You can bring together the body's various systems to fine tune the body and mind in order to navigate life's ups and downs in a way that minimizes stress and maximizes well-being and satisfaction.
The Zen people from Ancient China, When you're walking, just walk. It turns out to be the hardest thing.
There is just this moment. We are not trying to improve or to get anywhere else.
Look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them.... Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all.
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.
Discipline provides a constancy which is independent of what kind of day you had yesterday and what kind of day you anticipate today.
We are continuously bombarded with information, appeals, deadlines, communications... We are continually being squeezed or projected into the future as our present moments are assaulted and consumed in the fires of endless urgency.
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.
Simply put, mindfulness is moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness.
The funny thing about stopping is that as soon as you do it, here you are.
Longer Version:
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.
From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.
It's okay that the mind drifts away but you just bring it back.
For men and women alike, this journey is a the trajectory between birth and death, a human life lived. No one escapes the adventure. We only work with it differently.
The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.
Can you question who you are? And are you comfortable with not knowing?
When experience is viewed in a certain way, it presents nothing but doorways into the soul.
So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.
Mindfulness is not about getting anywhere else.
In letting go of wanting something special to occur, maybe we can realize that something special is already occurring.
When you're walking, just walk. When you're eating, just eat. Not in front of the TV, not with the newspaper. It turns out, that's huge.
Stillness, insight, and wisdom arise only when we can settle into being complete in this moment, without having to seek or hold on to or reject anything.
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.
The real meditation is how you live your life.
Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.
Perhaps the most spiritual thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.
See for yourself whether letting go when a part of you really wants to hold on doesn't bring a deeper satisfaction than clinging.
This is something called walking meditation. The goal is to learn to be aware of each and every movement and feeling. I know it seems ridiculous, but it does change the way you experience walking.
Meditation is really a non-doing. It is the only human endeavor I know of being where you already are.
Mindful parenting is the hardest job on the planet, but it's also one that has the potential for the deepest kinds of satisfactions over the life span, and the greatest feelings of interconnectedness and community and belonging.
Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.
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.
The awareness is not part of the darkness or the pain; it holds the pain, and knows it, so it has to be more fundamental, and closer to what is healthy and strong and golden within you.
When awareness embraces the senses, it enlivens them.
Dying without actually fully living, without waking up to our lives while we have the chance, is an ongoing and significant risk.
If you look at people out on the street, if you look at people at restaurants, nobody's having conversations anymore. They're sitting at dinner looking at their phone, because their brain is so addicted to it.
He who dies before he dies does not die when he dies.
From the point of view of the meditative traditions the entire society is suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
There are a lot of different ways to talk about mindfulness, but what it really means is awareness.
Longer Version:
To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking. It's akin to letting your palm open to unhand something you have been holding on to.
In any given moment we are either practicing mindfulness, or defacto, we are practicing mindlessness.
You make problem, you have problem
You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.
Make a list of what is really important to you. Embody it.
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.
Perhaps we just need little reminders from time to time that we are already dignified, deserving, worthy.
Longer Version:
Perhaps we just need little reminders from time to time that we are already dignified, deserving, worthy. Sometimes we don't feel that way because of the wounds and the scars we carry from the past or because of the uncertainty of the future. It is doubtful that we came to feel undeserving on our own. We were helped to feel unworthy. We were taught it in a thousand ways when we were little, and we learned our lessons well.
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.
Practice moment to moment non-judgemental awareness.
Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.
It's the nature of the mind to drift away. The mind is like the Pacific Ocean, it waves. And mindfulness has been shown to drop underneath the waves. If you drop underneath the agitation in the mind, into your breath deep enough calmness, gentle undulations.
Mindfulness is a way of paying attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally, to what goes on in the present moment in your body, mind and the world around you.
You are only here now; you're only alive in this moment.
Just stopping, is a radical act of sanity and love.
You are whole and also part of larger and larger circles of wholeness you many not even know about. You are never alone. And you already belong. You belong to humanity. You belong to life. You belong to this moment, this breath.
Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.
Living in a chronic state of unawareness can cause us to miss much of what is most beautiful and meaningful in our lives.
Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?
No one can listen to your body for you... To grow and heal, you have to take responsibility for listening to it yourself.
If we are honest with ourselves, most of us will have to admit that we live out our lives in an ocean of fear.
Note that this journey is uniquely yours, no one else's. So the path has to be your own. You cannot imitate somebody else's journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?
Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It's about feeling the way you feel.
Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives. It is about perceiving the exquisite vividness of each moment. We also gain immediate access to our own powerful inner resources for insight, transformation, and healing.
Longer Version:
Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives. It is about perceiving the exquisite vividness of each moment. We also gain immediate access to our own powerful inner resources for insight, transformation, and healing,.
Healing is a coming to terms with things as they are, rather than struggling to force them to be as they once were, or as we would like them to be, to feel secure or to have what we sometimes think of as our own way.
Patience is a form of wisdom. It demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things must unfold in their own time.
Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.
Longer Version:
Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. This kind of attention nurtures greater awareness, clarity, and acceptance of present-moment reality.
We take care of the future best by taking care of the present now.
It is indeed a radical act of love just to sit down and be quiet for a time by yourself.
I don't want people following Jon Kabat-Zinn. I want them following themselves.
Science gave me a cosmic religious feeling, and I would get the same feeling when I was dragged to the Met and the Museum of Modern Art.
I'm challenging everybody on every side of every divide to be more who they are, to cultivate their capacity for awareness.
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 started the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979. The idea of bringing Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism into the mainstream of medicine was tantamount to the Visigoths being at the gates about to tear down the citadel of Western civilization.
Mindfulness is often spoken of as the heart of Buddhist meditation. It's not about Buddhism, but about paying attention. That's what all meditation is, no matter what tradition or particular technique is used.
A lot of harm has come in all eras from people attached to one view of 'spiritual' truth.
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.
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.
Longer Version:
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. But you have to learn how to get along. I did an awful lot of fighting. I was tough, but I'm also relatively small, so I learned very early on to use my mind.
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.
Even before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that's compounded by a factor of trillions.
Most people think that to meditate, I should feel a particular special something, and if I don't, then I must be doing something wrong.
Paying attention and awareness are universal capacities of human beings.