Quotes by Jon Kabat-Zinn

There is really no natural limit to the practice of loving kindness in meditation or in one’s life. It is an ongoing, ever-expanding realization of interconnectedness. It is also its embodiment. When you can love one tree or one flower or one dog or one place, or one person or yourself for one moment, you can find all people, all places, all suffering, all harmony in that one moment. Practicing in this way is not trying to change anything or get anywhere, although it might look like it on the surface. What it is really doing is uncovering what is always present. Love and kindness are here all the time, somewhere, in fact, everywhere. Usually our ability to touch them and be touched by them lies buried below our own fears and hurts, below our greed and our hatreds, below our desperate clinging to the illusion that we are truly separate and alone. (

Non-doing simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way.

Anybody who is imitating somebody else, no matter who it us, is heading in the wrong direction. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself.

When we dont automatically take them (thoughts) personally or believe the stories about reality that we build from them,when we can simply hold them in awareness with a sense of curiosity and wonder at their amazing power given their insubstantiality, their limitations,and inaccuracies,then we have a chance right in that moment,in any moment really,to not get caught in their habitual patterning,to see thoughts for what they are,impersonal events.Then in that moment at least, we are already free,ready to act with greater clarity and kindness within the constantly changing field of events that is nothing other than life unfolding-- not always as we think it should,but definitely as it is.

We all have limitations. They are worth befriending. They teach us a lot. They can show us what we most need to pay attention to and honor. They become our cutting edge for learning and growing and gentling ourselves into the present moment as it is.

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.

Symptoms of illness and distress, plus your feelings about them, can be viewed as messengers coming to tell you something important about your body or about your mind. In the old days, if a king didnt like the message he was given, he would sometimes have the messenger killed. This is tantamount to suppressing your symptoms or your feelings because they are unwanted. Killing the messenger and denying the message or raging against it are not intelligent ways of approaching healing. The one thing we dont want to do is to ignore or rupture the essential connections that can complete relevant feedback loops and restore self-regulation and balance. Our real challenge when we have symptoms is to see if we can listen to their message and really hear them and take them to heart, that is, make the connection fully.

The awareness is not part of the darkness or the pain; it holds the pain, and knows it, so it has to be more fundamental, and closer to what is healthy and strong and golden within you.

Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience.

Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. Without calmness, the mirror of mindfulness will have an agitated and choppy surface and will not be able to reflect things with any accuracy.

Patience is an ever present alternative to the minds endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly, is anger. Its the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it. This doesnt mean you cant hurry when you have to. It is possible even to hurry patiently, mindfully, moving fast because you have chosen to.

Note that this journey is uniquely yours, no one elses. So the path has to be your own. You cannot imitate somebody elses journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?

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?

This is it.

The next time you feel a sense of dissatisfaction, of something being missing or not quite right, turn inward as an experiment. See if you can capture the energy of that very moment. Instead of picking up a magazine or going to the movies, calling a friend or looking for something to eat or acting up in one way or another, make a place for yourself. Sit down and enter into your breathing, if only for a few minutes. Dont look for anything - neither flowers not light nor a beautiful view. Dont extol the virtues of anything or condemn the inadequacy of anything. Dont even think to yourself, I am going inward now. Just sit. Reside at the center of the world. Let things be as they are.

[R]emain open to not knowing, perhaps allowing yourself to come to the point of admitting, I dont know, and then experimenting with relaxing a bit into this not knowing instead of condemning yourself for it. After all, in this moment, it may be an accurate statement of how things are for you.

By grounding yourself in mindfulness early in the morning, you are reminding yourself that things are always changing, that good and bad things come and go, and that it is possible to embody a perspective of of constancy, wisdom, and inner peace as you face any conditions that present themselves.

The challenge of mindfulness is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in - no matter how unpleasant, how discouraging, how limited, how unending and stuck they may appear to be - and to make sure that you have done everything in your power to use their energies to transform yourself before you decide to cut your losses and move on.

There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation has been faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges. In other words, you must be willing to let itself to become your teacher.

The virtues of getting up early have nothing to do with cramming more hours of busyness and industry into ones day. Just the opposite. They stem from the stillness and solitude of the hour, and the potential to use that time to expand consciousness, to contemplate, to make time for being, for purposefully not doing anything. The peacefulness, the darkness, the dawn, the stillness - all contribute to making early morning a special time for mindfulness practice.