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Mindfulness is so powerful that the fact that it comes out of Buddhism is irrelevant.

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
Buddhism
Powerful
Fact
Comes
Facts
Mindfulness
Irrelevant

More quotes by 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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Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.
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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Make a list of what is really important to you. Embody it.
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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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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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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The Zen people from Ancient China, When you're walking, just walk. It turns out to be the hardest thing.
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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You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.
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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The mind that has not been developed or trained is very scattered. That's the normal state of affairs, but it leaves us out of touch with a great deal in life, including our bodies.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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
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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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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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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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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
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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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From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.
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