Quotes from Jon Kabat-Zinn

If you believe in love, do you manifest it or just talk a lot? If you believe in compassion, in non-harming, in kindness, in wisdom, in generosity, in calmness, in solitude, in non-doing, in being even-handed and clear, do you manifest these qualities in your daily life? This is the level of intentionality which is required to keep your meditation practice vital

TRY: Asking yourself in this moment, "Am I awake?," "Where is my mind right now?

Live with nature In the present Above time

Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.

If we are to grasp the reality of our life while we have it, we will need to wake up to our moments. Otherwise, whole days, even a whole life, could slip past unnoticed.

Carl Jung put it this way: "The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one's whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises." With

It is a hard message to swallow at first blush because it brings into question everything that we think we are, which for the most part seems to come from what we identify with, our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings, our relationships, our values, our work, our expectations of what is "supposed" to happen and how things are "supposed" to work out for me in order for me to be happy, our stories of where we came from and where we are going and of who we are.

Allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling. [...] Let go of the labels. Just feel what you are feeling, all the while cultivating moment-to-moment awareness, riding the waves of up and down, good and bad, weak and strong, until you see that they are all inadequate to fully describe your experience. Be with the experience itself. Trust in your deepest strength of all: to be present, to be wakeful.

If we are unaware of what we are doing a good deal of the time, and we don't particularly like the way things turn out in our lives, perhaps it's time to pay closer attention, to be more in touch, to observe the choices we make and their consequences down the road.

In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.

Everything can be taken from a human being but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

whatever thoughts and emotions arise, and as best you can without taking any of it personally, as if the thoughts were merely sounds, or weather patterns in the mind.

no place to go, nothing to do, nothing to attain.

Engel's biopsychosocial model proposed that psychological and social factors could either protect a person from illness or increase his or her susceptibility to it. Such factors include a person's beliefs and attitudes, how supported and loved a person feels by family and friends, the psychological and environmental stresses to which one is exposed, and personal health behaviors.

If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants. SIR ISAAC NEWTON

Awareness requires only that we pay attention and see things as they are. It doesn't require that we change anything.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the venerable and highly respected Vietnamese meditation teacher, poet, and peace activist, uses the image of cloudy apple juice settling in a glass to describe meditation. You just sit with whatever is present, even discomfort, anxiety, or confusion, with whatever is present, and the mind settles all by itself.

Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science. 2010;330:932. § Harvard Business Review. Jan-Feb 2012:88.

not get caught in their habitual patterning, to see thoughts for what they are, impersonal events, and instead be the knowing that awareness already is. 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.

On the radio, I heard someone define ethics as "obedience to the unenforceable.

You can't sail straight into the wind, and if you only know how to sail with the wind at your back, you will only go where the wind blows you. But if you know how to use the wind's energy and are patient, you can sometimes get where you want to go. You can still be in control

Don't go outside your house to see the flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit.

we are only breathing now — the last breath is gone, the next one hasn't come yet — it is always a matter of this one. So it is an ideal anchor for our wayward attention. It keeps us in the present moment.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." His deepest conviction: "To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts…. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?