced only when we come in contact with someone who creates unpleasant experiences. According to Shantideva, enemies are really good for us as we can learn a lot from them and build our inner strength.
If anyone wonders why the airlines are not doing well it is because flying has been made such an unpleasant and degrading experience.
It is in the character of growth that we should learn from both pleasant and unpleasant experiences.
To hear that your neighbor was worse off than yourself was not an altogether unpleasant experience.
If someone is unpleasant to you, draw a halo around his or her head in your mind. He/she is an angel who came to teach you something.
Suffering for eight hours...the most unpleasant experience I've ever had.
Besides getting several paper cuts in the same day or receiving the news that someone in your family has betrayed you to your enemies, one of the most unpleasant experiences in life is a job interview.
Do you want to know a good way to fall in love? Just associate with all your pleasant experiences with someone, and disassociate from all the unpleasant ones.
Barbara Boxer is the most bitterly partisan, most anti-defense senator in the United States Senate today. I know that because I've had the unpleasant experience of having to serve with her.
To one who has led a virtuous life, to sin is the easiest thing in the world.
No experience of unpleasant consequences grits that smooth sliding fall, no recollection of disillusionment blurs that pure desire.
I was coerced into taking piano lessons in the early '50s. It was a quite unpleasant experience.
Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility -- the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.
Flying is always an unpleasant experience.
You wait an hour for every ten minutes you actually spend getting anywhere.
Migration was not the only unpleasant experience I went though.
I was born and lived in a country ruled by a brutal dictator whose wars never ended, and from an early age I was passionate about understanding the world through knowledge.
Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences. They say to themselves, for example, 'So this is what an earthquake is like,' and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge of the world increased by this new item.
Sometimes it's harder to play good tennis with a bad tennis player - the same way it's hard to be a good actor with a bad actor. It's just an unpleasant experience.
I think a lot of people are very good, but I don't think anybody could do my rhythm. I was thinking, "If you want my rhythm" - and when I was writing, I was writing them for myself - "why am I watching another actor doing what I should be doing?" It was just a really unpleasant experience.
When anyone apologizes to us he has to do it very expertly: otherwise we might easily come to see ourselves as the guilty party and experience unpleasant feelings.
All experiences, what does not kill you makes you stronger and tougher I think.
Life's experiences, whether they be pleasant, unpleasant, torturous or excruciatingly wonderful and blissful, season you somehow and you learn from them.
Oh, forgive me. Shaking hands with me is an unpleasant experience. My hands are no longer hands.
We should understand that our problems do not exist outside of ourself, but are part of our mind that experiences unpleasant feelings.
A perfect practice of Christianity would, of course, consist in a perfect imitation of the life of Christ -- I mean, in so far as it was applicable in one's own particular circumstance. Not in an idiotic sense -- it doesn't mean that every Christian should grow a beard, or be a bachelor, or become a travelling preacher. It means that every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God.
Everyone is perfectly willing to learn from unpleasant experience - if only the damage of the first lesson could be repaired.
It's actually a very unpleasant experience to read a Nature paper, or to read a Science paper.
A tragic mistake that is often made is to assume that the will of God is bound to be something very dull and uninviting, if not positively unpleasant. Consciously or not some persons look upon God as a hard taskmaster, or a severe parent. . . . The truth is that the will of God for us always means greater freedom, greater self-expression, newer and brighter experience, wider opportunity of service to others-life more abundant.
Life is an ever-flowing process and somewhere on the path some unpleasant things will pop up - it might leave a scar, but then life is flowing, and like running water, when it stops it grows stale. Go bravely on, my friend, because each experience teaches us a lesson. Keep blasting because life is such that sometimes it is nice and sometimes it is not.
Any attempt to capture the direct experience of the nature of mind in words is impossible. The best that can be said is that it is immeasurably peaceful and, once stabilized through repeated experience, virtually unshakable. It's an experience of absolute well-being that radiates through all physical, emotional and mental states-even those that might ordinarily be labeled as unpleasant.
Everything we experience-no matter how unpleasant-comes into our lives to teach us something.
We have to face the unpleasant as well as the affirmative side of the human story, including our own story as a nation, our own stories of our peoples. We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.
We fake perfect so others don't have to experience any unpleasant realities, because their life is just as fake as ours.
We use mindfulness to observe the way we cling to pleasant experiences &
push away unpleasant ones.
...I am happy to welcome you to a town peopled in morons exclusively. Furthermore, I hope that your transformation to moron is not an unpleasant experience.