Quotes from Jon Kabat-Zinn

There are no drugs that will make you immune to stress or to pain or that will by themselves magically solve your life's problems or promote healing. It will take conscious effort on your part to move in a direction of healing and inner peace. This means learning to work with the very stress and pain that is causing you to suffer.

If you can't entirely trust what you think, what about trusting awareness? What about trusting your heart? What about trusting your motivation to at least do no harm? What about trusting your experience until it's proven to be inaccurate — and then trusting that discovery?

known. If you are completely preoccupied with what is already known, you can't make the leap into that other dimension of creativity or imagination or poetry, or whatever it is that allows for seeing a hidden order in things which, until it is seen and realized, it isn't seen at all.

One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait. WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession…. Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Self-Reliance

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hand.

You certainly have to be ready for meditation. You have to come to it at the right time in your life, at a point where you are ready to listen carefully to your own voice, to your own heart, to your own breathing

Everything is related to everything else and, in a way, simultaneously contains everything else and is contained by everything else. What is more, everything is in flux.

When we spend some time each day in non-doing, resting in awareness, observing the flow of the breath and the activity of our mind and body without getting caught up in that activity, we are cultivating calmness and mindfulness hand in hand.

Perhaps over time we can adjust our default setting to one of greater mindfulness rather than of mindlessness and being lost in thought.

Feel your body lying in bed. Straighten it out. Ask yourself, Am I awake now? Do I know that the gift of a new day is being given to me? Will I be awake for it? What will happen today? Right now I don't really know. Even as I think about what I have to do, can I be open to this not-knowing? Can I see today as an adventure? Can I see right now as filled with possibilities?

We can feel victimized by our thoughts, or blinded by them. We can easily mis-take them for the truth or for reality when in actuality they are just waves on its surface, however tumultuous they may be at times.

The entirety of our mind, on the other hand, is by its very nature deep, vast, intrinsically still and quiet, like the depths of the ocean.

It is not that mindfulness is the "answer" to all life's problems. Rather, it is that all life's problems can be seen more clearly through the lens of a clear mind.

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath. KABIR

Just because you decide to still your body and observe your breath from moment to moment doesn't mean that your thinking mind is going to cooperate.

What does happen as we intentionally pay attention to our breathing is that we realize pretty quickly that we are

In order to build continuity and momentum in the meditation practice, you will need to keep reminding yourself to come back to the breath over and over again, no matter what the mind is up to from one moment to the next.

if you know anything about Buddhism, you will know that the most important point is to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already. Buddhism is fundamentally about being in touch with your own deepest nature and letting it flow out of you unimpeded.

To break out of this trap of always being driven by our own desires, it is not a bad exercise to ask yourself from time to time, "What is my own way?" "What do I really want?" "Would I know it if I got it?" "Does everything have to be perfect right now, or under my total control right now, for me to be happy?

Embody what you most want to impart, and keep your mouth shut.

we scarcely have time for being anymore, or even for catching our breath, literally and metaphorically—to say nothing of time for knowing what we are doing as we are doing it, and why.

If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, This is the best season of your life. WU-MEN

the true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self." Einstein