Introduction
18,000 medical patients and almost thirty years of experience and scientific studies from the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction(MBSR) Clinic and Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center have shown us that the cultivation of greater mindfulness through regular systematic formal and informal meditation practice can make a huge difference in the quality of life of people with a wide range of chronic stress disorders, pain conditions, and outright illness, to say nothing of those suffering from the normal wear and tear of the constant and mounting stress that is part and parcel of our everyday lives in this culture of 24/7 connectivity and multitasking. These pressures on our lives make it more and more difficult to find time for being and for moments of non-doing that might restore us, body and soul. Such moments, always available to us, but so easily missed, also allow us to remember, pay attention to, and embody what is most important in our lives, rather than getting caught up in the endless stream of what is most demanding or seductive.
This book of excerpts from Full Catastrophe Living—the book in which mindfulness meditation, the MBSR program, and the applications of mindfulness to stress, pain, and illness are described in great detail—can give you a doorway into the practice of mindfulness and the rediscovery of what is deepest and best in yourself. Any one, or any number, of these 100 pointers can readily remind you of what you already know in a deep way, that you actually have a choice in every moment: the choice of how to be in wise relationship to this moment, inwardly and outwardly, no matter what is happeing. By taking responsibility for your own experience in this way, you are taking a profound and potentially transformative step toward both healing and genuine well-being and happiness, not in some better “future” that may never come, but in the only moment you ever have for living, for breathing, for loving, for being … namely this one. You already have this power. It is innate in all of us. All it takes is paying attention, and being kind to yourself; and persevering in remembering that you are alive only in this moment, and now is the only time you ever have for making choices, and that this now is always available to you. Every moment is indeed a new beginning.
Since you have only moments to live, why not live them completely, and find out what it might mean to be true more of the time to your own deepest, most authentic nature?
This book was developed by Hor Tuck Loon of Malaysia out of his own passion for mindfulness and a desire to bring it to a wide range of people who are stressed and suffering in various ways. I am greatly indebted to him for both the idea of this book, and for its execution, which includes his own original photographic and graphic artistry, and his own choices in how to emphasize the transformative potential of mindfulness. The product is saturated with his generosity and spaciousness of heart.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
August 2008
Self-Motivation 1
In order for meditation practice to take root in your life and flourish, you will have to know why you are practicing. How else will you be able to sustain non-doing in a world where only doing seems to count? What will get you up early in the morning to sit and follow your breathing when everybody else is snug in bed? What will motivate you to practice when the wheels of the doing world are turning, your obligations and responsibilities are beckoning, and a part of you decides or remembers to take some time for “just being”? What will motivate you to bring moment-to-moment awareness into your daily life? What will prevent your practice from losing energy and becoming stale or from petering out altogether after an initial burst of enthusiasm?
Map Versus Journey 2
This book is meant to serve as a map, a guide to you. As you know, a map is not the territory it portrays. In the same way you should not mistake reading this book for the actual journey. That journey you have to live yourself, by cultivating mindfulness in your own life.”
3 Personal Vision
To sustain your commitment and keep your meditation practice fresh over a period of months and years, it is important to develop your own personal vision that can guide you in your efforts and remind you at critical times of the value of charting such an unusual course in your life. There may be times when your vision will be the only support you will have in keeping up your practice.
Lessons 4
In part your vision will be molded by your unique life circumstances, by your personal beliefs and values. Another part will develop from your experience of the meditation practice itself, from letting everything become your teacher: your body, your attitudes, your mind, your pain, your joy, other people, your mistakes, your failures, your successes, nature—in short, all your moments. If you are cultivating mindfulness in your life, there is not one thing that you do or experience that cannot teach you about yourself by mirroring back to you the reflections of your own mind and body.
5 Lifelong Commitment
As with meditation practice itself, this learning requires a lifelong commitment to continual inquiry and a willingness to modify your perspective as you acquire new knowledge and arrive at new levels of understanding and insight.
Do-It-Yourself 6
In this regard, cultivating mindfulness is not unlike the process of eating. It would be absurd to propose that someone else eat for you. And when you go to a restaurant, you don’t eat the menu, mistaking it for the meal, nor are you nourished by listening to the waiter describe the food. You have to actually eat the food for it to nourish you. In the same way, you have to actually practice mindfulness in order to reap its benefits and come to understand why it is so valuable.
Right Attitude 7
The attitude with which you undertake the practice of paying attention and being in the present is crucial. It is the soil in which you will be cultivating your ability to calm your mind and to relax your body, to concentrate and to see more clearly. If the attitudinal soil is depleted, that is, if your energy and commitment to practice are low, it will be hard to develop calmness and relaxation with any consistency. If the soil is really polluted, that is, if you are trying to force yourself to feel relaxed and demand of yourself that “something happen,” nothing will grow at all and you will quickly conclude that “meditation doesn’t work.”
Whole Being 8
To cultivate the healing power of mindfulness requires much more than mechanically following a recipe or a set of instructions. No real process of learning is like that. It is only when the mind is open and receptive that learning and seeing and change can occur. In practicing mindfulness you will have to bring your whole being to the process.
9 Fresh Mind
To cultivate meditative awareness requires an entirely new way of looking at the process of learning. Since thinking that we know what we need and where we want to get is so ingrained in our minds, we can easily get caught up in trying to control things to make them turn out “our way,” the way we want them to. But this attitude is antithetical to the work of awareness and healing.
Healing & Curing 10
Healing does not mean curing, although the two words are often used interchangeably. While it may not be possible for us to cure ourselves or to find someone who can, it is always possible for us to heal ourselves. Healing implies the possibility for us to relate differently to illness, disability, even death, as we learn to see with eyes of wholeness. Healing is coming to terms with things as they are.
Excerpt From: Jon Kabat-Zinn. “Letting Everything Become Your Teacher: 100 Lessons in Mindfulness.” iBooks.
Copyright © 2010 by Jon Kabat-Zinn. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
