16 Quotes by Ronald D. Siegel

Since everything changes, and we incessantly think about how to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, it’s no wonder we find life difficult.

Try to listen as a musician might – not labeling the sounds but hearing them as music.

Concentration, as a foundation for mindfulness, is a key step on the path to greater sanity.

Luckily, we humans evolved not only mental habits that lead us into emotional difficulty but also faculties through which we can free ourselves from them. The same skills we have used for millennia to understand and thrive in our environment can help us understand how our minds create unnecessary suffering and how to free ourselves from it.

Thinking and planning, wonderful and useful as they are, are at the heart of our daily emotional distress because, unlike other tools, we can’t seem to put these down when we don’t need them.

The traffic jam, rained-out picnic, misplaced keys, and lost sales are all easier to accept. We become more comfortable with the reality that sometimes we’ll get the date or the promotion and other times we won’t. By letting go of our struggle to control everything, we become less easily thrown by life’s daily ups and downs – and less likely to get caught in emotional problems like depression and anxiety or stress-related physical problems like chronic pain and insomnia.

Mindfulness can help us embrace, rather than resist, the inevitable ups and downs of life and equip us to handle our human predicament.