This is a curated selection of Diane Musho Hamilton quotes (primarily sourced from publicly available videos, and personally curated by me on my own lifelong learning journey). This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Diane Musho Hamilton’s books (Amazon).
Page Contents:
- Meditation & Mediation Quotes
- Sameness & Difference Quotes
- Awareness & Attention Quotes
- Conflict & Regulation Quotes
- Perspectives & Selves Quotes
25 Diane Musho Hamilton Quotes on Meditation, Mediation, Conflict, & More
Diane Musho Hamilton Quotes on Meditation & Mediation
“I’m a mediator, and I’m a meditator. It’s taken me until probably 10 years ago to realize that fundamentally they’re the same thing … ‘Meditate’ and ‘mediate’ both literally mean ‘to bring two into one.’” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“Mediation and meditation really have a lot to do with deepening our experience of our inherent unity, and then using differences as a way for us to grow because the universe evolves through this alteration between sameness and difference.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“Mediation is about bringing two differing points of view—or two different sets of interests, or a conflict in which there are many parties—into one solution … As a mediator, I’ll work with a group of people who, for whatever reason, disagree—or maybe they’re having a particular kind of conflict, or maybe they’re having a contract dispute—but what’s front and center in their awareness is not the way in which they’re the same, but the way in which they’re different.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“With meditation, when you sit down on the cushion, you’re bringing your body, speech, and mind into one moment and creating coherence with your life. So, you could say meditation is a way of becoming one with your life … When we meditate, we literally bring our attention into the here and now so that our body, our breath, our mind, and the expanse of our environment become one—and then we practice just learning to stay present and available to things as they are. This practice of sitting still, of being awake, is really a practice in discovering our fundamental sameness.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“Spiritual practice—whether it’s meditation, or prayer, or reading sacred texts, or singing together—is about fundamentally discovering the identity that is beyond the personal and separate self … Our deepest spiritual insight is really a glimpse into our sameness.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
Diane Musho Hamilton Quotes on Sameness & Difference
“Our differences are always connected to our fundamental commonality.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“Without deeper levels of sameness—of bonding, of trust, of belonging—it’s very difficult to explore our differences in a way that’s optimal.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“Coherence is really important to human efficiency, but differentiation and struggle is important to human creativity.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“Everything is okay as it is. There’s a deep recognition that feeling that level of peace and serenity is actually our birthright. It’s actually the case that we are fundamentally at home where we are … When we’re awake, and when we’re available to what is, and when we trust that we belong fundamentally, we’re not separate from others and we’re not separate from any life forms.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“The Buddha had been on a very extensive spiritual search for about six years, and there was a point at which he was looking for a quality of mind that was unconditioned, that was utterly reliable, in which the body and mind became completely peaceful. In order for that to occur, in a way, the experience of difference is relaxed, and one opens to whatever is arising. Without judgment and without a need for things to be different, there’s a sense of a deepening, and a coherence, and a coming into a quality of unity.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
Diane Musho Hamilton Quotes on Awareness & Attention
“Awareness is like an open, wide-angle lens. When you narrow the lens and focus on something in particular and become attentive to that thing, that’s mindfulness. So, we’re both mindful and aware.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“Mindfulness refers to paying attention to anything that arises within this open field of awareness … Mindfulness is the ability to notice what is in my awareness, what objects are in awareness.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“To the extent that we’re telling a story, cognition is preoccupied with that story, and our awareness cannot be extended as openly as it would otherwise.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“We have this incredible freedom to notice and to pay attention, and we have an even more radical and powerful capacity to notice what it is we’re noticing. And, when we start to notice what it is we’re noticing, we become interested in that which is paying attention. So, not only do I notice the objects of my attention, but I start to notice that I am paying attention—and then I get interested in that capacity, and I start to identify with my awareness.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“Qualities of well-being start to arise when I identify as awareness—when I’m not bound up by the coming and going of objects in my mind … Identify with awareness, and be awareness itself … Attention shifts from the object to the subject.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
Diane Musho Hamilton Quotes on Conflict & Regulation
“If you have two coexisting truths in your head at any one time, you literally have to deal with the disruption in your body.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“When those sensations build up in the body and our defensive systems start to be activated, we actually are not able to learn … Commit to experiencing the sensation. Stop the thoughts. Experience the sensation. Literally receive them. Get to know them.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“Listening is the golden communication skill for soothing the room, for bringing your own nervous system and other people’s nervous systems into coherence … Never ever confuse listening with agreement … You can give someone a very profound experience of hearing them out without agreeing at all with what it is they’re saying.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“Conflict is an embodied experience … Within a conflict situation, neurobiology drives a lot of what happens … The thing I pay the most attention to is what’s happening in our bodies when I’m working with conflict.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“When human beings go to war with each other, one of the first things we do is dehumanize the enemy. Because the enemy has to become ‘not me’. If it’s not me, then I can abuse you, I can kill you, I can destroy you. But, as soon as you’re like me, I no longer can do that.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
Diane Musho Hamilton Quotes on Perspectives & Selves
“We all know that there are certain developmental tasks that get accomplished at certain ages (in children). But, the same is true of adults. We also can expand and grow our perspectives.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“I suddenly started to see that perspective-taking was developmental … I started to see that there were limits to capacity. And the capacity that I started to notice was the capacity to take perspectives … What I was seeing was just a whole range of people who had different capacity to take different points of view.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“I don’t just assume that everybody’s capacity is the same. I assume that there are differences in capacity and that I have to take that into account … It is not a given that everyone in the room can hold two perspectives in their body-mind at the same time without an overabundance of chaos and tension.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“Some people actually have a difficult time taking their own perspective … Some people literally couldn’t take their own point of view … Then you have people who could take their own point of view, but couldn’t take the point of view of the other.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
“There was a much smaller group of people who not only could they hold one, two, perhaps three, they could hold four, five, six perspectives at once. They could take a perspective on the process. They could think about how the process had evolved from the past and where it might go in the future. They could think about what the impact of the facilitator was on the process.” — Diane Musho Hamilton
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