Mindfulness is a way to rebalance ourselves. Instead of being lost in thought, or caught up in emotional upheaval, we can tip the scale in the direction of greater equanimity, clarity, wisdom, and self-compassion by actually learning how to inhabit that other dimension of our being.
Jon Kabat-ZinnEven before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that's compounded by a factor of trillions.
Jon Kabat-ZinnNourishing the soul is the process of drinking at the life stream, coming back to one's true self, embracing the whole of one's experience - good, bad, or ugly; painful or exalted; dull or boring.
Jon Kabat-ZinnThe real meditative practice is to open up to the full range of what happens in life. And parenting is a fantastic arena for doing that kind of spiritual training. It's as much a potential door into enlightenment as anything else.
Jon Kabat-ZinnAnother way to look at meditation is to view thinking itself as a waterfall, a cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness, we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantage point in a cave or depression in the rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.
Jon Kabat-Zinn