Top 180 Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “To drop into being means to recognize your interconnectedness with all life, and with being itself. Your very nature is being part of larger and larger spheres of wholeness.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

52. “Just stopping, is a radical act of sanity and love.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

53. “But you cannot have harmony without a commitment to ethical behavior. It’s the fence that keeps out the goats that will eat all the young shoots in your garden.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

54. “We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

55. “Perhaps we just need little reminders from time to time that we are already dignified, deserving, worthy.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

56. “Can you question who you are? And are you comfortable with not knowing?”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

57. “The only time that any of us have to grow or change or feel or learn anything is in the present moment. But we’re continually missing our present moments, almost willfully, by not paying attention.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

58. “Meditation is really a non-doing. It is the only human endeavor I know of being where you already are.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

59. “Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

60. “There is just this moment. We are not trying to improve or to get anywhere else.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

61. “Breathing is central to every aspect of meditation training. It’s a wonderful place to focus in training the mind to be calm and concentrated.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

62. “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.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

63. “The funny thing about stopping is that as soon as you do it, here you are.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

64. “From the point of view of the meditative traditions the entire society is suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

65. “You make problem, you have problem.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

66. “You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

67. “Knowing what you are doing while you are doing it is the essence of mindfulness practice.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

68. “Most people don’t realize that the mind constantly chatters. And yet, that chatter winds up being the force that drives us much of the day in terms of what we do, what we react to, and how we feel.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

69. “Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

70. “When awareness embraces the senses, it enlivens them.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

71. “Living in a chronic state of unawareness can cause us to miss much of what is most beautiful and meaningful in our lives.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

72. “The real meditative practice is to open up to the full range of what happens in life. And parenting is a fantastic arena for doing that kind of spiritual training. It’s as much a potential door into enlightenment as anything else.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

73. “See If You Can Give Yourself Gifts That May Be True Blessings, Such As Self-Acceptance.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

74. “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.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

75. “Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

76. “A lot of harm has come in all eras from people attached to one view of ‘spiritual’ truth.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

77. “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

78. “In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are the same word.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

79. “Maybe the fear is that we are less than we think we are, when the actuality of it is that we are much much more.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

80. “Generosity is another quality which, like patience, letting go, non-judging, and trust, provides a solid foundation for mindfulness practice.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

81. “Dying without actually fully living, without waking up to our lives while we have the chance, is an ongoing and significant risk.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

82. “See if you can give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Practice feeling deserving enough to accept these gifts without obligation – to simply receive from yourself, and from the universe.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

83. “If we are to grasp the reality of our life while we have it, we will need to wake up to our moments. Otherwise, whole days, even a whole life, could slip past unnoticed.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

84. “There are certain ways in which I cultivate awareness, both through mindful yoga and taking care of my body and taking time to actually drop as deeply as possible into stillness, into whatever is unfolding in the present moment.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

85. “Allow your attention to gently alight on your belly, as if you were coming upon a shy animal sunning itself on a tree stump in a clearing in the forest. Feel your belly rise or expand gently on the inbreath, and fall or recede on the outbreath.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

86. “The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded. This includes a lack of awareness and understanding of our own mind and how it influences our perceptions and our actions. It severely limits our perspective on what it means to be a person and how we are connected to each other and the world around us.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

87. “Even before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that’s compounded by a factor of trillions.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

88. “See for yourself whether letting go when a part of you really wants to hold on doesn’t bring a deeper satisfaction than clinging.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

89. “From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

90. “How we see and hold the full range of our experiences in our minds and in our hearts makes an enormous difference in the quality of this journey we are on and what it means to us. It can influence where we go, what happens, what we learn, and how we feel along the way.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

91. “Paying attention and awareness are universal capacities of human beings.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

92. “The word discipline comes from disciple, someone who is in a position to learn.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

93. “Too much of the education system orients students toward becoming better thinkers, but there is almost no focus on our capacity to pay attention and cultivate awareness.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

94. “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.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

95. “Even the tiniest manifestation of mindfulness in any moment might give rise to an intuition or insight that could be hugely transforming.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

96. “There are a lot of different ways to talk about mindfulness, but what it really means is awareness.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

97. “When you have children, you realize how easy it is to not see them fully, and perhaps miss all those early years. If you are not careful, you can be too absorbed in work, and they will be only too happy to tell you about it later. Being a parent is one of greatest mindfulness practices of all.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

98. “Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath. KABIR.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

99. “Guess what? When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are. Whatever you wind up doing, that’s what you’ve wound up doing. Whatever you are thinking right now, that’s what’s on your mind. Whatever has happened to you, it has already happened. The important question is, how are you going to handle it? In other words, “Now what?”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

100. “When we spend some time each day in non-doing, resting in awareness, observing the flow of the breath and the activity of our mind and body without getting caught up in that activity, we are cultivating calmness and mindfulness hand in hand.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn