Can You Find Calm Through Meditation?

Meditation Inspiration

A few parting words of wisdom to meditate on:

"You don't have to be better than anyone else. You don't have to win. You don't have to be number 1 or number 27 or any other number. Give yourself permission to just be." -- Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, from Change Your Thoughts -- Change Your Life

"If your mind is scattered, it is quite powerless." -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, from How to See Yourself as You Really Are

"These days, I love silence.... For the first few minutes, my brain clatters and clangs like a stovetop of agitated, boiling pots and pans. But then I begin to hear the great silence around me, the stillness that underlines all sound. It seems to awaken a version of the same silence that lives within me. The two pools of quiet reach out for each other like magnets, like water droplets on a windshield. When they meet, the cacophony of my mind slows, calms, and on a good day, for a moment, stops." -- Martha Beck, from Leaving the Saints

"I've heard it said that prayer is the act of talking to God, while meditation is the act of listening." -- Elizabeth Gilbert, from Eat, Pray, Love

Originally published in FITNESS magazine, November 2007.