This page lists some of the all-time best Jon Kabat-Zinn quotes. Enjoy!
Page Contents:
- Mind & Thinking Quotes
- Personal Self Quotes
- Present Moment Quotes
- Attention & Mindfulness Quotes
- Wholeness & Interconnectedness Quotes
50+ Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes on Presence, Wholeness, Mindfulness, & More
Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes on Mind & Thinking
“We’re not educated to actually befriend our own minds.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“We get tremendous training in thinking, but there’s another element of our being that we get no education in, that’s obviously more powerful than thinking because it can take any thought and hold it … We never get any training in awareness at school.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“If you check on what your mind is up to, it’s up to memory. It’s up to thinking about things that are already over, to a large degree. The other favorite preoccupation of the mind is in the opposite direction: the future.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“When we’re always rushing to get someplace else, the byproduct of that is that we’re never where we actually are … Certain things can’t be hurried, but things do unfold in their own time.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“It’s the default mode of the mind to be all over the place.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“We’re continually scanning the world for something more interesting than this.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“The kind of mind that’s grasping for an outcome is exactly the kind of mind that gets in the way of any desirable outcome.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“There are intelligences at work that are deeper than the thought function.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes on the Personal Self
“We are continually constructing narratives about ourselves. I mean, after all, it’s the favorite topic, right? Me. What could be more interesting than me? The story of me, starring me.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Don’t take things personally when they’re not personal. Then you might ask, ‘When are they not personal?’ That’s a good question to keep asking yourself. It may be they’re never personal. It may be the ‘you’ that you think you are is not the real you.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“The source of suffering is clinging—self-identification—I, me, and mine.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“The problem is with the personal pronouns ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’. They are very problematic because who we think we are and who we actually are, are very different and there’s a huge separation. Who we think we are is very small compared to who we actually are.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“The thought about ‘how you are’ and ‘who you are’ is just that. It’s an event in the field of awareness.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“You’re already enlightened, but the personal pronoun that wants to grab it and say, ‘I’m enlightened’ is the problem.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes on the Present Moment
“The real meditation practice is life itself … The real meditation practice never stops … The real meditation is how you live your life moment to moment.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“How much time do you have on the planet? No time at all. You only have now.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“We’re only alive when we’re alive.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“The present moment turns out to be the only moment that any of us ever have.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“You don’t even have to shift your posture to be awake or to be aware … The posture is secondary. What’s important is the inner orientation. The willingness to open to the present moment.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Beginner’s mind is a lovely orientation to bring to the present moment. This moment is always fresh, always new. We’ve never been in this one before.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“The present moment is the door into life itself.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Be in wise relationship to the unfolding of life itself.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“In this moment, your life is just like this.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Can you feel how radical a shift it would be in your life to just take one moment and allow everything to be as it is, instead of wishing it was one way or another?” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes on Attention & Mindfulness
“There’s nothing Buddhist about attention. There’s nothing particularly Eastern. There’s nothing particularly magic or mysterious about it.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Mindfulness is not a philosophy. It’s not a good idea. It’s not a concept. It’s not a technique. It’s not a special state. It’s a way of being … It’s the art of living our lives as if they really mattered.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Mindfulness is actually awareness, and it’s cultivated by paying attention.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Mindfulness is the awareness that arises by paying attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally, in the present moment.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Mindfulness is all about discerning with clarity what’s actually going on.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Mindfulness is moment to moment non-judgmental awareness.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Every moment a new beginning. That’s what mindfulness is about. Every moment fresh.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“The challenge of mindfulness is can we work with things as they are? Can we be in wise relationship with things as they are? One way to think about mindfulness is that it’s all about relationality.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“The way I define ‘healing’ is coming to terms with things as they are … Letting go we could think of as the opposite of clinging or grasping … Letting go really means letting be. It means allowing things to be as they are … Acceptance is not passive resignation, but it’s an act of recognition that things are actually the way they are … It means that unless we accept things as they are, we will try to force things to be as they are not.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Mindfulness doesn’t mean that you won’t be judgmental. Mindfulness really means that you’ll become more aware of how judgmental you are, and then that gives us the possibility of actually not believing all those judgments. That opens up enormous dimensions of freedom. If you don’t believe your own propaganda, then actually there’s a lot of space for being in wiser relationship to other people, to nature, to your own body, to your own thoughts, to your own emotions.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Mindfulness is a liberative practice. It liberates us from the small-mindedness that we are in so much a habit of getting caught in.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“One of the core principles of mindfulness is that whatever it is, it’s workable as long as you’re breathing … As long as you’re breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong with you, no matter what’s wrong with you.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“When we focus on the breath, it’s never about the breath. It’s about the awareness.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Mindfulness is really about nondual wisdom. That means as long as we’re making ‘us’ or ‘them’ or ‘me when I was great’ and now ‘me when I’m falling apart’, it’s diluted, it’s the wrong view looking through the wrong lens.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“When you hear the word ‘mindfulness’, if you’re not also hearing the word ‘heartfulness’, you’re not actually understanding it.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Non-striving or non-doing is to actually allow things to be held in awareness without having to operate on them, without having to make anything happen.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes on Wholeness & Interconnectedness
“The most profound thing you can see is the interconnectedness of all things … Life is one completely integrated whole.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Every aspect of our being is one integrated whole.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Nothing to do, no place to go, nothing to attain because you’re already whole.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Awareness, and silence, and stillness are all different ways of saying the same thing, of pointing to something that’s already yours that you don’t have to get.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“We can’t improve on perfection … You’re perfect actually the way you are.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“The wisdom is actually inside of us to begin with.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“It’s my absolute pleasure to do whatever it is that I can to ignite an enduring passion for the emergence of a sense of deep recognition of interconnectedness.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“When we speak of mindfulness as being non-judgmental awareness, it doesn’t mean that there won’t be judgments. It means that you will be aware of how judgmental we actually are and then not judge the judging … We’re talking about a very fine degree of discernment, of clarity of wisdom, of understanding the interconnections between things.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“As we cultivate intimacy with ourselves, we also cultivate a deep sense of trustworthiness and trust, and a good place to start is with ourselves.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Seeing what hasn’t been seen before. Everything’s exactly the same, only you’re not. That’s liberation.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
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