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239a06c
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We take care of the future best by taking care of the present now.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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2f414b9
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By repeatedly bringing your attention back to the breath each time it wanders off, concentration builds and deepens, much as muscles develop by repetitively lifting weights.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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599d076
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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 divorce..
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the-future
mindfulness
moments
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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4f5173c
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TRY: During the day, see if you can detect the bloom of the present moment in every moment, the ordinary ones, the "in-between" ones, even the hard ones. Work at allowing more things to unfold in your life without forcing them to happen and without rejecting the ones that don't fit your idea of what "should" be happening. See if you can sense the "spaces" through which you might move with no effort in the spirit of Chuang Tzu's cook. Notice..
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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c6ec032
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There is a price we pay for being attached to a narrow view of being "right."
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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c53c3a3
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The funny thing about stopping is that as soon as you do it, here you are. Things get simpler. In some ways, it's as if you died and the world continued on. If you did die, all your responsibilities and obligations would immediately evaporate. Their residue would somehow get worked out without you.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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7c8f489
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A willingness to embrace and work with what is lies at the core of all meditation practice.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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5764ab9
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After all, if you really aren't trying to get anywhere else in this moment, patience takes care of itself.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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a195e9f
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cultivating mindfulness is not unlike the process of eating. It would be absurd to propose that someone else eat for you. And when you go to a restaurant, you don't eat the menu, mistaking it for the meal, nor are you nourished by listening to the waiter describe the food. You have to actually eat the food for it to nourish you. In the same way, you have to actually practice mindfulness, by which I mean cultivate it systematically in your o..
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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5c2fa63
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we all tend to fill up our days with things that just have to be done and then run around desperately trying to do them all, while in the process not really enjoying much of the doing because we are too pressed for time, too rushed, too busy, too anxious? We can feel overwhelmed by our schedules, our responsibilities, and our roles at times, even when everything we are doing is important, even when we have chosen to do them all. We live imm..
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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4b1cc7c
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There are always waves on the water. Sometimes they are big, sometimes they are small, and sometimes they are almost imperceptible. The water's waves are churned up by the winds, which come and go and vary in direction and intensity, just as do the winds of stress and change in our lives, which stir up the waves in our minds.
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mind
churned-up
waves
mindfulness
wind
meditation
stress
water
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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d99e94c
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Another way to look at meditation is to view the process of thinking itself as a waterfall, a continual cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantagepoint in a cave or depression in a rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.
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beyond-thinking
cascading-of-thought
cultivating-mindfulness
process-of-thought
mindfulness
waterfall
meditation
thinking
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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550ac8d
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Simply put, mindfulness is moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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5b44b47
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As we just saw, in this learning process we assume from the start that as long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than wrong with you, no matter how ill or how despairing you may be feeling in a given moment. But if you hope to mobilize your inner capacities for growth and for healing and to take charge in your life on a new level, a certain kind of effort and energy on your part will be required. The way we put it is that i..
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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aa3d5b9
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Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience.
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mindfulness
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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70f7ab6
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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.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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8b7d602
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we are simply inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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5431332
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Genetically speaking, we are one people. The two most seemingly different people in the world are virtually identical from the point of their genes.ph 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 e..
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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d8bd0f4
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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.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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c1d5b6e
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we all come into and go out of this world as passing gatherings of structured energy.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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5bf15e9
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Because of this inner busyness, which is going on almost all the time, we are liable either to miss a lot of the texture of our life experience or to discount its value and meaning.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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bf9d18d
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Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes use of thinking, honoring its value and its power. Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thoughts as thoughts rather than getting caught up in them in reality.
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thinking-vessel
meditation
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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51de0c7
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The challenge of mindfulness is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in--no matter how unpleasant, how discouraging, how limited, how unending and stuck they may appear to be--and to make sure that you have done everything in your power to use their energies to transform yourself before you decide to cut your losses and move on.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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b08fd16
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Knowing what you are doing while you are doing it is the essence of mindfulness practice.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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f38b8a9
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Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature... But is is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma.
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karma
destiny
buddhism
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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cabeb49
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Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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3c6315b
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Pablo Neruda, "Keeping Quiet." Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still. For once on the face of the earth let's not speak in any language, let's stop for one second, and not move our arms so much. It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines, we would all be together in a sudden strangeness. Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales and the man gathering salt would look at his hurt hands. Those who prepare..
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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5dae395
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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.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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49f09d0
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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.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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5ba5a17
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That sentence is: "Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine." In other words, no attachments--especially to fixed ideas of yourself and who you are."
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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fe9f387
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Meditation is neither shutting things out nor off. It is seeing things clearly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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e98f2fd
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Feeling threatened can easily lead to feelings of anger and hostility and from there to outright aggressive behavior, driven by deep instincts to protect your position and maintain your sense of things being under control. When things do feel "under control," we might feel content for a moment. But when they go out of control again, or even seem to be getting out of control, our deepest insecurities can erupt. At such times we might even ac..
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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bce4d73
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and remind you that you are here now, and that when you get there, you will be there. If you miss the here, you are likely also to miss the there. If your mind is not centered here, it is likely not to be centered just because you arrive somewhere else.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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2bf4ceb
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Anybody who is imitating somebody else, no matter who it us, is heading in the wrong direction. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself.
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inspiration
wisdom
imitation
meditation
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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2283d88
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Whether we are basically healthy at the moment or have a terminal illness, none of us knows how long we have to live. Life only unfolds in moments. The healing power of mindfulness lies in living each of those moments as fully as we can, accepting it as it is as we open to what comes next--in the next moment of now.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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cdedc81
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But when we start to focus in on what our own mind is up to, for instance, it is not unusual to quickly go unconscious again, to fall back into an automatic-pilot mode of unawareness. These lapses in awareness are frequently caused by an eddy of dissatisfaction with what we are seeing or feeling in that moment, out of which springs a desire for something to be different, for things to change.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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2f0ae5e
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We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. The incessant stream of thoughts flowing through our minds leaves us very little respite for inner quiet. And we leave precious little room for ourselves anyway just to be, without having to run around doing things all the time. Our actions are all too frequently driven rather than undertaken in awareness, driven by those perfectly ordinary thoughts and impulses..
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psychology
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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17802ac
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Above all, meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment. It's not about getting somewhere else, but about allowing yourself to be where you already are.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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88c8b1d
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When asked about his apparent lack of anger toward the Chinese by an incredulous reporter at the time he won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama replied something to the effect that: "They have taken everything from us; should I let them take my mind as well?"
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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6d0ba13
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R]emain open to not knowing, perhaps allowing yourself to come to the point of admitting, "I don't know," and then experimenting with relaxing a bit into this not knowing instead of condemning yourself for it. After all, in this moment, it may be an accurate statement of how things are for you."
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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9af3a00
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Rather, it is bearing in mind what is most important to you so that it is not lost or betrayed in the heat and reactivity of a particular moment.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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52cdcf2
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One practical way to do this is to look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them of just your thought about them. Sometimes our thoughts act like dream glasses. When we have them on, we see dream children, dream husband, dream wife, dream ob, dream colleagues, dream partners, dream friends. We can live in a dream present for a dream future...But if we take off the glasses, maybe, just maybe, we might see a little more ..
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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8e2c811
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In some ways, it's as if you died and the world continued on. If you did die, all your responsibilities and obligations would immediately evaporate. Their residue would somehow get worked out without you. No one else can take over your unique agenda. It would die or peter out with you just as it has for everyone else who has ever died. So you don't need to worry about it in any absolute way. If this is true, maybe you don't need to make o..
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |
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f5d4185
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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.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn |