Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes

“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.”

“Discipline provides a constancy which is independent of what kind of day you had yesterday and what kind of day you anticipate today.”

“Give more than you think you can, trusting that you are richer than you think.”

“He who dies before he dies does not die when he dies.”

“I don’t know of any magical solutions and, frankly, I’m not looking for one. A full life is painted with broad brush strokes. Many paths can lead to understanding and wisdom. Each of us has different needs to address and things worth pursuing over the course of a lifetime. Each of us has to chart our own course, and it has to fit what we are ready for.”

“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.”

“Like it or not, this moment is all we really have to work with.”

“Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is.”

“Note that this journey is uniquely yours, no one else's. So the path has to be your own. You cannot imitate somebody else's journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?”

“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.”

“The little things? The little moments? They aren't little.”

“When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are. Whatever you wind up doing, that’s what you’ve wound up doing. Whatever you are thinking about right now, that’s what’s on your mind.”

“When we can be centered in ourselves, even for brief periods of time in the face of the pull of the outer world, not having to look elsewhere for something to fill us up or make us happy, we can be at home wherever we find ourselves, at peace with things as they are, moment by moment.”

“When we speak of meditation, it is important for you to know that this is not some weird cryptic activity, as our popular culture might have it. It does not involve becoming some kind of zombie, vegetable, self-absorbed narcissist, navel gazer, “space cadet,” cultist, devotee, mystic, or Eastern philosopher. Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is.”

“Wherever you go, there you are.”

“Maybe the fear is that we are less than we think we are, when the actuality of it is that we are much much more.”

“No matter how many scars we carry from what we have gone through and suffered in the past, our intrinsic wholeness is still here: what else contains the scars? None of us has to be a helpless victim of what was done to us or what was not done for us in the past, nor do we have to be helpless in the face of what we may be suffering now. We are also what was present before the scarring—our original wholeness, what was born whole. And we can reconnect with that intrinsic wholeness at any time, because its very nature is that it is always present. It is who we truly are.”

“Patience is a form of wisdom. It demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things must unfold in their own time.”

“You make a problem, you have a problem.”

“At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient... only the universe rearranging itself.”

“Breathe and let be.”

“For men and women alike, this journey is a the trajectory between birth and death, a human life lived. No one escapes the adventure. We only work with it differently.”

“From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.”

“Give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are.”

“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...”

“If you stop trying to make yourself more than you are, out of fear that you are less than you are, whoever you really are will be a lot lighter and happier and easier to live with, too.”

“Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.”

“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?”

“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.”

“Make a list of what is really important to you. Embody it.”