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
There are many different aspects to a formal meditation practice. But the real meditation practice is how you interface with life from moment-to-moment, no matter what's happening. Especially when you are awake, which is pretty much most of the time except for deep sleep.
Meditation had never been tried before in a medical center, so we had no idea whether mainstream Americans would accept a clinic whose foundation was intensive training in meditative discipline.
I'll take transformational change any way it comes. One way to look at meditation is as a kind of intrapsychic technology that's been developed over thousands of years by traditions that know a lot about the mind/body connection. To call what happens 'the placebo effect' is just to give a name to something we don't understand.
Meditation is like farming... the right soil is required to grow anything, nothing will grow if the soil is polluted by striving or pushing too hard.
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.
Mindfulness meditation is the embrace of any and all mind states in awareness, without preferring one to another.
The real meditation is how you live your life.
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.
Meditation is really a non-doing. It is the only human endeavor I know of being where you already are.
Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It's about feeling the way you feel.
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.
So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.
From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.