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Tag: Leading

  • The Value of Mindfulness Practice: 13 Quotes from Women Leading the Movement

    The Value of Mindfulness Practice: 13 Quotes from Women Leading the Movement

    Earlier this year, the Mindful editorial team had the joy of interviewing 10 women leading the charge to make the world a more kind, connected place for our 2025 edition of the Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement feature article. With each conversation, we were inspired by these women’s stories, heartened by their dedication to true compassion, and puzzled over how we were going to fit so much wisdom into such short profiles. Spoiler alert: Despite our best efforts, a lot of great stuff ended up having to be cut. Here, we’re sharing some of their wise words about mindfulness that didn’t make it into the feature, but deserve to be shared. 

    To learn more about The Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement: 2025, check out the feature article here, and guided meditations by the women here. 

    13 Quotes About Mindfulness and Meditation

    1. “I think the absolute superpower of mindfulness is that it’s always available. We can find mindfulness in any moment. We don’t need any equipment.” – Vidyamala Burch

    2. “If you put 50 different brains together in a circle and you look at all of them, they’re all going to be completely different. They’re all going to be thinking and perceiving their environment in individual and unique ways. And they’re all perfect exactly as they are. Same with mindfulness: Every single person who sits down to meditate is doing so through the fabric of their wiring and their brain structure, so it’s going to be different for every single solitary person.” – Sue Hutton

    “Every single person who sits down to meditate is doing so through the fabric of their wiring and their brain structure, so it’s going to be different for every single solitary person.”

    Sue Hutton

    3. “Mindfulness doesn’t have to be all serious, something we only do when we’re stuck or when there’s suffering. We can even play with mindfulness. When we are having a good time, a good conversation, in the good moments when everything is going well for us, we tend to forget about mindfulness.” – Shalini Bahl

    4. “What I understand, through my practice, is that we all get the journeys we’re meant to have.” – Nanea Reeves

    5. “As a pastor, I believe in this process of mindfulness meditation. You have to own your own space, and so it’s not one-size-fits-all. Everybody approaches it differently. Nevertheless, it’s still mindfulness. It’s still meditation, it’s still tuning in, and it’s still allowing yourself to be present with yourself in the moment. You’re not in control of externals, but you do own the process, your own reckoning, your body structure and system.” – Brenda K. Mitchell

    “You have to own your own space, and so it’s not one-size-fits-all. Everybody approaches it differently. Nevertheless, it’s still mindfulness.”

    Brenda K. Mitchell

    6. “The power of contemplative practice is that it makes us observe what we are bringing, and then question that. Not falling to the inflation of, like, ‘All of what we do is right,’ but rather like, ‘Wait a second, is this truly helpful?’ And if not, what needs to change?” – Yuria Celidwen

    7. “Be present. Let go of clinging. Release into flow and love. Breathe in, breathe out. And that’s kind of it, really.” – Vidyamala Burch

    8. “When we are disconnected from the humanity of ourselves, we behave in ways that are less humane, and that paves the way to see others not in their humanity.” – Shelly Harrell

    9. “The more we can bathe ourselves in self-compassion and realize we’re okay exactly as we are, then we can build that strength, and that gives us a little bit more of a foundation to handle the tough stuff.” – Sue Hutton

    10. “Just by sitting in the moment to connect to our breath, to try to shift our mindset to just being grateful for the gift of life—which, you know, a breathing practice will definitely connect you to—even if I don’t feel good about who I am in the world in that moment, the fact that I’m taking that time to approach self-care is an act of self-love.” – Nanea Reeves

    “Who we truly are, what we truly are, has been calling us home.”

    Caverly Morgan 

    11. “What we long for is our very being. We are what we’ve been striving after. Who we truly are, what we truly are, has been calling us home. It’s possible, then, to rest in who you are rather than trying to become who you think you should be. So if you meditate to be a better person or to be more compassionate, you’ll always be busy trying to be a better person or trying to be more compassionate. But if you practice mindfulness because you’re just in love with resting in your own luminous, infinite being, you’ll always be in love.” – Caverly Morgan

    12. “Clearly, within mindfulness, if we really look at the teachings more deeply, interconnectedness is core, but a lot of the teaching front-facing is how it can help you with stress and be more happy and be more individually not attached to the world in some way…There’s a different vibe you can feel when you’re in spaces that are emphasizing things like detachment and bliss.” – Shelly Harrell

    13. “What we call pain is a mixture of all those factors: sensations, resistance, resentment, breath holding, tension, stress, anxiety, fear, all that. And what we can do with mindfulness is we can interrupt that cascade.” – Vidyamala Burch



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  • 13 Life Lessons From Women Leading the Mindfulness Movement

    13 Life Lessons From Women Leading the Mindfulness Movement

    Earlier this year, the Mindful editorial team had the joy of interviewing 10 women leading the charge to make the world a more kind, connected place for our 2025 edition of the Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement feature article. With each conversation, we were inspired by these women’s stories, heartened by their dedication to true compassion, and puzzled over how we were going to fit so much wisdom into such short profiles. Spoiler alert: Despite our best efforts, a lot of great stuff ended up having to be cut. Here, we’re sharing some of their wise words and life lessons that didn’t make it into the feature, but deserve to be shared. 

