Top 180 Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait. WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

152. “Meditation is a way of being, not a technique. Meditation is not about trying to get anywhere else. It is about allowing yourself to be exactly where you are and as you are, and the world to be exactly as it is in this moment, as well.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

153. “If you let restlessness move you, you lose touch with who you are.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

154. “So it can be particularly helpful to keep in mind from moment to moment that it is not so much the stressors in our lives but how we see them and what we do with them, how we are in relationship to them, that determines how much we are at their mercy.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

155. “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. R. D. LAING.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

156. “Carl Jung put it this way: “The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one’s whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises.” With.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

157. “To break out of this trap of always being driven by our own desires, it is not a bad exercise to ask yourself from time to time, “What is my own way?” “What do I really want?” “Would I know it if I got it?” “Does everything have to be perfect right now, or under my total control right now, for me to be happy?”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

158. “If we are unaware of what we are doing a good deal of the time, and we don’t particularly like the way things turn out in our lives, perhaps it’s time to pay closer attention, to be more in touch, to observe the choices we make and their consequences down the road.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

159. “TRY: Asking yourself in this moment, “Am I awake?,” “Where is my mind right now?”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

160. “Maybe we have an exaggerated belief that we have to stay in bed just to get through the day or that we can’t go out of the house and do things. Views like these lead readily to what is sometimes referred to as “illness behavior.” We begin to build our psychological life around our preoccupations with our illness, injury, or disability, while the rest of our life is on hold and unfortunately atrophying along with the body.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

161. “In order to build continuity and momentum in the meditation practice, you will need to keep reminding yourself to come back to the breath over and over again, no matter what the mind is up to from one moment to the next.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

162. “We resonate with one another’s sorrows because we are interconnected. Being whole and simultaneously part of a larger whole, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. If I become a center of love and kindness in this moment, then in a perhaps small but hardly insignificant way, the world now has a nucleus of love and kindness it lacked the moment before. This benefits me and it benefits others.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

163. “Meditation is not so concerned with how much thinking is going on as it is with how much room you are making for it to take place within the field of your awareness from one moment to the next.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

164. “There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hand.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

165. “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

166. “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

167. “The more you practice, the more skill you can develop in reducing pain or at least becoming more transparent to it, so that it is less eroding of your quality of life.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

168. “As you begin befriending your breath, you see immediately that unawareness is everywhere.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

169. “You have to actually make the time to practice every day, because otherwise you will not find it.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

170. “The present is the only time that we have to know anything.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

171. “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

172. “Just because you decide to still your body and observe your breath from moment to moment doesn’t mean that your thinking mind is going to cooperate.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

173. “What does happen as we intentionally pay attention to our breathing is that we realize pretty quickly that we are.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

174. “Rarely are we in touch with who is doing the doing – or, put otherwise, with the world of being. To.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

175. “If I wanted to predict your happiness, and I could know only one thing about you, I wouldn’t want to know your gender, religion, health, or income. I’d want to know about your social network – about your friends and family, and the strength of your bonds with them.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

176. “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

177. “It would not be hard to imagine that a happy hermit, living in isolation, might feel connected to everything in nature and all people on the planet and not be at all affected by a dearth of human neighbors.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

178. “Awareness requires only that we pay attention and see things as they are. It doesn’t require that we change anything.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

179. “Right in that or any moment of non-doing, you are already OK, already perfect, in the sense of perfectly who and what you are. And therefore, right in that moment you are already at home in a profound way, far beyond who you think you are and the ideas and opinions that may so shape and sometimes severely limit your view of the larger whole.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

180. “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

181. “We tend to see more through our thoughts and opinions than through our eyes.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

182. “You certainly have to be ready for meditation. You have to come to it at the right time in your life, at a point where you are ready to listen carefully to your own voice, to your own heart, to your own breathing.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

183. “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

184. “Feel your body lying in bed. Straighten it out. Ask yourself, “Am I awake now? Do I know that the gift of a new day is being given to me? Will I be awake for it? What will happen today? Right now I don’t really know. Even as I think about what I have to do, can I be open to this not-knowing? Can I see today as an adventure? Can I see right now as filled with possibilities?”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn