Quotes from Jon Kabat-Zinn

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.

The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment.

Such is the power of mindful, selfless generosity. At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient…only the universe rearranging itself.

It is simply a practical way to be more in touch with the fullness of your being through a systematic process of self-observation, self-inquiry, and mindful action.

No existe nada como "yo", "mí" o "lo mío" a lo que aferrarse.

You can think of concentration as the capacity of the mind to sustain an unwavering attention on one object of observation.

The deeper your concentration, the deeper the potential for mindfulness.

a work that no one on the planet can do for us, no matter how much they would want to, no matter how much love they have for us, no matter how badly they feel for us, no matter how much they are helping us in the ways that they can help.

In attending to the breath with onepointed concentration, everything else falls away—including thoughts, feelings, the outside world. Samadhi is characterized by absorption in stillness and undisturbed peacefulness.

Touching soap bubbles is another lovely metaphor.

It is so much easier to find fault, to blame, to believe that what is needed is a change on the outside, an escape from the forces that are holding you back, preventing you from growing

from our point of view, as long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than wrong with you, no matter what is wrong.

The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded.

In all the meditative traditions of the world, visualizations and imagery are used to invoke particular qualities of mind and heart.

rather than rushing headlong into things with a mind that is sorely out of touch with large parts of ourself, a mind driven by narrow ambition and ideas of personal gain. The story says we can only fare well if we proceed with an awareness of the way things are, including a willingness to admit not knowing where we are going.

Every time you get a strong impulse to talk about meditation and how wonderful it is, or how hard it is, or what it's doing for you these days, or what it's not, or you want to convince someone else how wonderful it would be for them, just look at it as more thinking and go meditate some more.

We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. The incessant stream of thoughts flowing through our minds leaves us very little respite for inner quiet. And we leave precious little room for ourselves anyway just to be

the highly respected macroeconomist Jeffrey Sachs has recently made an impassioned and well-argued case in his book The Price of Civilization that mindfulness needs to be at the heart of any attempt to resolve the major problems we face as a country and, by implication, as a world.

Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? LAO-TZU, Tao-te-Ching

We certainly do need a foundation in critical thinking and in analytical and deductive reasoning in order to understand the world and not be totally lost or overwhelmed by it. So thinking — precise, keen, critical thinking — is an extremely important faculty we need to develop, refine, and

Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence. NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ, I Am That

There is much to be said for the conscious expression of anger, and it is well known medically and psychologically that suppressing anger in the sense of internalizing it is unhealthy

It is the inner experience which counts. And you have to be there for it. All else is mere thinking.

awareness is at least as important and useful to us as thinking. In fact, it is demonstrably more powerful in that any thought, no matter how profound, can be held in awareness.