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Recently, I have been feeling restless.

I can’t stop thinking. I can’t stop feeling. My body is tense and my mind is tired.

When I used to teach meditation, I used to encourage my students to wait for the first thought that may appear during the first five minutes of their meditation session. Then I would tell them to watch how a single thought could generate even more thoughts and stir within them many different emotions.

Most of them would say that they couldn’t understand how one silly idea could lead to a whole set of scattered thoughts. In Buddhism, they call that overwhelming mental chatter “a monkey mind.”

My monkey mind has been on overdrive lately, and I know I’m not the only one.

Practicing mindfulness and incorporating meditation and yoga into our daily routine sometimes feels like it’s not enough.

Many years ago when I read Buddhism is Not What You Think and Buddhism Plain and Simple by Steve Hagen, I came to understand that the nature of our minds is extremely tricky. We believe every thought and emotion and easily get attached to them. We create our own suffering when in reality we can avoid it.

Although I know how to come back to my center, my mind keeps dragging me down. I am calm, but I am not focused. I am happy, but I am not grounded. Today, I feel that I need to read Hagen’s words once more so I can calm my aching heart and anxious mind.

If you also feel out of sorts, give these eight quotes a read:

1. “We determine what is good, what is bad, what ought to be, and what ought not to be—all out of our inclinations of mind. But we seldom recognize the total relativity—the total meaninglessness—of all our defining. We don’t see that it’s through our obsession with meaning that we create meaninglessness.”

2. “What purpose does it serve to deny actual experience in order to run with an idea instead?”

3. “See confusion as confusion. Acknowledge suffering as suffering. Feel pain and sorrow and divisiveness. Experience anger or fear or shock for what they are. But you don’t have to think of them as evil—as intrinsically bad, as needing to be destroyed or driven from our midst. On the contrary, they need to be absorbed, healed, made whole.”

4. “How can something cease to exist that has no solid existence in the first place?”

5. “We often think we know things when in fact it’s only our imagination taking us further and further away from what is actually happening. What we imagine then seems very real to us. Soon we’re caught up in our imaginary longings and loathings. But if you’re here—truly present—you realize there’s nothing to run from or to go after. You can stay calm…Just be with this moment and see what’s going on.”

6. “If it’s Truth we’re after, we’ll find that we cannot start with any assumptions or concepts whatsoever. Instead, we must approach the world with bare, naked attention, seeing it without any mental bias—without concepts, beliefs, preconceptions, presumptions, or expectations.”

7. “Good and bad aren’t absolutes. They are beliefs, judgements, ideas based on limited knowledge as well as on the inclinations of our minds.”

8. “Our problem is that we don’t pay attention to what we actually know. We give our attention to what we think—to what we have ideas or beliefs about—and we discard what we actually see.”

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