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You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.

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
Thinking
Affectionate
Woven
Mindfulness
Wise
Attention
Think

More quotes by Jon Kabat-Zinn

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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
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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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Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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To drop into being means to recognize your interconnectedness with all life, and with being itself. Your very nature is being part of larger and larger spheres of wholeness.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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
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The funny thing about stopping is that as soon as you do it, here you are.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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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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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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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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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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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Meditation is really a non-doing. It is the only human endeavor I know of being where you already are.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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
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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
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No one can listen to your body for you... To grow and heal, you have to take responsibility for listening to it yourself.
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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Too much of the education system orients students toward becoming better thinkers, but there is almost no focus on our capacity to pay attention and cultivate awareness.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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Paying attention and awareness are universal capacities of human beings.
Jon Kabat-Zinn