Jon Kabat-Zinn
No one can listen to your body for you... To grow and heal, you have to take responsibility for listening to it yourself.Collection: Responsibility
You are only here now; you're only alive in this moment.Collection: Life
Once in awhile throughout the day...let go into full acceptance of the present moment, including how you are feeling and what you perceive to be happening... Give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are. Then, when you're ready, move in the direction your heart tells you to go, mindfully and with resolution.Collection: Letting Go
If we are honest with ourselves, most of us will have to admit that we live out our lives in an ocean of fear.Collection: Life
Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.Collection: Life
Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?Collection: Life
Mindfulness is a way to rebalance ourselves. Instead of being lost in thought, or caught up in emotional upheaval, we can tip the scale in the direction of greater equanimity, clarity, wisdom, and self-compassion by actually learning how to inhabit that other dimension of our being.Collection: Emotional
From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.Collection: Perspective
Societal transformation isn't going to happen in one month, one year, or even one lifetime. But we see it happen person by person in front of us, and we don't have to worry about the future if we're taking care of the present. In some sense, that's the best insurance policy we can have.Collection: Worry
Allow your attention to gently alight on your belly, as if you were coming upon a shy animal sunning itself on a tree stump in a clearing in the forest. Feel your belly rise or expand gently on the inbreath, and fall or recede on the outbreath.Collection: Fall
Generosity is another quality which, like patience, letting go, non-judging, and trust, provides a solid foundation for mindfulness practice.Collection: Letting Go
Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. Without calmness, the mirror of mindfulness will have an agitated and choppy surface and will not be able to reflect things with any accuracy.Collection: Mirrors
Acknowledging that sometimes, often at very crucial times, you really have no idea where you are going or even where the path lies. A the same time, you can very well know something about where you are now (even if it is knowing that you are lost, confused, enraged or without hope).Collection: Confused
Discipline provides a constancy which is independent of what kind of day you had yesterday and what kind of day you anticipate today.Collection: Independent
The funny thing about stopping is that as soon as you do it, here you are.Collection: Funny Things
A lot of harm has come in all eras from people attached to one view of spiritual “truth.”Collection: Spiritual
In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are the same word.Collection: Heart
The real meditative practice is to open up to the full range of what happens in life. And parenting is a fantastic arena for doing that kind of spiritual training. It's as much a potential door into enlightenment as anything else.Collection: Mom
Mindfulness meditation is the embrace of any and all mind states in awareness, without preferring one to another.Collection: Meditation
See If You Can Give Yourself Gifts That May Be True Blessings, Such As Self-AcceptanceCollection: Acceptance
The Zen people from Ancient China, "When you're walking, just walk." It turns out to be the hardest thing.Collection: People
You can bring together the body's various systems to fine tune the body and mind in order to navigate life's ups and downs in a way that minimizes stress and maximizes well-being and satisfaction.Collection: Stress
Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Tibetan, or other historical traditions, are all different streams in the same river, different currents in the same ocean. With the long view, we can trust that the seeds that we're planting are transforming the world.Collection: Ocean
In its outward manifestation, meditation appears to involve either stopping, by parking the body in a stillness that suspends activity, or giving oneself over to flowing movement. In either case, it is an embodiment of wise attention, an inward gesture undertaken for the most part in silence, a shift from doing to simply being. It is an act that may at first seem artificial but that we soon discover, if we keep at it, is ultimately one of pure love for the life unfolding within us and around us.Collection: Wise
It’s interesting to look at your children as line-in Zen masters who can put their finger on places where you’re resistant, or thinking narrowly, in ways noone else can. You can either lose your mind and your authenticity in the process of reacting to all that stuff, or you can use it as the perfect opportunity to grow and nourish your children by attending to what is deepest and best in them and in yourself.Collection: Children
If we hope to go anywhere or develop ourselves in any way, we can only step from where we are standing. If we don't really know where we are standing... We may only go in circles.Collection: Life
Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic or visible, plant or animal, extinct or living. So there can be no one place to be. There can be no one way to be, no one way to practice, no one way to learn, no one way to love, no one way to grow or to heal, no one way to live, no one way to feel, no one thing to know or be known. The particulars count.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Wise
Perhaps we just need little reminders from time to time that we are already dignified, deserving, worthy.Collection: Needs
Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It's about feeling the way you feel.Collection: Meditation
Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more.Collection: Mean
The real meditation is how you live your life.Collection: Real
Generosity is another quality which, like patience, letting go, non-judging, and trust, provides a solid foundation for mindfulness practice. You might experiment with using the cultivation of generosity as a vehicle for deep self-observation and inquiry as well as an exercise in giving. A good place to start is with yourself. See if you can give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Practice feeling deserving enough to accept these gifts without obligation-to simply receive from yourself, and from the universe.Collection: Letting Go
Perhaps we just need little reminders from time to time that we are already dignified, deserving, worthy. Sometimes we don't feel that way because of the wounds and the scars we carry from the past or because of the uncertainty of the future. It is doubtful that we came to feel undeserving on our own. We were helped to feel unworthy. We were taught it in a thousand ways when we were little, and we learned our lessons well.Collection: Life
Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes no use of thinking, honoring it's value and it's power. Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thought as thought rather than getting caught up in them as reality.Collection: Wisdom
Practice moment to moment non-judgemental awareness.Collection: Practice
Mindfulness is a way of paying attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally, to what goes on in the present moment in your body, mind and the world around you.Collection: Mind
Living in a chronic state of unawareness can cause us to miss much of what is most beautiful and meaningful in our lives.Collection: Beautiful
Zen has an expression, "nothing special." When you understand "nothing special," you realize that everything is special. Everything's special and nothing's special. Everything's spiritual and nothing's spiritual. It's how you see, it's what eyes you're looking through, that matters.Collection: Spiritual
But you cannot have harmony without a commitment to ethical behavior. It's the fence that keeps out the goats that will eat all the young shoots in your garden.Collection: Commitment
Simply put, mindfulness is moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness.Collection: Mindfulness
There are a lot of different ways to talk about mindfulness, but what it really means is awareness.Collection: Mean
Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.Collection: Life
You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.Collection: Wise
People say things that get you ramped up. I find myself, as my body clenches up when somebody says something that I know is wrong or I wanna catch them in a lie or whatever, that just, "Calm down. When it's your turn, you make your point."Collection: Lying
Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely, the path that is your life. Meditation may help us see that this path we call our life has direction; that it is always unfolding, moment by moment; and that what happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next.Collection: Being Yourself
Look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them.... Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all.Collection: Life
Science is now documenting that it's not the objects of meditation that are important, it's the process of paying attention to them - the attending - that actually influences the organism in a whole range of different ways. The brain changes significantly enough to impact thought, emotion, and other biological functions. Today, people recognize that they're not going to find well-being from the outside, or from a pill; they're going to find it by looking inside. All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.Collection: Stress
Just stopping, is a radical act of sanity and love.Collection: And Love