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. But you have to learn how to get along. I did an awful lot of fighting. I was tough, but I'm also relatively small, so I learned very early on to use my mind.
— Jon Kabat-Zinn
I'm challenging everybody on every side of every divide to be more who they are, to cultivate their capacity for awareness.
Meditation had never been tried before in a medical center, so we had no idea whether mainstream Americans would accept a clinic whose foundation was intensive training in meditative discipline.
It is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from other animals. We can be aware of being aware.
You don't need the iPhone: you have the most exquisite apparatus in the known universe sitting right in your head - the most complex organization of matter in the entire universe. And here are we, feeling a little depressed, feeling like we're not getting where we need to be, when really you might be exactly where you need to be.
I started the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979. The idea of bringing Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism into the mainstream of medicine was tantamount to the Visigoths being at the gates about to tear down the citadel of Western civilization.
Sometimes shutting off the sound on the television can allow you to actually watch the game and take it in in an entirely different and more direct way - a first-order, first-person experience - rather than filtered through the mind of another.
Paying attention and awareness are universal capacities of human beings.
All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.
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.
Even before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that's compounded by a factor of trillions.
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.
I don't want people following Jon Kabat-Zinn. I want them following themselves.
The notion that the mind and body are actually different sides of the same coin goes all the way back to the origins of medicine. For most of its history, the practice was not separated from other aspects of human activity.
There are certain ways in which I cultivate awareness, both through mindful yoga and taking care of my body and taking time to actually drop as deeply as possible into stillness, into whatever is unfolding in the present moment.
The 'find it, fix it 'model of medicine doesn't work any more. The U.S. healthcare system is bankrupting the country, bankrolling the insurance companies and exhausting healthcare staff. And despite all that, we are ranked 50th in the world for life expectancy.
The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment.
Mindfulness is often spoken of as the heart of Buddhist meditation. It's not about Buddhism, but about paying attention. That's what all meditation is, no matter what tradition or particular technique is used.
When you pay attention to boredom it gets unbelievably interesting.
Writing can be an incredible mindfulness practice.
Most people don't realize that the mind constantly chatters. And yet, that chatter winds up being the force that drives us much of the day in terms of what we do, what we react to, and how we feel.
One way to look at meditation is as a kind of intrapsychic technology that's been developed over thousands of years by traditions that know a lot about the mind/body connection.
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.
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.
Science gave me a cosmic religious feeling, and I would get the same feeling when I was dragged to the Met and the Museum of Modern Art.
I'll take transformational change any way it comes. One way to look at meditation is as a kind of intrapsychic technology that's been developed over thousands of years by traditions that know a lot about the mind/body connection. To call what happens 'the placebo effect' is just to give a name to something we don't understand.
There are many different aspects to a formal meditation practice. But the real meditation practice is how you interface with life from moment-to-moment, no matter what's happening. Especially when you are awake, which is pretty much most of the time except for deep sleep.
I loved science, and when I discovered Buddhist meditative practices and martial arts, I was able to bridge those ways of knowing the world into my own unique way. From that grew the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, which became my karmic assignment.
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.
A lot of harm has come in all eras from people attached to one view of 'spiritual' truth.
Mindfulness is so powerful that the fact that it comes out of Buddhism is irrelevant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My father was a world-class scientist and my mother was a prolific painter. I could see that my parents had completely different ways of knowing and understanding the world, and relating to it. My father approached things through scientific inquiry and exploration, while my mother experienced things through her emotions and senses.