    To learn more about The Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement: 2025, check out the feature article here, and guided meditations by the women here. 

    13 Quotes About Life From Women Leading the Mindfulness Movement

    1. “Oftentimes being the only woman in the room, working in the video game industry, I could really just drop into the moment because I do an open-eye meditation. No one knows what I’m doing. I can choose to not react to how I might be feeling in that moment in a way that could be self-destructive. And sometimes not speaking up can be self-destructive. So it’s really just learning how to insert that pause, and then make the choice that’s the right one for me in that moment.” – Nanea Reeves 

    2. “I didn’t start a mindfulness practice because I was interested in Zen Buddhism or enlightenment. I started a mindfulness practice because, to put it bluntly, I had this holy s*** moment of realizing that something had been running my life that I didn’t even know was running it.” – Caverly Morgan

    “It’s been awesome to honor the space that belongs to my son, because that piece of me has never left me. The love resides, and we occupy the same space.”

    Brenda K. Mitchell

    3. “I lost a son to gun violence, and there is an understanding that there will never be a new norm for you. Normal is not something that I look for. It will never happen. But what I did learn to do [through mindful practices] was to create a new narrative for myself that allowed space to be happy. It’s been awesome to honor the space that belongs to my son, because that piece of me has never left me. The love resides, and we occupy the same space.” – Brenda K. Mitchell

    4. “What I sometimes say these days is that the highest teaching of all is to relax the bum. Because if you like, you just try it right now. If you relax your bum, it’s very hard to be mentally and physically agitated with a soft bum. The other thing about that that makes it the highest teaching is it’s good humored, because that’s another thing about mindfulness: the more I practice it, the more I realize it’s innately associated with lightheartedness, which I find really interesting because we can think mindfulness would make you a very serious, kind of earnest person.” – Vidyamala Burch

    5. “Soul is not a noun, it’s a verb. Soul is experience—of inner aliveness, of being touched and moved and this depth of experience and this real sense of interconnectedness.” – Shelly Harrell

    6. “That was a really huge realization for me, that strength is kind of like a skill, like riding a bike or learning to drive a car or learning the steps of a dance, like you can actually learn it and then get competent at it and then it can become like second nature. When I heard that, for me it was like a beacon of hope.” – Melli O’Brien

    7. “There’s so much craving. Like when my husband [who has dementia] can speak a whole sentence, I go, ‘Oh wow, good!’ and then when he forgets and gets frustrated in expressing himself, my heart sinks. So all of this is happening and I’m very glad that I’ve got this practice of knowing that all this is human, and going, Can I create space to watch it come and go?” – S. Helen Ma

    8. “My late husband was a beautiful meditator, and very traditional. And I feel like our life together informed what I’m building now in a way that, you know, part of his energy is still continuing.” – Nanea Reeves

    9. “When the inner critic speaks, we meet that voice with an unconditionally loving reassurance. And it’s really important to acknowledge that reassurances are just a voice that says the opposite of the inner critic. So it’s not responding to the voice that says, You’re not smart enough with another voice that says, You’re the smartest person in the room! An unconditionally loving reassurance says, I love you no matter what. You’re going to have days where you feel like you nailed it and you’re going to have days where you feel like you flopped. And I’m here and worthy, no matter what. That’s where the real healing is.”  – Caverly Morgan

    “If you want to see me in my fullness, it’s not just on your terms or what makes you comfortable to only see part of me or some fragment of me, but to see the whole me.”

    Shelly Harrell

    10. “Someone actually told me my blackness was not invited into the meditation space. Like I should detach from that, that that would be a better thing to do, that we all should just not even see race, so to speak. That is not the message that is going to make mindfulness inclusive to a diverse population whose real lived experience says, This is what’s happening. If you want to see me in my fullness, it’s not just on your terms or what makes you comfortable to only see part of me or some fragment of me, but to see the whole me.” – Shelly Harrell

    11. “I was so broken, and the trauma changed everything about me. I didn’t want to see another mother go through that. But I’m so grateful to become this new person that I am. I’m still thriving, and I’m still learning. I’m happily on a mindfulness meditation journey and sharing that healing journey with other people.” – Brenda K. Mitchell

    12. “The reason I started this work, and the reason I continue this work, is thinking back to when I was a 25-year-old young woman lying in a hospital bed and being told there wasn’t anything medically that could be done to help me. My back was damaged in such ways that there was no medical solution and I had to figure it all out for myself, how to create a good life with this body. For, you know, a lot of that time it has been very lonely and difficult so I’ve always thought, If I can help one person have an easier time of it, then that is my life’s work. The fact is, it’s now hundreds of thousands of people who have learned this superpower where any given moment you have this choice: Do you crank your pain up or do you dial it down? It’s so accessible. It’s just amazing.” – Vidyamala Burch

    13. “Dance became a place, particularly when I started choreographing, that was a refuge. It was a place where I could connect deeply to my body and allow my body to be a mode of expression. It was a place I could come home to. I very much began to experience my body as home. Coming home to my somatic experience was part of what dance did. Coming home but also allowing expression of whatever that inner experience was, it came out through movement and so movement became meditation.” – Shelly Harrell



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