Henepola Gunaratana quotes

Henepola Gunaratana is a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk and highly respected meditation teacher. Widely known for his book "Mindfulness in Plain English," he has made significant contributions to spreading Vipassana meditation in the West. He continues to inspire practitioners around the world with his teachings and writings. Here are 22 of his quotes:

By silencing the mind, we can experience real peace. As long as various kinds of thoughts agitate the brain, we don't experience 100 percent peace.

Henepola Gunaratana

Peace is not a thought, not a concept; it is a nonverbal experience.

Henepola Gunaratana

Mindfulness gives you time. Time gives you choices. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom. You don't have to be swept away by your feeling. You can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.

Henepola Gunaratana

When you have learned compassion for yourself, compassion for others is automatic.

Henepola Gunaratana

Watch the functioning of your own mind in a calm and detached manner so you can gain insight into your own behavior.

Henepola Gunaratana

Mindfulness helps us freeze the frame so that we can become aware of our sensations and experiences as they are, without the distorting coloration of socially conditioned responses or habitual reactions.

Henepola Gunaratana

Meditation changes your character.

Henepola Gunaratana

Don't cling to anything and don't reject anything.

Henepola Gunaratana

The process of becoming who you will be begins first with the total acceptance of who you are.

Henepola Gunaratana

You can learn not to want what you want, to recognize desires but not be controlled by them.

Henepola Gunaratana

The brain does not manufacture thoughts unless we stimulate it with habitual verbalizing. When we train ourselves by constant practice to stop verbalizing, the brain can experience things as they are.

Henepola Gunaratana

You can only have bliss if you don't chase it.

Henepola Gunaratana

The present moment is changing so fast that we often do not notice its existence at all. Every moment of mind is like a series of pictures passing through a projector. Some of the pictures come from sense impressions. Others come from memories of past experiences or from fantasies of the future.

Henepola Gunaratana

Ignorance may be bliss, but it does not lead to liberation.

Henepola Gunaratana

Let come what comes, and accommodate yourself to that, whatever it is. If good mental images arise, that is fine. If bad mental images arise, that is fine, too. Look on all of it as equal, and make yourself comfortable with whatever happens.

Henepola Gunaratana

No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way, and you just never noticed.

Henepola Gunaratana

Each step along the Buddha's path to happiness requires practising mindfulness until it becomes part of your daily life.

Henepola Gunaratana

Mindfulness is nonconceptual awareness. Another English term for sati is "bare attention.” It is not thinking. It does not get involved with thought or concepts. It does not get hung up on ideas or opinions or memories. It just looks. Mindfulness registers experiences, but it does not compare them. It does not label them or categorize them. It just observes everything as if it was occurring for the first time. It is not analysis that is based on reflection and memory. It is, rather, the direct and immediate experiencing of whatever is happening, without the medium of thought. It comes before thought in the perceptual process.

Henepola Gunaratana

You can't ever get everything you want. It is impossible. Luckily, there is another option: You can learn to control your mind, to step outside of the endless cycle of desire and aversion.

Henepola Gunaratana