Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes

It's not possible to have a problem without believing a prior thought. To notice this simple truth is the beginning of peace.

Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim.

A thought is harmless unless we believe it.

Regain your senses, call yourself back, and once again wake up. Now that you realize that only dreams were troubling you, view this 'reality' as you view your dreams.

I'm a morning "spinner." That's usually when my brain is thinking too much and I don't necessarily see things positively. So I sit myself down and remember that I'm making it up. I believe we are creating in every moment - making up our reality, so to speak - so when anything gets chaotic or I feel spun out, I remind myself that everything is an interpretation. I can look at it differently and make it work for me in a more positive light.

Questioning our stressful thoughts, we come to see they're not true.

Life is a state of consciousness.

Some people think they are concentrating when they're merely worrying.

There have been many occasions when I found it helpful to talk out loud to my own thoughts, ordering the unwholesome ones to go off somewhere and jump into the river.

People don't even realize the power the mind has over the body in the way you perceive things. Change your thoughts, change your reality. Words are powerful - every thought and every word we think has an effect on the body.

Keep your head on your shoulders - even when you think your head is on your shoulders, sometimes it isn't!

We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality. So the work is often a general koan into how we go about forming this world in which we live, in particular with seeing.

Mindfulness, as defined by the Buddha, means awareness of incessant change, of arising and vanishing, inside of your own body, which is the ultimate reality of your own life.

Everybody is looking with his own world of desires, expectations, passions, lust, greed, anger. There are a thousand and one things standing between you and your world; that's why you don't ever see it as it is. Once your eye is completely clean, clean of all the dust, once it becomes a pure mirror, it reflects that which is. And that is truth and truth liberates, but it has to be your own. My truth cannot liberate you, Buddha's truth cannot liberate you. There is only one possibility of liberation, that is your own truth. And all that you have to do is to create a dispassionate eye.

Thoughts aren't fact, so don't take them seriously

As we practice, we begin to know the difference between our fantasy and reality.

Make it your moment-to-moment aim to recognize the difference between being aware of your thoughts, and being carried along by them.

Awareness means grasping life just the way it is, without contamination by mental projections.

The fear is not real, Dil Bahadur; it is only in your mind, like all other things. Our thoughts form what we believe to be reality.

We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

As meditation deepens, compulsions, cravings and fits of emotion begin to lose their power to dictate our behavior. We see clearly that choices are possible; we can say yes or we can say no. It is profoundly liberating.

Meditation means removing all your prejudices, putting all your conclusions aside, seeing without any hindrance, seeing without any curtains, seeing clearly without any mediation of any thought, seeing without Buddha standing between you and reality, or Krishna, or Christ.