From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

I'll take transformational change any way it comes. 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. To call what happens 'the placebo effect' is just to give a name to something we don't understand.

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

It's not that God, the environment, and other people cannot help us to be happy or find satisfaction. It's just that our happiness, satisfaction, and our understanding, even of God, will be no deeper than our capacity to know ourselves inwardly, to encounter the world from the deep comfort that comes from being at home in one's own skin, from an intimate familiarity with the ways of one's own mind and body.

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature... But is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma.

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself. The watching is the holding. By watching your thoughts without being drawn into them, you can learn something profoundly liberating about thinking itself, which may help you to be less of a prisoner of those thought patterns (….)

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

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.

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

Meditation is a way of being, not a technique. Meditation is not about trying to get anywhere else. It is about allowing yourself to be exactly where you are and as you are, and the world to be exactly as it is at this moment, as well.

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.

— Jon Kabat-Zinn