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Jon Kabat-Zinn

Jon Kabat-Zinn Books

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“YOU HAVE TO BE STRONG ENOUGH TO BE WEAK Allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling. Notice any labels you attach to crying or feeling vulnerable. 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.”

StrongMeditationStrengthTrustMindfulnessWeakExperienceVulnerableLabelsFeelingPresentCryingGood And BadUp And DownWeak And StrongRiding The WavesWakefulMoment To Moment Awareness
Book:Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
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“Buckminster Fuller, the discoverer/inventor of the geodesic dome, at age thirty-two contemplated suicide for a few hours one night at the edge of Lake Michigan, as the story goes, after a series of business failures that left him feeling he had made such a mess of his life that the best move would be for him to remove himself from the scene and make things simpler for his wife and daughter. Apparently everything he had touched or undertaken had turned to dust in spite of his incredible creativity and imagination, which were only recognized later. However, instead of ending his life, Fuller decided (perhaps because of his deep conviction in the underlying unity and order of the universe, of which he knew himself to be an integral part) to live from then on as if he had died that night. Being dead, he wouldn't have to worry about how things worked out any longer for himself personally and would be free to devote himself to living as a representative of the universe. The rest of his life would be a gift. Instead of living for himself, he would devote himself to asking, "what is it on this planet (which he referred to as Spaceship Earth) that needs doing that I know something about, that probably won't happen unless I take responsibility for it?”

Inspirational Life
Book:Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
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“There are always waves on the water. Sometimes they are big, sometimes they are small, and sometimes they are almost imperceptible. The water’s waves are churned up by the winds, which come and go and vary in direction and intensity, just as do the winds of stress and change in our lives, which stir up the waves in our minds.”

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Book:Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
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“Patience is an ever present alternative to the mind's endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly, is anger. It's the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it. This doesn't mean you can't hurry when you have to. It is possible even to hurry patiently, mindfully, moving fast because you have chosen to.”

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Book:Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
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“There is really no natural limit to the practice of loving kindness in meditation or in one’s life. It is an ongoing, ever-expanding realization of interconnectedness. It is also its embodiment. When you can love one tree or one flower or one dog or one place, or one person or yourself for one moment, you can find all people, all places, all suffering, all harmony in that one moment. Practicing in this way is not trying to change anything or get anywhere, although it might look like it on the surface. What it is really doing is uncovering what is always present. Love and kindness are here all the time, somewhere, in fact, everywhere. Usually our ability to touch them and be touched by them lies buried below our own fears and hurts, below our greed and our hatreds, below our desperate clinging to the illusion that we are truly separate and alone. (…). Make sure that you are not trying to help anybody else or the planet. Rather, you are simply holding them in awareness, honoring them, wishing them well, opening to their pain with kindness and compassion and acceptance.”

LoveLifeCompassionKindnessMeditationAwarenessAcceptanceMindfulnessIllusionHarmonyTouchedLovingUnlimitedPresenceExpandingRealisationInterconnectednessLoving KindnessUncoveringEverywhereWell WishingAll PeopleAll PlacesHonouringOpening To Pain
Book:Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
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“To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking. It's akin to letting your palm open to unhand something you have been holding on to.”

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Book:Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
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“When we don't automatically take them (thoughts) personally or believe the stories about "reality" that we build from them,when we can simply hold them in awareness with a sense of curiosity and wonder at their amazing power given their insubstantiality, their limitations,and inaccuracies,then we have a chance right in that moment,in any moment really,to not get caught in their habitual patterning,to see thoughts for what they are,impersonal events. 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.”

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Book:Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment
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“We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. The incessant stream of thoughts flowing through our minds leaves us very little respite for inner quiet. And we leave precious little room for ourselves anyway just to be, without having to run around doing things all the time. Our actions are all too frequently driven rather than undertaken in awareness, driven by those perfectly ordinary thoughts and impulses that run through the mind like a coursing river, if not a waterfall. We get caught up in the torrent and it winds up submerging our lives as it carries us to places we may not wish to go and may not even realize we are headed for. Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us rather than to tyrannize us.”

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Book:Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
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“Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself. The watching is the holding. By watching your thoughts without being drawn into them, you can learn something profoundly liberating about thinking itself, which may help you to be less of a prisoner of those thought patterns (….)”

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Book:Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
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“We resonate with one another’s sorrows because we are interconnected. Being whole and simultaneously part of a larger whole, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. If I become a center of love and kindness in this moment, then in a perhaps small but hardly insignificant way, the world now has a nucleus of love and kindness it lacked the moment before. This benefits me and it benefits others.”

LoveKindnessMeditationSorrowMindfulnessChange The WorldInterconnectednessCenterResonateChange OurselvesBeing WholeBeing Part OfBenefits AllBenefits Me
Book:Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
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“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.”

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Author:Jon Kabat-Zinn
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“When we let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment, we are taking a profound step toward being able to encounter what is here now. 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—a knowing that comes directly from the cultivation of mindfulness—we may only go in circles, for all our efforts and expectations. So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.”

IfsKnowsWayTryingMayMomentsHappensAbleHopeEffortStepsPracticeKnowingMeditationLetting GoMindfulnessExpectationsStandingProfoundCirclesBest WayEncountersCultivationMeditation Practice
Book:Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
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“But when we start to focus in on what our own mind is up to, for instance, it is not unusual to quickly go unconscious again, to fall back into an automatic-pilot mode of unawareness. These lapses in awareness are frequently caused by an eddy of dissatisfaction with what we are seeing or feeling in that moment, out of which springs a desire for something to be different, for things to change.”

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Book:Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
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“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.”

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Book:Full Catastrophe Living, Revised Edition: How to cope with stress, pain and illness using mindfulness meditation
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“How we see and hold the full range of our experiences in our minds and in our hearts makes an enormous difference in the quality of this journey we are on and what it means to us. It can influence where we go, what happens, what we learn, and how we feel along the way.”

WayFeelsMindHeartMeanHappensDifferencesQualityJourneyInfluenceEnormousRange
Book:Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting
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“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.”

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Author:Jon Kabat-Zinn
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“"What is my job on the planet?" is one question we might do well to ask ourselves over and over again. Otherwise, we may wind up doing somebody else's job and not even know it. And what's more, that somebody else might be a figment of our own imagination, and maybe a prisoner of it as well.”

KnowsWellsMayMightJobsAsksImaginationPlanetsWindPrisonerFigments
Book:Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
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“The importance of the development of the emotional body is hardly recognized today. We are pretty much left to our own devices to come to full adulthood, whether man or woman. Our elders may have become so denatured themselves from a lack of such nurturance that there is no longer a collective knowledge of how to guide the awakening emotional vitality and authenticity of our young people, our children. Mindfulness may contribute to a reawakening of this ancient wisdom in ourselves and in others.”

PeopleMenMayChildrenBodyTodayYoungLeftEmotionalDevelopmentMindfulnessImportanceOur ChildrenAncientGuidesAwakeningAuthenticityCollectivesDevicesAdulthoodVitalityEldersAncient WisdomCollective Knowledge
Author:Jon Kabat-Zinn
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“Wherever you go, there you are. Whatever you wind up doing, that's what you've wound up doing. Whatever you are thinking right now, that's what's on your mind. Whatever has happened to you, it has already happened. The important question is, "how are you going to handle it?" .... Like it or not, this moment is all we really have to work with.”

ThinkingMindImportantMomentsHappenedWindRight NowWoundsHandleImportant QuestionsThinking Right
Book:Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life
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