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.
Interpretation
Mindfulness involves being fully present and aware of your actions and surroundings.
In this quote, Jon Kabat-Zinn emphasizes the importance of paying attention to our experiences as a way to truly capture and appreciate life’s moments. He suggests that mindfulness, which is the practice of being aware and present in the here and now, enhances our ability to engage with the world and recognize the significance of our actions and experiences.
In practice
In a mindfulness workshop, this quote inspired participants to focus on their breathing.
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.
In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are same. So if you’re not hearing mindfulness in some deep way as heartfulness, you’re not really understanding it. Compassion and kindness towards oneself are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.
Initiate giving. Don't wait for someone to ask. See what happens - especially to you. You may find that you gain a greater clarity about yourself and about your relationships, as well as more energy rather than less. You may find that, rather than exhausting yourself or your resources, you will replenish them. Such is the power of mindful, selfless generosity. At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient . . . only the universe rearranging itself.
Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.
Difficulties come when you don't pay attention to life's whisper. Life always whispers to you first, but if you ignore the whisper, sooner or later you'll get a scream
The three things you can offer your children to change them: attention, appreciation and affection.
A true musician, like Johnny Cash, should be able to walk into a room with nothing but an instrument and capture people's attention for two hours.
For my own part, I would rather be in company with a dead man than with an absent one; for if the dead man gives me no pleasure, at least he shows me no contempt; whereas the absent one, silently indeed, but very plainly, tells me that he does not think me worth his attention.
The technique of positive thinking is not a technique that transforms you. It is simply repressing the negative aspects of your personality. It is a method of choice. It cannot help awareness; it goes against awareness. Awareness is always choiceless.
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