Coming to Our Senses Quotes

“Genetically speaking, we are one people. The two most seemingly different people in the world are virtually identical from the point of their genes.φ At most, about one in a thousand nucleotides in our DNA are different between the blackest and the whitest, the tallest and the shortest of us. We are 99.9 percent the same. We are one tribe, one family, but have yet to recognize it. We humans are all intimately interconnected. How we treat each other matters to the health and well-being, perhaps even the survival, of us all as a species, not in some vague future, but in this very moment.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. R. D. LAING”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“It is a hard message to swallow at first blush because it brings into question everything that we think we are, which for the most part seems to come from what we identify with, our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings, our relationships, our values, our work, our expectations of what is “supposed” to happen and how things are “supposed” to work out for me in order for me to be happy, our stories of where we came from and where we are going and of who we are.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“For the most part, we share the desire to live our lives in peace, to pursue our private yearnings and creative impulses, to contribute in meaningful ways to a larger purpose, to fit in and belong and be valued for who we are, to flourish as individuals and as families, and as societies of purpose and of mutual regard, to live in individual dynamic balance, which is health, and in a collective dynamic balance, what used to be called the “commonweal,” which honors our differences and optimizes our mutual creativity and the possibility for a future free from wanton harm and from that which threatens what is most vital to our well-being and our very being.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“It is healing simply to be heard, to be met, to be seen, to be known.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants. SIR ISAAC NEWTON”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“it is awareness that we fall into when we stop trying to get somewhere or to have a special feeling and allow ourselves to be where we are and with whatever we are feeling right now.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“It does provide a greater basket for tenderly holding and intimately knowing our suffering in any and all circumstances, and that, it turns out, is transformative, and can make all the difference between endless imprisonment in pain and suffering and freedom from suffering,”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“a work that no one on the planet can do for us, no matter how much they would want to, no matter how much love they have for us, no matter how badly they feel for us, no matter how much they are helping us in the ways that they can help.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“Meditar consiste simplemente en prestar atención a la vida como si en verdad importase.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, La práctica de la atención plena

“even and especially as we are being confronted with the law of impermanence and the inevitability of change, conditions we are subject to as individuals regardless of how much we resist or protest or try to control outcomes. If we wish to make a quantum leap to greater awareness, there is no getting around the need for us to be willing to wake up, and to care deeply about waking up.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is, … W. B. YEATS, “Sailing to Byzantium”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“For mindfulness is the knowing quality of awareness, the core property of mind itself. It is strengthened by sustaining, and it is self-sustaining. Mindfulness is the field of knowing. When that field is stabilized by calmness and one-pointedness, the arising of the knowing itself is sustained, and the quality of the knowing strengthened.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“Coming to our senses involves cultivating an overarching awareness of all our senses, including our own minds, and their limitations, including the temptation when we feel deeply insecure and have a lot of resources, to try to control as rigidly and as tightly as possible all variables in the external world, an impossible and ultimately depleting, intrinsically violent, and self-exhausting enterprise.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“Coming to our senses involves cultivating an overarching awareness of all our senses, including our own minds, and their limitations, including the temptation when we feel deeply insecure and have a lot of resources, to try to control as rigidly and as tightly as possible all variables in the external world, an impossible and ultimately depleting, intrinsically violent,”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“Según Ray Kurzweil, genio de la informática y creador de amplificadores para las personas con deficiencias sensoriales, nuestra sensación interna y subjetiva del paso del tiempo está determinada por la que él denomina la ley del tiempo y del caos, según la cual, el intervalo que separa los “hitos” o eventos sobresalientes de un determinado proceso se expande o contrae en función del “grado de caos” del sistema. Por ello cuando, por ejemplo, disminuye el orden y aumenta el caos (es decir, la cantidad de eventos desordenados) de un determinado sistema, la sensación del paso del tiempo (entre eventos sobresalientes) se enlentece, y cuando, por el contrario, el orden aumenta y disminuye el caos, se acelera. Este corolario, al que denomina ley del retorno acelerado, es aplicable a todos los procesos evolutivos, desde la evolución de las especies hasta la evolución tecnológica y la evolución de la capacidad de computación.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, La práctica de la atención plena

“Los términos “medicina” y “meditación” proceden de la misma raíz latina mederi, que significa “curar”. La raíz indoeuropea profunda de mederi transmite, además, el significado esencial de “medir” pero, en este caso, no se refiere tanto a la noción habitual de “medida” como una relación cuantitativa con el criterio establecido de una determinada propiedad como la longitud, el volumen o el área, sino a la noción platónica de que todas las cosas tienen su propia medida interna, la cualidad o “esencia” que hacen que el objeto sea lo que es. En este sentido, la medicina es el procedimiento destinado a restaurar, cuando ésta se ve perturbada, la mesura interior adecuada, y la meditación consistiría en la percepción directa y el conocimiento experiencial profundo de la naturaleza de esta magnitud.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, La práctica de la atención plena

“Por el mismo motivo, cada vez que nos ensimismamos, no nos damos cuenta de las cosas o nos sentimos ansiosos, ejercitamos y reforzamos la capacidad de ensimismarnos, de tornarnos inconscientes y de estar ansiosos, respectivamente, porque, como dice el refrán, “la práctica hace el músculo”. Si no somos conscientes de la ira, del ensimismamiento, del aburrimiento o de cualquier otro estado mental que pueda desbordarnos, acabaremos consolidando las redes sinápticas del sistema nervioso en que se asienta nuestra conducta y nuestros hábitos condicionados inconscientes de los que, por más cuenta que nos demos de lo que está sucediendo, cada vez nos resulta más difícil desenredarnos.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, La práctica de la atención plena

“Fui a vivir al bosque porque quería vivir despierto, enfrentarme tan sólo a los hechos esenciales de la vida y aprender lo necesario para no verme obligado, cuando estuviera postrado en mi lecho de muerte, a reconocer que no había vivido.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, La práctica de la atención plena

“Meditation is a way of being, not a technique.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness

“No existe nada como “yo”, “mí” o “lo mío” a lo que aferrarse.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, La práctica de la atención plena

“vemos ciertas cosas, pero que también, al mismo tiempo, quizás no vemos las más importantes.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, La práctica de la atención plena