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

by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Meditation helps us wake up from this sleep of automaticity and unconsciousness, thereby making it possible for us to live our lives with access to the full spectrum of our conscious and unconscious possibilities.

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 and imprison us.

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity that at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get somewhere else but simply to be fully who you are in this moment, as you are. And to let that be OK for now—underscore for now. Perhaps the value of meditation lies precisely in this. Maybe we all need to do one thing in our lives simply for its own sake.

Above all, meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment.

Non-doing simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way.

Meditation involves intentionally cultivating a non-judging attitude toward whatever arises in the mind, come what may.

Discernment is the ability to see this and that, as opposed to this or that, to see the whole picture, and its fine details, to see gradations, not just binary categories such as black and white, good or bad, us and them in absolute terms.

A commitment to voluntary simplicity in the midst of the world on fire is a delicate balancing act. It is always in need of fine-tuning, further inquiry, ongoing attention, and listening to the compelling need for wise engagement and for more and more inclusive activism for the sake of our species and our planet.

Meditation practice is the slow, disciplined work of digging trenches, of working in the vineyards, of bucketing out a pond, of getting your rear end on the cushion, so to speak, literally and metaphorically, and keeping it there, perhaps for longer than feels comfortable at times. It is the work of no time and the work of a lifetime, all wrapped into one seamless whole.

So, in very real and hardly insignificant ways, when we change ourselves, we have already begun to change the world.