Quote

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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Jon Kabat-Zinn
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: June 5
Molecular Biologist
Physician
Professor
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Jon Kabat
Attention
Belly
Recede
Upon
Forest
Alight
Fall
Forests
Stump
Feel
Rise
Stumps
Feels
Allow
Clearing
Coming
Gently
Tree
Expand
Animal
Shy

More quotes by 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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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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The little things? The little moments? They aren't little.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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Mindfulness meditation is the embrace of any and all mind states in awareness, without preferring one to another.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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Simply put, mindfulness is moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness.
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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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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The real meditative practice is to open up to the full range of what happens in life. And parenting is a fantastic arena for doing that kind of spiritual training. It's as much a potential door into enlightenment as anything else.
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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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
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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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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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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
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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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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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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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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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
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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
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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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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