Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes
Mindfulness is so powerful that the fact that it comes out of Buddhism is irrelevant.
Living in a chronic state of unawareness can cause us to miss much of what is most beautiful and meaningful in our lives.
So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.
The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment.
When experience is viewed in a certain way, it presents nothing but doorways into the soul.
Mindfulness is a way of paying attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally, to what goes on in the present moment in your body, mind and the world around you.
If we hope to go anywhere or develop ourselves in any way, we can only step from where we are standing. If we don't really know where we are standing... We may only go in circles.
This is something called "walking meditation." The goal is to learn to be aware of each and every movement and feeling. I know it seems ridiculous, but it does change the way you experience walking.
We call the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment ‘practice’ or ‘meditation practice.’
Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us.
Most people don't realize that the mind constantly chatters. And yet, that chatter winds up being the force that drives us much of the day in terms of what we do, what we react to, and how we feel.
When you're walking, just walk. When you're eating, just eat. Not in front of the TV, not with the newspaper. It turns out, that's huge.
Even before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that's compounded by a factor of trillions.
A lot of harm has come in all eras from people attached to one view of spiritual “truth.”
Most people think that to meditate, I should feel a particular special something, and if I don't, then I must be doing something wrong.
The Zen people from Ancient China, "When you're walking, just walk." It turns out to be the hardest thing.
You can bring together the body's various systems to fine tune the body and mind in order to navigate life's ups and downs in a way that minimizes stress and maximizes well-being and satisfaction.
I was very much a tough New York street kid. I went to a school where you had to learn how to get along with everybody or fight with everybody, and I did my fair share of both.
The mind that has not been developed or trained is very scattered. That's the normal state of affairs, but it leaves us out of touch with a great deal in life, including our bodies.
To drop into being means to recognize your interconnectedness with all life, and with being itself. Your very nature is being part of larger and larger spheres of wholeness.
Look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them.... Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all.
In letting go of wanting something special to occur, maybe we can realize that something special is already occurring.
Awareness Is Not The Same As ThoughtMore Like A Vessel Which Can Hold And Contain Our Thinking
Nourishing the soul is the process of drinking at the life stream, coming back to one's true self, embracing the whole of one's experience - good, bad, or ugly; painful or exalted; dull or boring.
Non-doing simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way.
Anybody who is imitating somebody else, no matter who it us, is heading in the wrong direction. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself.
Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience.
The challenge for mindfulness is to be present for your experience as it is rather than immediately jumping in to change it or try to force it to be different.
The challenge for each of us is to find out who we are and to live our way into our own calling.we do this by paying close attention to all aspects of life as they unfold in the present moment.
Through it all, we attempt to bring balance to the present moment, understanding that in patience lies wisdom, knowing that what will come next will be determined in large measure by how we are now.
After all, if you really aren't trying to get anywhere else in this moment, patience takes care of itself.
Meditation had never been tried before in a medical center, so we had no idea whether mainstream Americans would accept a clinic whose foundation was intensive training in meditative discipline.
