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

by Jon Kabat-Zinn

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.

For, as the book affirms, you are already perfect. We all are. Perfectly what we are, including all our imperfections and inadequacies. The question is: can we be with it? Can we sit with it? Can we know it? Can we embrace our own wholeness and embody it, here, where we already are, in the very situations, good, bad, ugly, lost, confusing, heart-rending, terrifying, and painful, that we find ourselves in? Can we be this knowing? Can we realize the infinite beauty and mystery and intelligence of our own awareness and realize, too, that it can be infinitely refined through tending, through the cultivation of an affectionate and tender attention? Can we realize that wherever we go, there we are and that this “there” is always “here” and so requires at least acknowledgment and perhaps a degree of acceptance of what is, however it is, because it already is? Can we grow into ourselves in our fullness and live our precious and fleeting lives more wisely?