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The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.

—Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

In 1979 Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic and MBSR program (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Wouster. His program and world-renowned book, Full Catastrophe Living, originally intended to improve patient health outcomes, is not only found in over 700 hospitals worldwide, but has also been applied in psychology, sports, business, and criminal justice, impacting thousands, if not millions, of lives.

The wellspring of mindfulness meditation is Buddhist, but Kabat-Zinn’s approach is decidedly secular. In one of his popular books, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, he writes,

“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.”

Some further excerpts from the book:

“Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel and knowing it in awareness in that moment. It’s not about making the mind empty or still, although stillness does deepen in meditation and can be cultivated systematically. Above all, meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment.

“It is more rightly thought of as a “Way” than as a technique. It is a Way of being, a Way of living, a Way of listening, a Way of walking the path of life and being in harmony, in wise relationship, with things as they are rather than as we might idealistically want them to be. This means in part acknowledging that sometimes, often at very crucial times in life, you really have no idea where you are going or even where the path lies.

“The truly interesting question here is “What is my Way?’ with a capital W…We don’t have to come up with answers or think there has to be one particular answer. Better not to think at all. Instead, only persist in asking the question, letting any answers that formulate just come of themselves and go of themselves…“What is my Way?” “What is my path?” “Who am I?”

In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface everfresh…which retains no breath that is breathed on it…

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or Life in the Woods

COME JOIN US on Mondays for koan meditation, dharma talk and conversation. Register to participate. All are welcome.

Jon Joseph Roshi, Director of San Mateo Zen Community