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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

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Jon Kabat-Zinn
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: June 5
Molecular Biologist
Physician
Professor
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Jon Kabat
Going
Simplicity
Places
Seeing
Simple
Rather
Less
Acquiring
Means
Voluntary
Mean
Fewer

More quotes by Jon Kabat-Zinn

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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. All ethics and morality, and a sense of interconnectedness, come out of the act of paying attention.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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Can you question who you are? And are you comfortable with not knowing?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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
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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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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
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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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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When awareness embraces the senses, it enlivens them.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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).
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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
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If you look at people out on the street, if you look at people at restaurants, nobody's having conversations anymore. They're sitting at dinner looking at their phone, because their brain is so addicted to it.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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
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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
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Just stopping, is a radical act of sanity and love.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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
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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