Wherever You Go, There You Are

by Jon Kabat-Zinn

What is required to participate more fully in our own health and well-being is simply to listen more carefully and to trust what we hear, to trust the messages from our own life, from our own body and mind and feelings. This sense of participation and trust is all too frequently a missing ingredient in medicine.

they will come to see what they are doing and understand that their positive energy for me is really theirs. The positivity is their own.

It is their energy, and they need to keep it and use it and appreciate its source. Why should they give away their power?

[People] measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is…. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

you must be willing to let life itself become your teacher.

This is the path of working where you find yourself, with what is found here and now. This,

The challenge of mindfulness is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in—no matter how unpleasant, how discouraging, how limited, how unending and stuck they may appear to be—and to make sure that you have done everything in your power to use their energies to transform yourself before you decide ...

“What is it on this planet [which he referred to as Spaceship Earth] that needs doing that I know something about, that probably won’t happen unless I take responsibility for it?” He decided he would just ask that question continuously and do what came to him, following his nose. In this way, working for humanity as an employee of the universe at large, you get to modify and contribute to your locale by who you are, how you are, and what you

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you

have only an extemporaneous half possession…. Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Self-Reliance

We have climbed to a vantagepoint from which we can more readily perceive wholeness, and can cradle the flow of present moments in awareness. The flow of the breath and the flow of present moments interpenetrate, beads and thread together giving something larger.

All faces resemble each other, yet how easily we see in each uniqueness, individuality, an identity. How deeply we value these differences. The ocean is a whole, but it has countless waves, every one different from all the others; it has currents, each unique, ever-changing; the bottom is a landscape all its own, different everywhere; similarly the shoreline. The atmosphere is whole, but its currents have unique signatures, even though they are just wind. Life on earth is a whole, yet it expresses itself in unique time-bound bodies, microscopic

So, if you stop trying to make yourself into more than you are out of fear that you are less than you are, whoever you really are will be a lot lighter and happier, and easier to live with, too.

Without care and awareness, small-minded feeling states can dominate the moment. It happens all the time.

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.

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters

Hopefully they will have heard that the practice is not about getting anywhere else at all, not even to pleasant or profound spiritual experiences. 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.

Perhaps ultimately, spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous. If you see in this way, then everything becomes spiritual in its deepest sense. Doing science is spiritual. So is washing the dishes. It is the inner experience which counts. And you have to be there for it. All else is mere thinking.

But, while unity is surely an all-too-rare human experience, it is not the end of the story. What is more, all too often it is merely nine parts wishful thinking (but thinking nonetheless) and only one part direct experience. The quest for spiritual unity, especially in youth, is often driven by naivete and a romantic yearning to transcend the pain, the suffering, and the responsibilities of this world of eachness and suchness, which includes the moist and the dark.

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. And Zen practitioners have the wholly irreverent and wonderfully provocative saying, “If you meet the Buddha, kill him,” which means that any conceptual attachments to Buddha or enlightenment are far from the mark.

Rock, the students of psyche remind us, is symbolical of soul rather than spirit. Its direction is downward, the soul journey a symbolic descent, a going underground. Water, too, is symbolical of soul, embodying the downward element, as in the lake meditation, pooling in the low places, cradled in rock, dark and mysterious, receptive, often cold and damp.

The meditation practice itself is a mirror of this journey of growth and development. It too takes us down as well as up, demands that we face, even embrace, pain and darkness as well as joy and light. It reminds us to use whatever comes up and wherever we find ourselves as occasions for inquiry, for opening, for growing in strength and wisdom, and for walking our own path.

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. …their

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?

And what could be more important than to give our very life, in the fullness of its possibilities and its very actualities, often unseen, unnoticed, and unused, back to ourselves while we have the chance? It is either “Wherever you go, there you are,” or “Wherever you go, there you aren’t.” Both are true to a degree in any moment. But we can fiddle with the degreeness, and so reclaim who and what we already are, and always have been, right here, right now…only temporarily forgotten.