Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotations

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

In Asian languages, the word for 'mind' and the word for 'heart' are same. So if you're not hearing mindfulness in some deep way as heartfulness, you're not really understanding it. Compassion and kindness towards oneself are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.

Paying attention and awareness are universal capacities of human beings.

I'll take transformational change any way it comes. 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. To call what happens 'the placebo effect' is just to give a name to something we don't understand.

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

You don't need the iPhone: you have the most exquisite apparatus in the known universe sitting right in your head - the most complex organization of matter in the entire universe. And here are we, feeling a little depressed, feeling like we're not getting where we need to be, when really you might be exactly where you need to be.

Even before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that's compounded by a factor of trillions.

When you pay attention to boredom it gets unbelievably interesting.

Science gave me a cosmic religious feeling, and I would get the same feeling when I was dragged to the Met and the Museum of Modern Art.

Sometimes shutting off the sound on the television can allow you to actually watch the game and take it in in an entirely different and more direct way - a first-order, first-person experience - rather than filtered through the mind of another.

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.

There are certain ways in which I cultivate awareness, both through mindful yoga and taking care of my body and taking time to actually drop as deeply as possible into stillness, into whatever is unfolding in the present moment.

Mindfulness is often spoken of as the heart of Buddhist meditation. It's not about Buddhism, but about paying attention. That's what all meditation is, no matter what tradition or particular technique is used.

It is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from other animals. We can be aware of being aware.

Mindfulness is so powerful that the fact that it comes out of Buddhism is irrelevant.

When you have children, you realize how easy it is to not see them fully, and perhaps miss all those early years. If you are not careful, you can be too absorbed in work, and they will be only too happy to tell you about it later. Being a parent is one of greatest mindfulness practices of all.

I'm challenging everybody on every side of every divide to be more who they are, to cultivate their capacity for awareness.

I loved science, and when I discovered Buddhist meditative practices and martial arts, I was able to bridge those ways of knowing the world into my own unique way. From that grew the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, which became my karmic assignment.

The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment.

I don't want people following Jon Kabat-Zinn. I want them following themselves.

A lot of harm has come in all eras from people attached to one view of 'spiritual' truth.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

There are many different aspects to a formal meditation practice. But the real meditation practice is how you interface with life from moment-to-moment, no matter what's happening. Especially when you are awake, which is pretty much most of the time except for deep sleep.

I started the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979. The idea of bringing Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism into the mainstream of medicine was tantamount to the Visigoths being at the gates about to tear down the citadel of Western civilization.

The notion that the mind and body are actually different sides of the same coin goes all the way back to the origins of medicine. For most of its history, the practice was not separated from other aspects of human activity.

How we see and hold the full range of our experiences in our minds and in our hearts makes an enormous difference in the quality of this journey we are on and what it means to us. It can influence where we go, what happens, what we learn, and how we feel along the way.

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.

Acknowledging that sometimes, often at very crucial times, you really have no idea where you are going or even where the path lies. A the same time, you can very well know something about where you are now (even if it is knowing that you are lost, confused, enraged or without hope).

You make problem, you have problem

The funny thing about stopping is that as soon as you do it, here you are.

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.

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.

Allow your attention to gently alight on your belly, as if you were coming upon a shy animal sunning itself on a tree stump in a clearing in the forest. Feel your belly rise or expand gently on the inbreath, and fall or recede on the outbreath.

Simply put, mindfulness is moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness.

Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic or visible, plant or animal, extinct or living. So there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or to heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known. The particulars count.

In its outward manifestation, meditation appears to involve either stopping, by parking the body in a stillness that suspends activity, or giving oneself over to flowing movement. In either case, it is an embodiment of wise attention, an inward gesture undertaken for the most part in silence, a shift from doing to simply being. It is an act that may at first seem artificial but that we soon discover, if we keep at it, is ultimately one of pure love for the life unfolding within us and around us.

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.

Zen has an expression, "nothing special." When you understand "nothing special," you realize that everything is special. Everything's special and nothing's special. Everything's spiritual and nothing's spiritual. It's how you see, it's what eyes you're looking through, that matters.

As long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than there is wrong, no matter how ill or how hopeless you may feel. But if you hope to mobilize your inner capacities for growth and for healing and to take charge in your life on a new level, a certain kind of effort and energy on your part will be required.... It will take conscious effort on your part to move in a direction of healing and inner peace. This means learning to work with the very stress and pain that is causing you to suffer.

