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Most people think that to meditate, I should feel a particular special something, and if I don't, then I must be doing something wrong.

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
People
Special
Wrong
Feel
Must
Feels
Something
Think
Meditate
Thinking
Particular

More quotes by 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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Mindfulness is so powerful that the fact that it comes out of Buddhism is irrelevant.
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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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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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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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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Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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Patience is a form of wisdom. It demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things must unfold in their own time.
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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Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature... But is is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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Meditation is simply about being yourself and know about who that is.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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Paying attention and awareness are universal capacities of human beings.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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Resting in awareness is one of those phrases used a lot by people who practice mindfulness. But when I tried to do it, it wasn't restful and I worried I wasn't doing it right. I kept thinking about work.
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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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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Perhaps the most spiritual thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.
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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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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The little things? The little moments? They aren't little.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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