Quotes from Jon Kabat-Zinn

There is no successful escaping from yourself in the long run, only transformation

The challenge for each of us is to find out who we are and to live our way into our own calling.we do this by paying close attention to all aspects of life as they unfold in the present moment.

Parenting and family life can be a perfect field for mindfulness practice, but it's not for the weak-hearted, the selfish or lazy, or the hopelessly romantic. Parenting is a mirror that forces you to look at yourself. If you can learn from what you observe, you just may have a chance to keep growing yourself.

We see each moment as a new beginning, a new opportunity to start over, to tune in, to reconnect.

M]indfulness does not involve trying to get anywhere or feel anything special. Rather it involves allowing yourself to be where you already are, to become more familiar with your own actual experience moment by moment.

As a consequence of this common play of our minds, don't we all tend to fill up our days with things that just have to be done and then run around desperately trying to do them all, while in the process not really enjoying much of the doing because we are too pressed for time, too rushed, too busy, too anxious?

It is remarkable how liberating it feels to be able to see that your thoughts are just thoughts and that they are not "you" or "reality." For instance, if you have the thought that you have to get a certain number of things done today and you don't recognize it as a thought but act as if it's "the truth," then you have created a reality in that moment in which you really believe that those things must all be done today.

There is more right with you than wrong with you"—those

Note that an individual thought does not last long. It is impermanent. If it comes, it will go.

Congressman Ryan is a strong advocate for greater mindfulness in health care as well as in other important areas such as education, the military, and criminal justice. In his book, he makes a very strong case for why we need greater mindfulness in these and other areas of our society.

health is a dynamical process. It is not a fixed state that you "get" and then hold on to.

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. The impulse will pass and everybody will be better off—especially you.

The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. PETER MATTHIESSEN, The Snow Leopard

You can't stop the waves but you can learn how to surf.

if I can perceive myself as transparent or empty, then what comes toward me can go through me and out the door.

Il s'agit d'apprécier la plénitude de chaque moment que nous vivons et surtout d'être en contact avec notre être dans sa plénitude.

La méditation consiste à s'éveiller de cet état de rêve.

La pleine conscience signifie « faire attention » de manière particulière : délibérément, au moment présent et sans jugements de valeurs.

Le mot bouddha signifie celui ou celle qui s'est éveillé à sa propre nature.

Personal motivations to live are known to sometimes influence survival.

You discover that the boundaries of how far your body can stretch or how long you can hold a particular posture are not fixed or static. So your thoughts about what you can and can't do shouldn't be too fixed or static either, because

Mindfulness has to do above all with attention and awareness, which are universal human qualities. But in our society, we tend to take these capacities for granted and don't think to develop them systematically in the service of self-understanding and wisdom. Meditation is the process by which we go about deepening our attention and awareness, refining them, and putting them to greater practical use in our lives.

It's not that feelings of anger don't arise. It's that the anger can be used, worked with, harnessed so that its energies can nourish patience, compassion, harmony, and wisdom in ourselves and perhaps in others as well.

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—to just be present for them and with them, without having to go anywhere or make anything better or different. This is hard work.