Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

by Jon Kabat-Zinn

It is all too easy to remain on something of a fog-enshrouded, slippery slope right into our graves—or, in the fog-dispelling clarity that on occasion precedes the moment of death, to wake up and realize that what we had thought all those years about how life was to be lived and what was important were at best unexamined half-truths based on fear or ignorance, only our own life-limiting ideas, and not the truth or the way our life had to be at all.

The systematic cultivation of mindfulness through formal meditation practices wakes us up to the fact that our lives unfold only in moments. If we are not fully present for many of those moments, we may not only miss what is most valuable in our lives but also fail to realize the richness and the depth of our possibilities for growth and transformation—often in the very next moment—

The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded. This includes a lack of awareness and understanding of our own mind and how it influences our perceptions and our actions. It severely limits our perspective on what it means to be a person and how we are connected to each other and to the world around us.

If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, This is the best season of your life. WU-MEN

One practical way to do this is to look at other people on occasion and ask yourself whether you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them. Sometimes our thoughts and opinions act like dream glasses. When we have them on, we see dream children, dream husband, dream wife, dream partner, dream job, dream colleagues, dream friends. We can live in a dream present for a dream future. Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all. Although things in the dream may change and give the illusion of being vivid and real, it is still a dream we are caught in. But if we take off the glasses, maybe, just maybe, we might see a little more accurately what is actually unfolding right here, right now, and engage with an extra dose of embodied presence and agency.

Inviting the body to settle into stillness and simply taking up residence in awareness for some part of each day, we touch what is most real and reliable in ourselves and most easily overlooked and undeveloped. When we can be at home with and 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, or get us to the next moment, we can be at home wherever we find ourselves, at peace with things as they are, moment by moment.

If you miss the here, you are likely also to miss the there.

Who knows what will happen to future generations as they come into contact with what we ironically call the “developed world”? Maybe we are overdeveloped outwardly and underdeveloped inwardly. Perhaps it is we who, for all our wealth, are living in poverty.