Top 100 Jon Kabat Zinn Quotes
#1. Thoughts come and go. It's impossible to stop your thoughts, but the idea is that the thoughts are kind of like waves on the ocean. That's Jon Kabat-Zinn's big analogy and that this is actually kind of diving under the waves. And you know it's kind of interesting.
Anderson Cooper
#2. I don't want people following Jon Kabat-Zinn. I want them following themselves.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#3. Even the tiniest manifestation of mindfulness in any moment might give rise to an intuition or insight that could be hugely transforming.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#5. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#6. [R]emain open to not knowing, perhaps allowing yourself to come to the point of admitting, "I don't know," and then experimenting with relaxing a bit into this not knowing instead of condemning yourself for it. After all, in this moment, it may be an accurate statement of how things are for you.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#7. A willingness to embrace and work with what is lies at the core of all meditation practice.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#8. Meditation is neither shutting things out nor off. It is seeing things clearly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#9. Note that this journey is uniquely yours, no one else's. So the path has to be your own. You cannot imitate somebody else's journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#10. It is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from other animals. We can be aware of being aware.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#11. So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#12. Rather, it is bearing in mind what is most important to you so that it is not lost or betrayed in the heat and reactivity of a particular moment.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#13. From the point of view of the meditative traditions the entire society is suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#14. Rarely are we in touch with who is doing the doing - or, put otherwise, with the world of being. To
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#15. Attention leads to connection, connection to regulation, regulation to order, and order to ease (as opposed to dis-ease), or, more colloquially, to health.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#16. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#17. To be patient is simply to be completely open to each moment, accepting it in its fullness, knowing that, like the butterfly, things can only unfold in their own time.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#18. Dying without actually fully living, without waking up to our lives while we have the chance, is an ongoing and significant risk.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#19. No one can listen to your body for you ... To grow and heal, you have to take responsibility for listening to it yourself.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#20. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#21. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#22. Discipline provides a constancy which is independent of what kind of day you had yesterday and what kind of day you anticipate today.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#23. The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#24. You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#25. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#26. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#27. Carl Jung put it this way: "The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one's whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises." With
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#28. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#29. Mindfulness has been called the heart of Buddhist meditation.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#30. Congressman Ryan is a strong advocate for greater mindfulness in health care as well as in other important areas such as education, the military, and criminal justice. In his book, he makes a very strong case for why we need greater mindfulness in these and other areas of our society.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#31. Meditation is not so concerned with how much thinking is going on as it is with how much room you are making for it to take place within the field of your awareness from one moment to the next.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#32. All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#34. Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#35. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#36. What does happen as we intentionally pay attention to our breathing is that we realize pretty quickly that we are
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#37. When experience is viewed in a certain way, it presents nothing but doorways into the soul.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#38. Group meditation according to Jon Kabat
Howard Zinn
#39. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#40. You are whole and also part of larger and larger circles of wholeness you many not even know about. You are never alone. And you already belong. You belong to humanity. You belong to life. You belong to this moment, this breath.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#42. Paying attention on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#43. That sentence is: "Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine." In other words, no attachments - especially to fixed ideas of yourself and who you are.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#44. Mindfulness is so powerful that the fact that it comes out of Buddhism is irrelevant.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#45. Mindfulness meditation is the embrace of any and all mind states in awareness, without preferring one to another.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#46. The present is the only time that we have to know anything.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#47. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#48. Because of this inner busyness, which is going on almost all the time, we are liable either to miss a lot of the texture of our life experience or to discount its value and meaning.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#49. Writing can be an incredible mindfulness practice.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#50. Even before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that's compounded by a factor of trillions.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#51. Meditation is a way of being, not a technique. Meditation is not about trying to get anywhere else. It is about allowing yourself to be exactly where you are and as you are, and the world to be exactly as it is in this moment, as well.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#52. It is not that mindfulness is the "answer" to all life's problems. Rather, it is that all life's problems can be seen more clearly through the lens of a clear mind.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#53. "What is my job on the planet?" is one question we might do well to ask ourselves over and over again. Otherwise, we may wind up doing somebody else's job and not even know it. And what's more, that somebody else might be a figment of our own imagination, and maybe a prisoner of it as well.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#54. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#55. When asked about his apparent lack of anger toward the Chinese by an incredulous reporter at the time he won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama replied something to the effect that: They have taken everything from us; should I let them take my mind as well?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#56. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#57. See If You Can Give Yourself Gifts That May Be True Blessings, Such As Self-Acceptance
