Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life

by Jon Kabat-Zinn

to live from then on as if he had died that night.

Die today as if you never lived.

it’s no longer personal. It’s just part of the totality of the universe expressing itself.

your own unexamined self-limiting beliefs and expectations.

The best time? How about now?

Right now

“If I can understand it, anybody can understand it.”

Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

Ultimately, it is the climb itself which is the adventure, not just standing at the top.

As best we can, we show others what we have seen up to now. It’s at best a progress report, ‘a map of our experiences, by no means the absolute truth. And so the adventure unfolds. We are all on Mount Analogue together. And we need each other’s help.

Beautiful

This has to happen in order for that to happen. Nothing comes from nothing.

Usually things are embedded in a complex web of finely balanced interconnections. Certainly what we call life, or health, or the biosphere, are all complex systems of interconnections, with no absolute starting point or end point.

everything we are in contact with connects us to the whole world in each moment, and that things and other people, and even places and circumstances, are only here temporarily. It makes now so much more interesting. In fact, it makes now everything.

nothing is ever isolated and needs reconnecting. It’s our way of seeing which creates and maintains separation.

Mindfulness practice is simply the ongoing discovery of the thread of interconnectedness.

man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable.

Advait

all things are one thing and that one thing is all things

Why not try to live so as to cause as little damage and suffering as possible?

The willingness to hurt comes ultimately out of fear. Non-harming requires that you see your own fears and that you understand them and own them. Owning them means taking responsibility for them. Taking responsibility means not letting fear completely dictate your vision or your view. Only mindfulness of our own clinging and rejecting, and a willingness to grapple with these mind states, however painful the encounter, can free us from this circle of suffering. Without a daily embodiment in practice, lofty ideals tend to succumb to self-interest.

As long as you are trying your very best, there can be no question of failure.

when we speak of a person’s karma, it means the sum total of the person’s direction in life and the tenor of the things that occur around that person, caused by antecedent conditions, actions, thoughts, feelings, sense impressions, desires.

You can make new karma.

all impulses in the mind arise and pass away, that they have a life of their own, that they are not you but just thinking, and that you do not have to be ruled by them. Not feeding or reacting to impulses, you come to understand their nature as thoughts directly.

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.

trusting people you shouldn’t,

you can “lose your mind,” commit an irreversible act, and then experience the myriad ways in which it shapes future moments.

We can all be imprisoned by incessant wanting, by a mind clouded with ideas and opinions it clings to as if they were truths.

If we hope to change our karma, it means we have to stop making those things happen that cloud mind and body and color our every action.

When we are in touch with being whole, we feel at one with everything. When we feel at one with everything, we feel whole ourselves.

Inquiry doesn’t mean looking for answers, especially quick answers which come out of superficial thinking. It means asking without expecting answers, just pondering the question, carrying the wondering with you, letting it percolate, bubble, cook, ripen, come in and out of awareness, just as everything else comes in and out of awareness.

Inquiry means asking questions, over and over again. Do

I don't question

what we call “the self” is really a construct of our own mind, and hardly a permanent one, either.

If you ask: “Who is the I who is asking who am I?”, ultimately you come to, “I don’t know.” The “I” just appears as a construct which is known by its attributes, none of which, taken singly or together, really makes up the whole of the person.

What it means is that everything is interdependent and that there is no isolated, independent core “you.”

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, without the distortions of our own thought processes. Part of that is perceiving that everything is interconnected and that while our conventional sense of “having” a self is helpful in many ways, it is not absolutely real or solid or permanent.

“strange attractor,” a pattern which embodies order, yet is also unpredictably disordered. It never repeats itself. Whenever you look, it is slightly different.

There is a price we pay for being attached to a narrow view of being “right.”

A proper guardian or guide needs wisdom and patience in abundance to pass on what is most important to the generation coming along the path.

you have to remind yourself that all colorations of “I,” “me,” and “mine” are just currents of thinking that are liable to carry you away from your own heart and the purity of direct experience.

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 concept of spirituality can narrow our thinking rather than extend it.

spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous.

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.

“If you meet the Buddha, kill him,” which means that any conceptual attachments to Buddha or enlightenment are far from the mark.

The fully developed human being embodies the unity of soul and spirit, up and down, material and non-material.

you are already perfect. We all are. Perfectly what we are, including all our imperfections and inadequacies.

Can we realize that wherever we go, there we are and that this “there” is always “here” and so requires at least acknowledgement and perhaps a degree of acceptance of what is, however it is, because it already is?

It is either “Wherever you go, there you are,” or “Wherever you go, there you aren’t.”

our afflictive emotions and the agitations of an unquiet and continually judging mind, revealing as well that these cannot but abate on their own if we cease denying them or attempting to shut them down, which only feeds their disquieting energies and so often leads to harm and suffering in all directions, inwardly and outwardly, rather than illumination and kindness.