Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kabat-Zinnis Professor of Medicine Emeritus and creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn was a student of Buddhist teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh and Zen Master Seung Sahn and a founding member of Cambridge Zen Center. His practice of yoga and studies with Buddhist teachers led him to integrate their teachings with those of science. He teaches mindfulness, which he...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth5 June 1944
CountryUnited States of America
I was very much a tough New York street kid. I went to a school where you had to learn how to get along with everybody or fight with everybody, and I did my fair share of both.
Practice moment to moment non-judgemental awareness.
Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.
Paying attention and awareness are universal capacities of human beings.
Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. Without calmness, the mirror of mindfulness will have an agitated and choppy surface and will not be able to reflect things with any accuracy.
Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It's about feeling the way you feel.
Even before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that's compounded by a factor of trillions.
Can you question who you are? And are you comfortable with not knowing?
Mindfulness is not about getting anywhere else.
We call the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment ‘practice’ or ‘meditation practice.’
The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment.
He who dies before he dies does not die when he dies.
So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.
Mindfulness is so powerful that the fact that it comes out of Buddhism is irrelevant.