Mindfulness for Beginners Quotes

“The future that we want - this is it. This is the future of all the previous thoughts you've ever had about the future. You're in it. You're already in it. What is the purpose of all this living if it's only to get some place else and then when you're there you're not happy anyway, you want to be some place else. It's always for 'when I retire,' 'when I graduate college,' 'when I make enough money,' 'when I get married,' 'when I get divorced,' 'when the kids move out.' It's like, wait a minute, this is it. This is your life. We only have moments. This moment's as good as any other. It's perfect.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“If we are not careful, it is all too easy to fall into becoming more of a human doing than a human being, and forget who is doing all the doing, and why.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“It's very important as a beginner that you understand right from the start that meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“Mindfulness as a practice provides endless opportunities to cultivate greater intimacy with your own mind and to tap into and develop your deep interior resources for learning, growing, healing, and potentially for transforming your understanding of who you are and how you might live more wisely and with greater well-being, meaning, and happiness in this world.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“The challenge for mindfulness is to be present for your experience as it is rather than immediately jumping in to change it or try to force it to be different.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“Sometimes shutting off the sound on the television can allow you to actually watch the game and take it in in an entirely different and more direct way — a first-order, first-person experience — rather than filtered through the mind of another. In the case of meditation it is the same, except your own thoughts are doing the broadcast commentary, turning a first-order direct experience of the moment into a second-order story about it: how hard it is, how great it is, and on and on and on.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“it is the awareness that is of primary importance, no matter what the objects are that we are paying attention to.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“The word discipline comes from disciple, someone who is in a position to learn.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“When you practice mindfulness, the first thing you are likely to notice is how mindless you can be. Let’s say you decide to focus on the feeling of the breath moving in and out of the body. It is happening in the present moment. It is important. You can’t live without breathing. It is not hard to locate the sensations in the body associated with breathing, at the belly or in the chest, or at the nostrils. You might find yourself saying, “What is the big deal? I will just keep my focus on the breath.” Well, lots of luck with that one. Because invariably, you will find that the mind has a life of its own and is not interested in taking orders from you about staying focused on the breath or anything else. So it is very likely that you will find your attention dissipating over and over again, forgetting about this breath in this moment, and being preoccupied with something else — anything else — in spite of your own best intentions. This is just part and parcel of the landscape of meditation practice, and it tells you something about the nature of your own mind.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“The attitude of letting go, of letting things be as they are, of non-attachment, does not imply a condition of reactive distancing or detachment, and is not to be confused with passivity, dissociative behaviors, or attempts to separate yourself even the tiniest bit from reality. It is not a pathological condition of withdrawal adopted to protect yourself. Nor is it nihilistic. It is exactly opposite: a supremely healthy condition of heart and mind. It means embracing the whole of reality in a new way.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“any change that comes about in your life will be primarily because of your own efforts”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“whatever thoughts and emotions arise, and as best you can without taking any of it personally, as if the thoughts were merely sounds, or weather patterns in the mind.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“we are only breathing now — the last breath is gone, the next one hasn’t come yet — it is always a matter of this one. So it is an ideal anchor for our wayward attention. It keeps us in the present moment.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“no place to go, nothing to do, nothing to attain.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“Everything can be taken from a human being but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“The entirety of our mind, on the other hand, is by its very nature deep, vast, intrinsically still and quiet, like the depths of the ocean.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“We can feel victimized by our thoughts, or blinded by them. We can easily mis-take them for the truth or for reality when in actuality they are just waves on its surface, however tumultuous they may be at times.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“Perhaps over time we can adjust our default setting to one of greater mindfulness rather than of mindlessness and being lost in thought.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“known. If you are completely preoccupied with what is already known, you can’t make the leap into that other dimension of creativity or imagination or poetry, or whatever it is that allows for seeing a hidden order in things which, until it is seen and realized, it isn’t seen at all.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“When we don't automatically take them (thoughts) personally or believe the stories about "reality" that we build from them,when we can simply hold them in awareness with a sense of curiosity and wonder at their amazing power given their insubstantiality, their limitations,and inaccuracies,then we have a chance right in that moment,in any moment really,to not get caught in their habitual patterning,to see thoughts for what they are,impersonal events.
Then in that moment at least, we are already free,ready to act with greater clarity and kindness within the constantly changing field of events that is nothing other than life unfolding-- not always as we think it should,but definitely as it is.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“If you can’t entirely trust what you think, what about trusting awareness? What about trusting your heart? What about trusting your motivation to at least do no harm? What about trusting your experience until it’s proven to be inaccurate — and then trusting that discovery?”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“not get caught in their habitual patterning, to see thoughts for what they are, impersonal events, and instead be the knowing that awareness already is. Then, in that moment at least, we are already free, ready to act with greater clarity and kindness within the constantly changing field of events that is nothing other than life unfolding — not always as we think it should, but definitely as it is.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“Hay dos formas complementarias de llevar a cabo este trabajo, formal e informalmente. La primera consiste en dedicar a diario un tiempo a la práctica, en este caso, a la práctica de las meditaciones guiadas. El abordaje informal consiste en dejar que la práctica vaya impregnando, de un modo tan sencillo como natural, todas y cada una de las facetas de tu vida cotidiana. Estas dos modalidades de práctica encarnada van de la mano y se apoyan mutuamente, constituyendo, en última instancia, una totalidad inconsútil a la que podríamos denominar vida consciente y despierta. Espero que la práctica de las meditaciones guiadas te sirva de punto de partida para una exploración continua de la práctica del mindfulness formal e informal y de lo que ocurre durante los días, semanas, meses y años posteriores.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness para principiantes

“Mindfulness es conciencia, una conciencia que se desarrolla prestando una atención concreta, sostenida, deliberada y sin juzgar al momento presente. Esta es una de las muchas formas de meditación, si pensamos en la meditación como algo en lo que nos comprometemos (1) para regular sistemáticamente nuestra atención y energía, (2) mediante lo que influimos —y posiblemente también profundizamos— en la cualidad de nuestra experiencia (3) con la intención de actualizar el amplio abanico de nuestra humanidad y (4) nuestra relación con los demás y con el mundo.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness para principiantes

“It means that how we relate to all our moments, all our experiences, is a choice.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“The challenge of mindfulness is to be present for your experience as it is rather than immediately jumping in to change it or try to force it to be different.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“So the training in mindfulness that we will be exploring together is really the cultivation of a resource that is already ours.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment

“Ultimately, I see mindfulness as a love affair — with life, with reality and imagination, with the beauty of your own being, with your heart and body and mind, and with the world.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Explore the Infinite Potential that Lies Within This Very Moment