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There is just this moment. We are not trying to improve or to get anywhere else.

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
Anywhere
Moment
Moments
Else
Trying
Improve

More quotes by Jon Kabat-Zinn

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A lot of harm has come in all eras from people attached to one view of spiritual “truth.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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
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It's okay that the mind drifts away but you just bring it back.
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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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
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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
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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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Mindfulness means moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness. It is cultivated by refining our capacity to pay attention, intentionally, in the present moment, and then sustaining that attention over time as best we can. In the process, we become more in touch with our life as it is unfolding.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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When experience is viewed in a certain way, it presents nothing but doorways into the soul.
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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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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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
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Societal transformation isn't going to happen in one month, one year, or even one lifetime. But we see it happen person by person in front of us, and we don't have to worry about the future if we're taking care of the present. In some sense, that's the best insurance policy we can have.
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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It is indeed a radical act of love just to sit down and be quiet for a time by yourself.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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In any given moment we are either practicing mindfulness, or defacto, we are practicing mindlessness.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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
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All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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