Jon Kabat-Zinn's Quotes

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 so powerful that the fact that it comes out of Buddhism is irrelevant.

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.

Paying attention and awareness are universal capacities of human beings.

When you pay attention to boredom it gets unbelievably interesting.

Writing can be an incredible mindfulness practice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.