Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life by Joh Kabat-Zinn (Amazon)
What happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next.
We tend to be particularly unaware that we are thinking virtually all the time. […] Meditation means learning how to get out of this current.
Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at the bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.
Let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment.
Is it possible for you to contemplate that this may actually be the best season, the best moment of your life?
Look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them. Sometimes our thoughts act like “dream glasses.”
If you do decide to start meditation, there’s no need to tell other people about it, or talk about why you are doing it or what it’s doing for you. […] Just look at (this) as more thinking.
Meditation is neither shutting things out nor off. It is seeing things clear4ly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.
Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel. It’s not about making the mind empty or still. […] Meditation is about letting the mind be as it is.
Even our leisure tends to be busy and mindless. The joy of non-doing is that nothing else needs to happen for this moment to be complete.
“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.” — Thoreau
(We meditate to realize) “…that things are already perfect.”
We tend to see things through tinted glasses: through the lens of whether something is good for me or bad for me, or whether or not it conforms to my beliefs or philosophy.
At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient… only the universe rearranging itself.
Voluntary Simplicity: “…intentionally doing only one thing at a time and making sure I am here for it.
If mindfulness is deeply important to you, then every moment is an opporunity to practice.
Meditation is more rightly thought of as “Way” than as a technique.
Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking. […] Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking.
Meditation involves watching thought itself.
The posture itself is the meditation. The posture speaks of not looking for anything more, but simply digesting what is.
Mindfullness: Allowing one moment to unfold intot he next without analyzing, discoursing, judging, condemning, or doubting; simply observing, embracing, opening, letting be, accepting. Right now. Only this step. Only this moment.
We often see our thoughts, or someone else’s, instead of seeing what is right in front of us or inside of us.
When we perceive our intrinsic wholeness, there is truly no place to go and nothing to do.
What we call “the self” is really a construct of our own mind.
Stop trying so hard to be “somebody” and instead just experience being. […] You are only you in relationship to all other forces and events in the world.
You are who you already are. But who you are is not your name, your age, your childhood, your beliefes, your fears. They are part of it, but not the whole.
The self is impermanent. […] It is constantly changing, decaying, and being reconstructed again, always slightly differently, depending on the circumstances of the moment. […] It never repeats itself. Whenever you look, it is slightly different.