Kabat Zinn Quotes & Sayings

It's very important as a beginner that you understand right from the start that meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way. — 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

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

The little things? The little moments? They aren't little. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Many great minds have been preoccupied with the notion of wholeness and how to realize it in one's own life. Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist, held the meditative traditions of Asia in very high regard in this connection. He wrote, "This question [of coming to wholeness] has occupied the most adventurous minds of the East for more than two thousand years, and in this respect, methods and philosophical doctrines have been developed that simply put all Western attempts along these lines into the shade." Jung well understood the relationship between meditation practice and the realization of wholeness. Albert — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear? — Jon Kabat-Zinn

If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants. SIR ISAAC NEWTON — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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

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

Curiously, just as much if not more mindless behavior can creep into our most momentous closures and life transitions, including our own aging and our own dying. Here, too, mindfulness can have healing effects. We may be so defended against feeling the full impact of our emotional pain - whether it be grief, sadness, shame, disappointment, anger, or for that matter, even joy or satisfaction - that we unconsciously escape into a cloud of numbness in which we do not permit ourselves to feel anything at all or know what we are feeling. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are. — 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

By grounding yourself in mindfulness early in the morning, you are reminding yourself that things are always changing, that good and bad things come and go, and that it is possible to embody a perspective of of constancy, wisdom, and inner peace as you face any conditions that present themselves. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

The real meditation is how you live your life. — 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

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

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

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

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

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

The only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment, because this is the only moment any of us ever gets. You're only here now; you're only alive in this moment. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Healing is a coming to terms with things as they are, rather than struggling to force them to be as they once were, or as we would like them to be, to feel secure or to have what we sometimes think of as our own way. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

A willingness to embrace and work with what is lies at the core of all meditation practice. — 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

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

The only way you can do anything of value is to have the effort come out of non-doing and to let go of caring whether it will be of use or not. Otherwise, self-involvement and greediness can sneak in and distort your relationship to the work, or the work itself, so that it is off in some way, biased, impure, and ultimately not completely satisfying, even if it is good. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Mindfulness of self: personal moderation to escape mass consumerism Mindfulness of work: the balancing of work and leisure Mindfulness of knowledge: the cultivation of education Mindfulness of others: the exercise of compassion and cooperation Mindfulness of nature: the conservation of the world's ecosystems Mindfulness of the future: the responsibility to save for the future Mindfulness of politics: the cultivation of public deliberation and shared values for collective action through political institutions Mindfulness of the world: the acceptance of diversity as a path to peace This — Jon Kabat-Zinn

These qualities are beautifully encapsulated in the famous statement of Victor Frankl, himself a survivor of Auschwitz (and a neurologist and psychologist): "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." MBSR, — Jon Kabat-Zinn

When you pay attention to boredom it gets unbelievably interesting. — 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

Thich Nhat Hanh, the venerable and highly respected Vietnamese meditation teacher, poet, and peace activist, uses the image of cloudy apple juice settling in a glass to describe meditation. You just sit with whatever is present, even discomfort, anxiety, or confusion, with whatever is present, and the mind settles all by itself. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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. — 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

The word discipline comes from disciple, someone who is in a position to learn. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

In some ways, it's as if you died and the world continued on. If you did die, all your responsibilities and obligations would immediately evaporate. Their residue would somehow get worked out without you. No one else can take over your unique agenda. It would die or peter out with you just as it has for everyone else who has ever died. So you don't need to worry about it in any absolute way. If this is true, maybe you don't need to make one more phone call right now, even if you think you do. Maybe you don't need to read something just now, or run one more errand. By taking a few moments to "die on purpose" to the rush of time while you are still living, you free yourself to have time for the present. By "dying" now in this way, you actually become more alive now. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

There is a price we pay for being attached to a narrow view of being right. — 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

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. — 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

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

Group meditation according to Jon Kabat — Howard Zinn

When it comes right down to it, the challenge of mindfulness is to realize that "this is it" Right now is my life. The question is, What is my relationship to it going to be? Does my life just automatically "happen" to me? Am I a total prisoner of my circumstances or my obligations, of my body or my illness, or of my history? Do I become hostile or defensive or depressed if certain buttons get pushed, happy if other buttons are pushed, and frightened if something else happens? What are my choices? Do I have any options? We will be looking into these questions more deeply when we take up the subject of our reactions to stress and how our emotions affect our health. For now the important point is to grasp the value of bringing the practice of mindfulness into the conduct of our daily lives. Is there any waking moment of your life that would not be richer and more alive for you if you were more fully awake while it was happening? — Jon Kabat-Zinn

[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

Kabat-Zinn writes, "You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf." OBAMA — Will Schwalbe

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

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Writing can be an incredible mindfulness practice. — 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

Mindfulness is not about getting anywhere else. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Just stopping, is a radical act of sanity and love. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

It is a form of violence, to not see a being for who he or she really is. You think, "Oh, that's my son." But the lens, "my son," completely obliterates the multi- dimensions of that being. Maybe you only see your disappointments in that child, or you aspirations for that child, but that's not the child. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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

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

One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait. WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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

Most of the time, if you're not really paying attention, you're someplace else. So your child might say, "Daddy, I want this," and you might say, "Just a minute, I'm busy." Now that's no big deal-we all get busy, and kids frequently ask for attention. But over your child's entire youth, you may have an enormous number of such moments to be really, fully present, but because you thought you were busy, you didn't see the opportunities these moments presented ... People carry around an enormous amount of grief because they missed the little things. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

We resonate with one another's sorrows because we are interconnected. Being whole and simultaneously part of a larger whole, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. If I become a center of love and kindness in this moment, then in a perhaps small but hardly insignificant way, the world now has a nucleus of love and kindness it lacked the moment before. This benefits me and it benefits others. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

The present is the only time that we have to know anything. — 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

Feeling threatened can easily lead to feelings of anger and hostility and from there to outright aggressive behavior, driven by deep instincts to protect your position and maintain your sense of things being under control. When things do feel "under control," we might feel content for a moment. But when they go out of control again, or even seem to be getting out of control, our deepest insecurities can erupt. At such times we might even act in ways that are self-destructive and hurtful to others. And we will feel anything but content and at peace within ourselves. — 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

So when we make contact with the domain of being in the meditation practice, we are already, in a profound sense, beyond the scarring, beyond the isolation and fragmentation and suffering we may be experiencing. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Paying attention on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally. — 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

To allow ourselves to be truly in touch with where we already are, no matter where that is, we have got to pause in our experience long enough to let the present moment sink in; long enough to actually feel the present moment, to see it in its fullness, to hold it in awareness and thereby come to know and understand it better. — 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 have to actually make the time to practice every day, because otherwise you will not find it. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Make a list of what is really important to you. Embody it. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

Thought doesn't wrap around awareness. Awareness wraps around thought. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

immersed in a seemingly never-ending stream of thoughts, coming willy-nilly one after another in rapid succession. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the father of MBSR, doesn't look like the kind of person to be selling meditation and mindfulness to America's fast-paced, stressed-out masses. When I met him at a mindfulness conference in April, he was dressed in corduroys, a button-down shirt and a blazer, with wire-rimmed glasses and a healthy head of thick gray hair. He looked more like the professor he trained to become than the mindfulness guru he is. — Kate Pickert

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath. KABIR — 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

When experience is viewed in a certain way, it presents nothing but doorways into the soul. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

Mindfulness as a practice provides endless opportunities to cultivate greater intimacy with your own mind and to tap into and develop your deep interior resources for learning, growing, healing, and potentially for transforming your understanding of who you are and how you might live more wisely and with greater well-being, meaning, and happiness in this world. — 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