Words matter. These are the best Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Mindfulness is so powerful that the fact that it comes out of Buddhism is irrelevant.
The ‘find it, fix it ‘model of medicine doesn’t work any more. The U.S. healthcare system is bankrupting the country, bankrolling the insurance companies and exhausting healthcare staff. And despite all that, we are ranked 50th in the world for life expectancy.
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.
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.
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.
When you pay attention to boredom it gets unbelievably interesting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Writing can be an incredible mindfulness practice.
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.
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.
The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment.
It is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from other animals. We can be aware of being aware.
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.
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.
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.
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.
