Wherever You Go, There You Are

by Jon Kabat-Zinn

robotlike way of seeing and thinking and doing.

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.

“Be a light unto yourself.”

waking up and living in harmony with oneself and with the world.

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

unconscious and automatic actions and behaviors, often driven by deepseated fears and insecurities.

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.

the most important point is to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already.

“heartfulness.”

it leads to new ways of being in our own skin and in the world, which can free us from the ruts we so often fall into.

listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us rather than to tyrannize us.

“Don’t just do something, sit there.”

TRY: Stopping, sitting down, and becoming aware of your breathing once in a while throughout the day. It can be for five minutes, or even five seconds. Let go into full acceptance of the present moment, including how you are feeling and what you perceive to be happening. For these moments, don’t try to change anything at all, just breathe and let go. Breathe and let be. Die to having to have anything be different in this moment; in your mind and in your heart, give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are. Then, when you’re ready, move in the direction your heart tells you to go, mindfully and with resolution.

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. Perhaps its value lies precisely in this.

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.

Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to being present.

The spirit of mindfulness is to practice for its own sake, and just to take each moment as it comes—pleasant or unpleasant, good, bad, or ugly—and then work with that because it is what is present now.

One practical way to do this is to look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them.

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

meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel.

meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment. It’s not about getting somewhere else, but about allowing yourself to be where you already are.

Let this or any time you practice be your time for letting go of all doing, for shifting into the being mode, in which you simply dwell in stillness and mindfulness, attending to the moment-to-moment unfolding of the present, adding nothing, subtracting nothing, affirming that “This is it.”

The joy of non-doing is that nothing else needs to happen for this moment to be complete.

The only way you can do anything of value is to have the effort come out of non-doing and to let go of caring whether it will be of use or not.

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

They can only be cultivated, and this only when you have reached the point where your inner motivation is strong enough to want to cease contributing to your own suffering and confusion and perhaps to that of others.

It is an inner hearing you are attending to, just as it is an inner soil that is being tilled for the cultivation of mindfulness.

so subtly, is anger. It’s the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it.

“They have taken everything from us; should I let them take my mind as well?”

the inner peace of knowing what is most fundamental, and the outer peace of embodying that wisdom in carriage and action. Peace, and a willingness to be patient in the face of such enormous provocation and suffering, can only come about through the inner cultivation of compassion, a compassion that is not limited to friends, but is felt equally for those who, out of ignorance and often seen as evil, may cause you and those you love to suffer.

It’s that the anger can be used, worked with, harnessed so that its energies can nourish patience, compassion, harmony, and wisdom in ourselves and perhaps in others as well.

We don’t have to let our anxieties and our desire for certain results dominate the quality of the moment, even when things are painful.

To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking.

To be transparent requires that we allow fears and insecurities to play themselves out in the field of full awareness.

judgments are unavoidable and necessarily limiting thoughts about experience.

our thoughts tend to be less than completely accurate. Usually they are merely uninformed private opinions, reactions and prejudices based on limited knowledge and influenced primarily by our past conditioning.

Trust is a feeling of confidence or conviction that things can unfold within a dependable framework that embodies order and integrity.

generosity is an inward giving, a feeling state, a willingness to share your own being with the world.

The impulse frequently arises in me to squeeze another this or another that into this moment.

This impulse doesn’t care what it feeds on, as long as it’s feeding.

It involves intentionally doing only one thing at a time and making sure I am here for it.

Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more.

You can think of concentration as the capacity of the mind to sustain an unwavering attention on one object of observation.

“onepointedness.”

The pot of awareness helps us cradle the anger and see that it may be producing more harmful effects than beneficial ones, even if that is not our aim. In this way, it helps us cook the anger, digest the anger, so that we can use it effectively, and, in changing from an automatic reacting to a conscious responding, perhaps move beyond it altogether. This and other options stem from a careful listening to the dictates of the whole situation. Our vision has to do with our values, and with our personal blueprint for what is most important in life.

At some time or another, you are practically forced to sit down and contemplate your life and question who you are and where the meaning lies in the journey of life…your life.

first, a bargain with our own suppressed shadow energies,

Conversing with those aspects of our psyches that we instinctively turn away from into unconsciousness is a prerequisite. And that may be plenty scary, because the feeling state that arises is the one that comes when we go down into dark, unknown, mysterious places.

they represent different mind states, each with its own kind of divine energy which has to be faced, honored, and worked with if we are to grow and develop our true potential as full human beings, whether men or women.

what Jungians call soul work, the development of depth of character through knowing something of the tortuous labyrinthine depths and expanses of our own minds.