# Read the first page of Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn Read the opening of Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn free, no signup. An introduction to mindfulness through attention, stillness, patience, and daily practice. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/wherever-you-go-there-you-are-jon-kabat-zinn - Genre: Mindfulness - Year: 1994 - ISBN: 9781562827694 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781562827694&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781562827694 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781562827694 ## The opening @@CHAP@@ PART ONE @@CHAP@@ The Bloom of the Present Moment Only that day dawns to which we are awake. HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden @@CHAP@@ What Is Mindfulness? Mindfulness is an ancient Buddhist practice that has compelling relevance for our present-day lives. This relevance has nothing to do with Buddhism per se or with becoming a Buddhist, but it has everything to do with waking up and finding authentic ways to live in dynamic and creative harmony with oneself and with the world. It has to do with examining who we are, with questioning our view of the world and our place in it, and with cultivating some appreciation for the fullness of each precious moment in which we are alive. Most of all, it has to do with being present, with recognizing and being more in touch with the depths of your original mind and heart, and with being a locus of sanity and kindness in a sometimes very crazy and painful world. From the Buddhist perspective, our ordinary waking consciousness is seen as severely suboptimal, both limited and limiting, resembling in many respects an extended dream rather than wakefulness. Meditation helps us wake up from this sleep of automaticity and unconsciousness, thereby making it possible for us to live our lives with access to the full spectrum of our conscious and unconscious possibilities. Monastics, sages, yogis, and Zen masters, women and men, have been exploring this territory systematically for thousands of years; in the process they have learned something that may now be profoundly beneficial for humanity to adopt on a global scale to counterbalance the prevailing orientation toward controlling and subduing nature rather than honoring that we are an intimate part of it. Their collective experience over the centuries suggests that by investigating inwardly and befriending our own truest, most authentic nature as human beings and—to be more specific—the nature of our own minds and hearts through careful and systematic attending, we may be able to live lives of greater satisfaction, harmony, and wisdom, and be of significant benefit to others and, at this critical moment in time, to the larger world and planet Earth itself. It also proffers a view of the world that is complementary to the predominantly reductionist and materialistic one currently dominating Western thought and institutions. This view is neither particularly “Eastern” nor mystical. Thoreau saw the same problem with our ordinary mind state in New England in 1846 and wrote with great passion about its unfortunate consequences. Mindfulness has been called the heart of Buddhist meditation. Its power lies in its practice and its applications. In my vocabulary, “mindfulness” is synonymous with pure awareness. It is a profound inborn human capacity. You already have it. We all do. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say we are it, as it is such a fundamental element of our nature as human beings. So there is nothing to get here, except perhaps out of our own way, so that easy access to the spaciousness of awareness emerges on its own. We can access awareness (I won’t say “our” awareness, because it is neither accurate nor appropriate to be possessive about it), as noted earlier, by paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. Paying attention in this way gives us immediate access to awareness itself. And learning to “inhabit” or “take up residency in” awareness naturally invites greater wellbeing, clarity, compassion, insight, meaning, and a palpable sense of interconnectedness into present-moment experience, what we sometimes refer to as “reality.” The systematic cultivation of mindfulness through formal meditation practices wakes us up to the fact that our lives unfold only in moments. If we are not fully present for many of those moments, we may not only miss what is most valuable in our lives but also fail to realize the richness and the depth of our possibilities for growth and transformation—often in the very next moment—along with a profound coming to terms with things as they are, which is my working definition of healing, and as you will see, has nothing to do with passive resignation. ## Books with a similar feel - [The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down by Haemin Sunim, Chi-Young Kim & Young-Cheol Lee](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-things-you-can-see-only-when-you-slow-down-haemin-sunim-chi-young-kim-and-young-cheol.md) - [Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert](https://uncovered.ink/read/big-magic-elizabeth-gilbert.md) - [All About Love by bell hooks](https://uncovered.ink/read/all-about-love-bell-hooks.md) - [Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows & Diana Wright](https://uncovered.ink/read/thinking-in-systems-donella-meadows-and-diana-wright.md) - [Convince Them in 90 Seconds or Less by Nicholas Boothman](https://uncovered.ink/read/convince-them-in-90-seconds-or-less-nicholas-boothman.md) - [Ikigai by Héctor García & Francesc Miralles](https://uncovered.ink/read/ikigai-hector-garcia-and-francesc-miralles.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). 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