Wherever You Go, There You Are

by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely, the path that is your life. Meditation may help us see that this path we call our life has direction; that it is always unfolding, moment by moment; and that what happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next.

You certainly have to be ready for meditation. You have to come to it at the right time in your life, at a point where you are ready to listen carefully to your own voice, to your own heart, to your own breathing—to just be present for them and with them, without having to go anywhere or make anything better or different. This is hard work.

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.

When we commit ourselves to paying attention in an open way, without falling prey to our own likes and dislikes, opinions and prejudices, projections and expectations, new possibilities open up and we have a chance to free ourselves from the straitjacket of unconsciousness.

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 us. This process doesn’t magically happen by itself. It takes energy. We call the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment “practice” or “meditation practice.”

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.

When we let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment, we are taking a profound step toward being able to encounter what is here now. 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—a knowing that comes directly from the cultivation of mindfulness—we may only go in circles, for all our efforts and expectations. So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.

You Can’t Stop the Waves but You Can Learn to Surf

Meditation is neither shutting things out nor off. It is seeing things clearly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.

Meditation is more rightly thought of as a “Way” than as a technique. It is a Way of being, a Way of living, a Way of listening, a Way of walking along the path of life and being in harmony with things as they are. This means in part acknowledging that sometimes, often at very crucial times, you really have no idea where you are going or even where the path lies. At the same time, you can very well know something about where you are now (even if it is knowing that you are lost, confused, enraged, or without hope).

Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes use of thinking, honoring its value and its power. Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thoughts as thoughts rather than getting caught up in them as reality.

Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself. The watching is the holding. By watching your thoughts without being drawn into them, you can learn something profoundly liberating about thinking itself, which may help you to be less of a prisoner of those thought patterns—often so strong in us—which are narrow, inaccurate, self-involved, habitual to the point of being imprisoning, and also just plain wrong.

If we decide to think positively, that may be useful, but it is not meditation. It is just more thinking. We can as easily become a prisoner of so-called positive thinking as of negative thinking. It too can be confining, fragmented, inaccurate, illusory, self-serving, and wrong. Another element altogether is required to induce transformation in our lives and take us beyond the limits of thought.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Meditation practice is the slow, disciplined work of digging trenches, of working in the vineyards, of bucketing out a pond. It is the work of moments and the work of a lifetime, all wrapped into one.

Recall that in a line six inches long, there are an infinite number of points, and in a line one inch long there are just as many. Well, then, how many moments are there in fifteen minutes, or five, or ten, or forty-five? It turns out we have plenty of time, if we are willing to hold any moments at all in awareness.

A journey of a thousand miles really does begin with a single step.

If you find yourself rushing or becoming impatient, slowing the pace can help take the edge off your rushing and remind you that you are here now, and that when you get there, you will be there. If you miss the here, you are likely also to miss the there. If your mind is not centered here, it is likely not to be centered just because you arrive somewhere else.

Maybe we are overdeveloped outwardly and underdeveloped inwardly. Perhaps it is we who, for all our wealth, are living in poverty.

First we learn what it’s like at the base. Only later do we encounter the slopes, and finally, perhaps, the top. But you can’t stay at the top of a mountain. The journey up is not complete without the descent, the stepping back and seeing the whole again from afar. Having been at the summit, however, you have gained a new perspective, and it may change your way of seeing forever.

Ahimsa is the attribute of the soul, and therefore, to be practiced by everybody in all the affairs of life. If it cannot be practiced in all departments, it has no practical value. MAHATMA GANDHI

Ultimately, it is our mindlessness that imprisons us. We get better and better at being out of touch with the full range of our possibilities, and more and more stuck in our cultivated-over-a-lifetime habits of not-seeing, but only reacting and blaming.

Stillness becomes available in doing and in non-doing. We find it lying within ourselves at all times, and as we touch it, taste it, listen to it, the body cannot but touch it, taste it, listen as well, and in so doing, let go. And the mind too comes to listen, and knows at least a moment of peace.

Ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe LAO-TZU, Tao-te-Ching

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self. ALBERT EINSTEIN, The World As I See It

“I,” “me,” and “mine” are products of our thinking. My friend Larry Rosenberg, of the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, calls it “selfing,” that inevitable and incorrigible tendency to construct out of almost everything and every situation an “I,” a “me,” and a “mine,” and then to operate in the world from that limited perspective which is mostly fantasy and defense.

If you observe this process of selfing with sustained attention and inquiry, you will see that what we call “the self” is really a construct of our own mind, and hardly a permanent one, either.

You are who you already are. But who you are is not your name, your age, your childhood, your beliefs, your fears. They are part of it, but not the whole.

when we speak about not trying so hard to be “somebody” and instead just experience being, directly, what it means is that you start from where you find yourself and work here.

Meditation is not about trying to become a nobody, or a contemplative zombie, incapable of living in the real world and facing real problems. It’s about seeing things as they are, wit...

Without care and awareness, small-minded feeling states can dominate the moment.

Watching your reactions in situations that annoy you or make you angry. Notice how even speaking of something “making” you angry surrenders your power to others.

Parenting and family life can be a perfect field for mindfulness practice, but it’s not for the weak-hearted, the selfish or lazy, or the hopelessly romantic. Parenting is a mirror that forces you to look at yourself. If you can learn from what you observe, you just may have a chance to keep growing yourself.

I see parenting as extended but temporary guardianship. When we think of them as “our” children, or “my” children, and start relating to them as our proper possessions to shape and control to satisfy our own needs, we are, I believe, in deep trouble. Like it or not, children are and will always be their own beings; but they need great love and guidance to come to full humanness.

meditation really is the one human activity in which you are not trying to get anywhere else but simply allowing yourself to be where and as you already are.

The work of mindfulness is waking up to vitality in every moment that we have. In wakefulness, everything inspires. Nothing is excluded from the domain of spirit.

Meditation can be a profound path for developing oneself, for refining one’s perceptions, one’s views, one’s consciousness.

Hopefully they will come to understand that mindfulness is beyond all thinking, wishful and otherwise, that the here and now is the stage on which this work unfolds continuously.

Mindfulness allows everything to shine with the luminosity that the word “spiritual” is meant to connote.

It is the inner experience which counts. And you have to be there for it. All else is mere thinking.

The idea of transcendence can be a great escape, a high-octane fuel for delusion. This is why the Buddhist tradition, especially Zen, emphasizes coming full circle, back to the ordinary and the everyday, what they call “being free and easy in the marketplace.” This means being grounded anywhere, in any circumstances, neither above nor below, simply present, but fully present.

For me, words like “soul” and “spirit” are attempts to describe the inner experience of human beings as we seek to know ourselves and find our place in this strange world.

Our demons, our dragons, our dwarfs, our witches and ogres, our princes and princesses, our kings and queens, our crevices and grails, our dungeons and our oars are all here now, ready to teach us. But we have to listen and take them on in the spirit of the heroic never-ending quest each of us embodies, whether we know it or not, in the very fabric of a human life lived, for what it means to be fully human. Perhaps the most “spiritual” thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.

Mindfulness meditation, especially when it is understood as a way of being, as living life as if it really mattered, moment by moment by moment, rather than merely as a technique or as one more thing you have to do during your already too-busy day, is one powerful vehicle for realizing such transformative and healing possibilities in ourselves and in the world.

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?

Mindfulness, cultivated for even a few minutes, draws the heart toward itself. It invites the intimacy we yearn for and that is calling to us because, ultimately, mindfulness is intimacy—with ourselves and the world—underneath any apparent separation between the two.