Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes

My whole teaching consists of two words, meditation and love.

I loved reading the Dalai Lama's words: My religion is loving-kindness. I realized that meant loving-kindness to everyone in my life: past, present, and future; and that meant loving-kindness to myself-in my pain, in my jealousy, in my fear.

Mindfulness needs to not be judgmental to really be mindfulness, which means it needs a basis of loving kindness.

It's been my experience that the longer I do yoga, the more I want to know, the more I am able to understand and the less judgmental I am.

Dedicating some time to meditation is a meaningful expression of caring for yourself that can help you move through the mire of feeling unworthy of recovery. As your mind grows quieter and more spacious, you can begin to see self-defeating thought patterns for what they are, and open up to other, more positive options.

When you practice Buddhism, you have to always self-reflect, and you can't avoid your problems. That makes me understand human beings better. I feel that the more I do that in my own life, the more I can see how to play a character.

The moment that we realize our attention has wandered is the magic moment of the practice, because that's the moment we have the chance to be really different. Instead of judging ourselves, and berating ourselves, and condemning ourselves, we can be gentle with ourselves.

When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.

You need not search for the compassionate mind from outside. To know yourself, to know your nature, your mind will automatically be the compassionate one.

Compassion starts with making friends with ourselves.

With the practice of meditation we can develop this ability to more fully love ourselves and to more consistently love others.

The more you meditate, the more helpful you can be to others, and the more deeply you will be in tune with God.

Meditation is a flower and compassion is its fragrance.

In deep self acceptance, grows a compassionate understanding.

Meditation is about cultivating constructive emotions, like altruism, compassion.

Meditation means: put the mind aside and watch. The first step - LOVE YOURSELF - will help you tremendously. By loving yourself you will have destroyed much that society has implanted within you. You will have become freer from the society and its conditioning.

By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home.

Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, or unconditional friendliness, a simple, direct relationship with the way we are.

With me, meditation is the only essential religion. And everything that follows it is virtue, because it comes of its own accord. You don't have to drag it, you don't have to discipline yourself for it. I have nothing to do with vegetarianism, but I know that if you meditate you are going to grow new perceptivity, new sensitivity, and you cannot kill animals.

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.

To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of the things that are happening inside you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.

One can not reflect in streaming water. Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.

I had benefited so much from Vipassana, I felt it was important for many more people to be able to share the experience.

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

I meditate an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. Once a year I go away for a long retreat. And overall, I just feel more comfortable in my own skin and less anxious, less sad, less fearful.