Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes

You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

It is indeed a radical act of love just to sit down and be quiet for a time by yourself.

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.

The little things? The little moments? They aren't little.

Patience is a form of wisdom. It demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things must unfold in their own time.

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.

If we are honest with ourselves, most of us will have to admit that we live out our lives in an ocean of fear.

Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.

We take care of the future best by taking care of the present now.

Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.

No one can listen to your body for you... To grow and heal, you have to take responsibility for listening to it yourself.

Practice moment to moment non-judgemental awareness.

But you cannot have harmony without a commitment to ethical behavior. It's the fence that keeps out the goats that will eat all the young shoots in your garden.

Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more.

Perhaps we just need little reminders from time to time that we are already dignified, deserving, worthy.

Mindfulness is about love and loving life. When you cultivate this love, it gives you clarity and compassion for life, and your actions happen in accordance with that.

When you pay attention to boredom it gets unbelievably interesting.

The awareness is not part of the darkness or the pain; it holds the pain, and knows it, so it has to be more fundamental, and closer to what is healthy and strong and golden within you.

Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.

Dying without actually fully living, without waking up to our lives while we have the chance, is an ongoing and significant risk.

You are only here now; you're only alive in this moment.

Maybe the fear is that we are less than we think we are, when the actuality of it is that we are much much more.

One way to look at meditation is as a kind of intrapsychic technology that's been developed over thousands of years by traditions that know a lot about the mind/body connection.

Just stopping, is a radical act of sanity and love.

Mindfulness meditation is the embrace of any and all mind states in awareness, without preferring one to another.

Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.

Too much of the education system orients students toward becoming better thinkers, but there is almost no focus on our capacity to pay attention and cultivate awareness.

Writing can be an incredible mindfulness practice.

Meditation is really a non-doing. It is the only human endeavor I know of being where you already are.

See for yourself whether letting go when a part of you really wants to hold on doesn't bring a deeper satisfaction than clinging.

Perhaps the most "spiritual" thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.

There are a lot of different ways to talk about mindfulness, but what it really means is awareness.

Breathing is central to every aspect of meditation training. It's a wonderful place to focus in training the mind to be calm and concentrated.

Meditation is simply about being yourself and know about who that is.

He who dies before he dies does not die when he dies.

The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.

Stillness, insight, and wisdom arise only when we can settle into being complete in this moment, without having to seek or hold on to or reject anything.

When awareness embraces the senses, it enlivens them.

For men and women alike, this journey is a the trajectory between birth and death, a human life lived. No one escapes the adventure. We only work with it differently.

Meditation is like farming... the right soil is required to grow anything, nothing will grow if the soil is polluted by striving or pushing too hard.

From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

From the point of view of the meditative traditions the entire society is suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Discipline provides a constancy which is independent of what kind of day you had yesterday and what kind of day you anticipate today.

The only time that any of us have to grow or change or feel or learn anything is in the present moment. But we're continually missing our present moments, almost willfully, by not paying attention.

There is just this moment. We are not trying to improve or to get anywhere else.

In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are the same word.

See If You Can Give Yourself Gifts That May Be True Blessings, Such As Self-Acceptance

In any given moment we are either practicing mindfulness, or defacto, we are practicing mindlessness.

Generosity is another quality which, like patience, letting go, non-judging, and trust, provides a solid foundation for mindfulness practice.