Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness

“You cannot see what they are doing, but they are working hard. They are practicing non-doing. They are actively tuning in to each moment in an effort to remain awake and aware from one moment to the next. They are practicing mindfulness.”

In his first chapter, Kabat-Zinn rejects the notion that meditation is a passive activity, and instead insists that it requires discipline and focus. By defining mindfulness as an intentional awakeness and awareness the author helps the reader understand that meditation is about tuning into reality rather than escaping from it. This quotation also intrigues the reader to keep reading and discover what meditation feels like from the practitioners’ perspective.

“Unawareness can keep us from being in touch with our own body, its signals and messages. This in turn can create many physical problems for us, problems we don’t even know we are generating ourselves. And living in a chronic state of unawareness can cause us to miss much of what is most beautiful and meaningful in our live—and, as a consequence, to be significantly less happy than we might be otherwise.”

The author persuades the reader of the importance of awareness, which he believes is cultivated through meditation. This quotation highlights how being out of touch with one’s body can create long-term dysfunction for people’s health. By mentioning how people may be “generating” such issues, Kabat-Zinn challenges the reader to consider how they might check in with their own minds and bodies and take more responsibility for their self-care.

“To see the richness of the present moment, we need to cultivate what has been called ‘beginner’s mind,’ a mind that is willing to see everything as if for the first time…An open ‘beginner’s’ mind allows us to be receptive to new possibilities and prevents us from getting stuck in a rut of our own expertise, which often thinks it knows more than it does.”

The author encourages the reader to shed their existing preconceptions, whether about meditation or other events in their life, and to embrace “beginner’s mind.” This mindset is one of Kabat-Zinn’s seven attitudes which form a foundation for a beneficial meditation practice. This quotation emphasizes how applying past experiences or assuming to understand a subject can inhibit learning and personal development.