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#58. Non-doing simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#59. If we are to grasp the reality of our life while we have it, we will need to wake up to our moments. Otherwise, whole days, even a whole life, could slip past unnoticed.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#60. When we can be centered in ourselves, even for brief periods of time in the face of the pull of the outer world, not having to look elsewhere for something to fill us up or make us happy, we can be at home wherever we find ourselves, at peace with things as they are, moment by moment.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#61. If we are not careful, it is all too easy to fall into becoming more of a human doing than a human being, and forget who is doing all the doing, and why.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#62. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#63. Patience is a form of wisdom. It demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things must unfold in their own time.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#64. But we're not being educated in how to be, only in how to accomplish. So it's all about acquisition, about getting stuff we don't have ... As soon as you realize it's a thought pattern, you can write yourself a restraining order.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#65. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#66. The more you practice, the more skill you can develop in reducing pain or at least becoming more transparent to it, so that it is less eroding of your quality of life.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#67. Oh, I've had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. - NADINE STAIR, EIGHTY-FIVE YEARS OLD, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#68. You have to actually make the time to practice every day, because otherwise you will not find it.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#69. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#70. There are a lot of different ways to talk about mindfulness, but what it really means is awareness.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#71. After all, if you really aren't trying to get anywhere else in this moment, patience takes care of itself.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#72. Any change that comes about in your life will be primarily because of your own efforts
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#73. Thought doesn't wrap around awareness. Awareness wraps around thought.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#74. Either wherever you go there you are or wherever you go there you aren't.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#75. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#76. And remind you that you are here now, and that when you get there, you will be there. If you miss the here, you are likely also to miss the there. If your mind is not centered here, it is likely not to be centered just because you arrive somewhere else.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#77. Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#78. We are not meditating to make anything go away, any more than we are meditating to attain some special state or feeling. Whether we are basically healthy at the moment or have a terminal illness, none of us knows how long we have to live.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#79. Comes up with. This is the flavor of true intentionality and inner discipline. You do it simply
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#80. Knowing what you are doing while you are doing it is the essence of mindfulness practice.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#81. When I was talking to a reporter, she said, "Oh, you mean to live for the moment." I said, "No, it isn't that. That has a hedonistic ring to it. I mean to live in the moment.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#82. Make a list of what is really important to you. Embody it.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#83. Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives. It is about perceiving the exquisite vividness of each moment. We also gain immediate access to our own powerful inner resources for insight, transformation, and healing.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#84. Meditation is really a non-doing. It is the only human endeavor I know of being where you already are.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#85. Paying attention and awareness are universal capacities of human beings.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#86. Living in a chronic state of unawareness can cause us to miss much of what is most beautiful and meaningful in our lives.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#87. There is more right with you than wrong with you" - those
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#88. Just stopping, is a radical act of sanity and love.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#89. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#90. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#91. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#92. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#93. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#94. Just because you decide to still your body and observe your breath from moment to moment doesn't mean that your thinking mind is going to cooperate.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#95. We can learn to work with them, understand them, find meaning in them, make critical choices, and use their energies to grow in strength, wisdom, and compassion.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#96. We take care of the future best by taking care of the present now.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#97. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#98. 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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#99. I'm challenging everybody on every side of every divide to be more who they are, to cultivate their capacity for awareness.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#100. Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing 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. - Jon Kabat
Howard Zinn
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