You are only here now; you're only alive in this moment.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of living in the present moment and cherishing our current experiences.
Jon Kabat-Zinn's quote reminds us that our existence is limited to the present moment, urging us to engage fully with life as it unfolds. It highlights the fleeting nature of time and encourages mindfulness, suggesting that true awareness and presence can lead to a more meaningful and fulfilling life.
In practice
During a mindfulness workshop, this quote can be used to remind participants to focus on their breath.
Once you have established yourself as a center of love and kindness radiating throughout your being, which amounts to a cradling of yourself in loving kindness and acceptance, you can dwell here indefinitely, drinking at this fount, bathing it in, renewing yourself, nourishing yourself, enlivening yourself. This can be a profoundly healing practice for body and soul.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are same. So if youβre not hearing mindfulness in some deep way as heartfulness, youβre not really understanding it. Compassion and kindness towards oneself are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.
I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.
Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!
Know not to revere human things too much.
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