Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes & Sayings

After all, if you really aren't trying to get anywhere else in this moment, patience takes care of itself. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

In any given moment we are either practicing mindfulness, or defacto, we are practicing mindlessness. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Practice moment to moment non-judgemental awareness. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

it is the awareness that is of primary importance, no matter what the objects are that we are paying attention to. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

Breathe and let be. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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

The challenge of mindfulness is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in - no matter how unpleasant, how discouraging, how limited, how unending and stuck they may appear to be - and to make sure that you have done everything in your power to use their energies to transform yourself before you decide to cut your losses and move on. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

One practical way to do this is to look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them of just your thought about them. Sometimes our thoughts act like dream glasses. When we have them on, we see dream children, dream husband, dream wife, dream ob, dream colleagues, dream partners, dream friends. We can live in a dream present for a dream future ... But if we take off the glasses, maybe, just maybe, we might see a little more accurately what is actually here. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Wherever you go, there you are. Whatever you wind up doing, that's what you've wound up doing. Whatever you are thinking right now, that's what's on your mind. Whatever has happened to you, it has already happened. The important question is, "how are you going to handle it?"
... Like it or not, this moment is all we really have to work with. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

TRY: During the day, see if you can detect the bloom of the present moment in every moment, the ordinary ones, the "in-between" ones, even the hard ones. Work at allowing more things to unfold in your life without forcing them to happen and without rejecting the ones that don't fit your idea of what "should" be happening. See if you can sense the "spaces" through which you might move with no effort in the spirit of Chuang Tzu's cook. Notice how if you can make some time early in the day for being, with no agenda, it can change the quality of the rest of your day. By affirming first what is primary in your own being, see if you don't get a mindful jump on the whole day and wind up more capable of sensing, appreciating, and responding to the bloom of each moment. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Patience is an ever present alternative to the mind's endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly, is anger. It's the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it. This doesn't mean you can't hurry when you have to. It is possible even to hurry patiently, mindfully, moving fast because you have chosen to. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? LAO-TZU, Tao-te-Ching — Jon Kabat-Zinn

A lot of harm has come in all eras from people attached to one view of 'spiritual' truth. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

One small shift in the way we each conduct ourselves, and the crystal lattice structure of the world is already different. In this way, we are the world, and when we take responsibility for our small but not insignificant part of it, the whole is already different - the flowering we manifest emotionally and in every other way of some importance, potentially enormous. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

We all have limitations. They are worth befriending. They teach us a lot. They can show us what we most need to pay attention to and honor. They become our cutting edge for learning and growing and gentling ourselves into the present moment as it is. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

If you can't entirely trust what you think, what about trusting awareness? What about trusting your heart? What about trusting your motivation to at least do no harm? What about trusting your experience until it's proven to be inaccurate - and then trusting that discovery? — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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

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

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

Coming to our senses involves cultivating an overarching awareness of all our senses, including our own minds, and their limitations, including the temptation when we feel deeply insecure and have a lot of resources, to try to control as rigidly and as tightly as possible all variables in the external world, an impossible and ultimately depleting, intrinsically violent, — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

He who dies before he dies does not die when he dies. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Mindful sitting meditation is not an attempt to escape from problems or difficulties into some cut-off "meditative" state of absorption or denial. On the contrary, it is a willingness to go nose to nose with pain, confusion, and loss, if that is what is dominating the present moment, and to stay with the observing over a sustained period of time, beyond thinking. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Cannot be imposed, legislated, or decreed. They can only be cultivated, and — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

When we spend some time each day in non-doing, resting in awareness, observing the flow of the breath and the activity of our mind and body without getting caught up in that activity, we are cultivating calmness and mindfulness hand in hand. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Simply put, mindfulness is moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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

As we just saw, in this learning process we assume from the start that as long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than wrong with you, no matter how ill or how despairing you may be feeling in a given moment. 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. The way we put it is that it can be stressful to take the stress reduction program. I sometimes explain this by saying that there are times when you have to light one fire to put out another. There are no drugs that will make you immune to stress or to pain, or that will by themselves magically solve your life's problems or promote healing. It will take conscious effort on your part to move in a direction of healing, inner peace, and well-being. This means learning to work with the very stress and pain that are causing you to suffer. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

The future that we want - this is it. This is the future of all the previous thoughts you've ever had about the future. You're in it. You're already in it. What is the purpose of all this living if it's only to get some place else and then when you're there you're not happy anyway, you want to be some place else. It's always for 'when I retire,' 'when I graduate college,' 'when I make enough money,' 'when I get married,' 'when I get divorced,' 'when the kids move out.' It's like, wait a minute, this is it. This is your life. We only have moments. This moment's as good as any other. It's perfect. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Engel's biopsychosocial model proposed that psychological and social factors could either protect a person from illness or increase his or her susceptibility to it. Such factors include a person's beliefs and attitudes, how supported and loved a person feels by family and friends, the psychological and environmental stresses to which one is exposed, and personal health behaviors. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

Be a light unto yourself. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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 ... — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Non-doing simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

As long as you are breathing there is more right with you than wrong with you, no matter what is wrong. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Any change that comes about in your life will be primarily because of your own efforts — Jon Kabat-Zinn

We take care of the future best by taking care of the present now. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Perhaps over time we can adjust our default setting to one of greater mindfulness rather than of mindlessness and being lost in thought. As — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

In all the meditative traditions of the world, visualizations and imagery are used to invoke particular qualities of mind and heart. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

