Quote

Can you question who you are? And are you comfortable with not knowing?

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jon Kabat-Zinn
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: June 5
Molecular Biologist
Physician
Professor
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Jon Kabat
Knowing
Comfortable
Question

More quotes by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Image
Make a list of what is really important to you. Embody it.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Image
The little things? The little moments? They aren't little.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Image
When experience is viewed in a certain way, it presents nothing but doorways into the soul.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Meditation is really a non-doing. It is the only human endeavor I know of being where you already are.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Image
Mindfulness meditation is the embrace of any and all mind states in awareness, without preferring one to another.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Image
When you have children, you realize how easy it is to not see them fully, and perhaps miss all those early years. If you are not careful, you can be too absorbed in work, and they will be only too happy to tell you about it later. Being a parent is one of greatest mindfulness practices of all.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Image
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
Image
There is just this moment. We are not trying to improve or to get anywhere else.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Image
Mindfulness is so powerful that the fact that it comes out of Buddhism is irrelevant.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Image
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
Image
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. Doing science is spiritual. So is washing the dishes.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Image
To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Image
Maybe the fear is that we are less than we think we are, when the actuality of it is that we are much much more.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Image
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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Image
You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Image
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
Image
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