Meditation had never been tried before in a medical center, so we had no idea whether mainstream Americans would accept a clinic whose foundation was intensive training in meditative discipline.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the uncertainty of introducing meditation as a medical practice.
In this quote, Jon Kabat-Zinn highlights the pioneering nature of incorporating meditation into medical treatment, emphasizing the unknowns involved in its acceptance by the mainstream American public. He suggests that despite the lack of precedent, it was an innovative approach to enhance wellness through meditative practices.
In practice
A speaker at a wellness retreat could use this quote to emphasize the importance of meditation in healing.
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.
The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.
Your body has a remarkable capacity to begin healing itself, and much more quickly than people had once realized, if you simply stop doing what's causing the problem.
There's no question that the mind-body connection is real, even if we can't quantify it. Hope is one of the greatest weapons we have to fight disease.
The important thing is to bring people with Parkinson's into our world and for the public to have a real understanding of it, as they've beginning to have with autism.
The health care industry can play a great role in this by being aware of the fact that these children form perhaps the most neglected group of people in the country, largely because it is hard to find them.
If a country denies it has AIDS, that country will inevitably become an even greater victim.
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