When people say "Let it go," what they really mean is "Get over it," and that's not a helpful thing to say. It's not a matter of letting go - you would if you could. Instead of "Let it go," we should probably say "Let it be"; this recognizes that the mind won't let go and the problem may not go away, and it allows you to form a healthier relationship with what's bothering you. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

It helps to have a focus for your attention, an anchor line to tether you to the present moment and to guide you back when the mind wanders. The breath serves this purpose exceedingly well. It can be a true ally. Bringing awareness to our breathing, we remind ourselves that we are here now, so we might as well be fully awake for whatever is already happening. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Dwell in stillness and to observe without reacting and without judging. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

You make problem, you have problem — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Can we be in touch with our own life unfolding? Can we rise to the occasion of our own humanity? Can we take on the challenges we meet, even seeking them out to test ourselves, to grow, to act in a principled way, to be true to ourselves, to find our own way, and ultimately not only have it but, more importantly, live it? — Jon Kabat-Zinn

[I]t is useful at times to admit to yourself that you don't know your way and to be open to help from unexpected places. Doing that makes available to you inner and outer energies and allies that arise out of your own soulfulness and selflessness. [...] [G]etting caught up in the normal human tendencies of self-cherishing and arrogance, and ignoring the larger order of things, will ultimately lead to ans impasse in your life in which you are unable to go forward, unable to go back, and unable to turn around. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

In letting go of wanting something special to occur, maybe we can realize that something special is already occurring. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

even and especially as we are being confronted with the law of impermanence and the inevitability of change, conditions we are subject to as individuals regardless of how much we resist or protest or try to control outcomes. If we wish to make a quantum leap to greater awareness, there is no getting around the need for us to be willing to wake up, and to care deeply about waking up. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Guess what? When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are. Whatever you wind up doing, that's what you've wound up doing. Whatever you are thinking right now, that's what's on your mind. Whatever has happened to you, it has already happened. The important question is, how are you going to handle it? In other words, Now what? — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

For mindfulness is the knowing quality of awareness, the core property of mind itself. It is strengthened by sustaining, and it is self-sustaining. Mindfulness is the field of knowing. When that field is stabilized by calmness and one-pointedness, the arising of the knowing itself is sustained, and the quality of the knowing strengthened. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

Studies by Dr. Herbert Benson of the Harvard Medical School in the early 1970s on people practicing a form of meditation known as Transcendental Meditation, or TM, demonstrated that meditation can produce a pattern of significant physiological changes, which he termed the relaxation response. These include a lowering of blood pressure, reduced oxygen consumption, and an overall decrease in arousal. Dr. Benson proposed that the relaxation response was the physiological opposite of hyperarousal, the state we experience when we are stressed or threatened. He hypothesized that if the relaxation response was elicited regularly, it could have a positive influence on health and protect us from some of the more damaging effects of stress. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Can you question who you are? And are you comfortable with not knowing? — Jon Kabat-Zinn

There is more right with you than wrong with you" - those — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

Mindfulness is now more relevant than ever as an effective and dependable counterbalance to strengthen our health and well-being, and perhaps our very sanity. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Are using the word practice here in a special way. It does not mean a rehearsal or a perfecting of some skill so that we can put it to use at some other time. In the meditative context, practice means "being in the present on purpose." The means and the end of meditation are really the same. We are not trying to get somewhere else, only working — Jon Kabat-Zinn

cultivating mindfulness is not unlike the process of eating. It would be absurd to propose that someone else eat for you. And when you go to a restaurant, you don't eat the menu, mistaking it for the meal, nor are you nourished by listening to the waiter describe the food. You have to actually eat the food for it to nourish you. In the same way, you have to actually practice mindfulness, by which I mean cultivate it systematically in your own life, in order to reap its benefits and come to understand why it is so valuable. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

One very important domain of our lives and experience that we tend to miss, ignore, abuse, or lose control of as a result of being in the automatic pilot mode is our own body. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

But when we start to focus in on what our own mind is up to, for instance, it is not unusual to quickly go unconscious again, to fall back into an automatic-pilot mode of unawareness. These lapses in awareness are frequently caused by an eddy of dissatisfaction with what we are seeing or feeling in that moment, out of which springs a desire for something to be different, for things to change. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Can we simply address what it means to be human? What is available to us in this brief moment when the universe lifts up in the form of a human sentient body and being and we live out our seventy, eighty, or ninety years (if that) and then dissolve back into the undifferentiated ocean of potential? — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

It might have helped us considerably to have been shown, perhaps through some simple exercises in elementary school, that we are not our thoughts, that we can watch them come and go and learn not to cling to them or run after them. Even if we didn't understand it at the time, it would have been helpful just to hear it. Likewise, it would have been helpful to know that the breath is an ally, that it leads to calmness just by watching it. Or that it is okay to just be, that we don't have to run around all the time doing or striving or competing in order to feel that we have an identity - that we are fundamentally whole as we are. We — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Perhaps we just need little reminders from time to time that we are already dignified, deserving, worthy. Sometimes we don't feel that way because of the wounds and the scars we carry from the past or because of the uncertainty of the future. It is doubtful that we came to feel undeserving on our own. We were helped to feel unworthy. We were taught it in a thousand ways when we were little, and we learned our lessons well. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes no use of thinking, honoring it's value and it's power. Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thought as thought rather than getting caught up in them as reality. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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. But you have to learn how to get along. I did an awful lot of fighting. I was tough, but I'm also relatively small, so I learned very early on to use my mind. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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