Make a list of what is really important to you. Embody it.

The real meditative practice is to open up to the full range of what happens in life. And parenting is a fantastic arena for doing that kind of spiritual training. It's as much a potential door into enlightenment as anything else.

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.

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

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

My father was a world-class scientist and my mother was a prolific painter. I could see that my parents had completely different ways of knowing and understanding the world, and relating to it. My father approached things through scientific inquiry and exploration, while my mother experienced things through her emotions and senses.

We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable.

It’s interesting to look at your children as line-in Zen masters who can put their finger on places where you’re resistant, or thinking narrowly, in ways noone else can. You can either lose your mind and your authenticity in the process of reacting to all that stuff, or you can use it as the perfect opportunity to grow and nourish your children by attending to what is deepest and best in them and in yourself.

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

Another way to look at meditation is to view thinking itself as a waterfall, a cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness, we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantage point in a cave or depression in the rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.

The real meditation is how you live your life.

Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely, the path that is your life. Meditation may help us see that this path we call our life has direction; that it is always unfolding, moment by moment; and that what happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next.

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.

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

Living in a chronic state of unawareness can cause us to miss much of what is most beautiful and meaningful in our lives.

The importance of the development of the emotional body is hardly recognized today. We are pretty much left to our own devices to come to full adulthood, whether man or woman. Our elders may have become so denatured themselves from a lack of such nurturance that there is no longer a collective knowledge of how to guide the awakening emotional vitality and authenticity of our young people, our children. Mindfulness may contribute to a reawakening of this ancient wisdom in ourselves and in others.

Peace is something that we can bring about if we can actually learn to wake up a bit more as individuals and a lot more as a species; if we can learn to be fully what we actually already are; to reside in the inherent potential of what is possible for us, being human.

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

Even though in principle we may "know better", we routinely succumb all the same to the incessant, often frantic and unexamined busyness of thinking we have to get somewhere else first before we can rest; thinking we need to get certain things done to feel we have accomplished something before we can be happy.

In letting go of wanting something special to occur, maybe we can realize that something special is already occurring.

We are continuously bombarded with information, appeals, deadlines, communications... We are continually being squeezed or projected into the future as our present moments are assaulted and consumed in the fires of endless urgency.

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.

You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.

Awareness Is Not The Same As ThoughtMore Like A Vessel Which Can Hold And Contain Our Thinking

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.

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.

Practice moment to moment non-judgemental awareness.

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

Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. Without calmness, the mirror of mindfulness will have an agitated and choppy surface and will not be able to reflect things with any accuracy.

Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It's about feeling the way you feel.

Can you question who you are? And are you comfortable with not knowing?

Mindfulness is not about getting anywhere else.

We call the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment ‘practice’ or ‘meditation practice.’

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

So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.

Perhaps ultimately, spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous. If you see in this way, then everything becomes spiritual in its deepest sense. Doing science is spiritual. So is washing the dishes.

Buckminster Fuller himself was fond of stating that what seems to be happening at the moment is never the full story of what is really going on. He liked to point out that for the honey bee, it is the honey that is important. But the bee is at the same time nature's vehicle for carrying out cross-pollination of the flowers. Interconnectedness is a fundamental principle of nature. Nothing is isolated. Each event connects with others.

When experience is viewed in a certain way, it presents nothing but doorways into the soul.

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

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.

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.

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

Once you have established yourself as a center of love and kindness radiating throughout your being, which amounts to a cradling of yourself in loving kindness and acceptance, you can dwell here indefinitely, drinking at this fount, bathing it in, renewing yourself, nourishing yourself, enlivening yourself. This can be a profoundly healing practice for body and soul.

Non-doing has nothing to do with being indolent or passive. Quite the contrary. It takes great courage and energy to cultivate non-doing, both in stillness and in activity. Nor is it easy to make a special time for non-doing and to keep at it in the face of everything in our lives which needs to be done.

Writing can be an incredible mindfulness practice.

Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.

When we let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment, we are taking a profound step toward being able to encounter what is here now. 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—a knowing that comes directly from the cultivation of mindfulness—we may only go in circles, for all our efforts and expectations. So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.

Mindful parenting is the hardest job on the planet, but it's also one that has the potential for the deepest kinds of satisfactions over the life span, and the greatest feelings of interconnectedness and community and belonging.

When awareness embraces the senses, it enlivens them.

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.

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...

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

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.

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

To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking.