Jon Kabat-Zinn books summary

The catastrophe life:

There’s a line in the movie Zorba the Greek where Zorba, the irrepressibly happy protagonist, describes his life as “the full catastrophe!” Zorba isn’t being negative – far from it. He’s alluding to the fact that a rich life is woven from great happiness and great disasters, as well as small pleasures and minor irritations. And you can't close yourself off to life's irritations and disasters without also closing yourself off to its joys. Confront life’s catastrophes head-on and your life’s joys will also be intensified.

Mindfulness guides you to experience the present moment.

A 2012 Harvard study found that we feel calmer, more stable, and happier when our minds are focused on the present instead of the future or the past.

Here’s a simple mindfulness exercise to try out. Take three raisins. Observe the first raisin closely. What does it look like? How does it smell? How does it feel between your fingers? Then put the raisin in your mouth and begin to chew: How does it taste? How does it feel on your tongue and in your teeth? Repeat the process with the next two raisins. Each time, try to deepen your focus on the process of eating the raisin. And with that deeper focus, you might find that the sensory experience of eating the raisin intensifies each time. Slowing down to fully attend to even the most seemingly mundane experiences – like eating a raisin – is the first step on a path to a mindful life.

In a nutshell, you try to “be” rather than “do.”

Start by finding physical stillness. A seated position is ideal, especially when you’re just starting out. Straighten your back and make sure it’s aligned with your neck and head. Relax your shoulders and place your hands somewhere comfortable, like resting in your lap or on your knees. Next, gently bring your focus to your breathing. Simply register the sensations of your breath. Feel the tickle of air at your nostrils as you inhale. Notice how your lungs expand. Observe the feeling of refreshment and replenishment that courses through your body after every breath. Lastly, turn to your thoughts. Your objective is to still your busy mind. But that doesn’t mean you need to empty your mind completely. Instead, allow your thoughts to pass through your mind. Acknowledge each thought and then release it. As an observer, try to give equal weight to each thought, whether it’s a thought about death or a thought about buying cat food. The longer you sit with your thoughts, the more you’ll see that they’re just that: thoughts. They don’t define you. They don’t shape your reality. They are simply passing thoughts.

Stress can be like the weather, can’t it? It’s something we can’t predict or control. And when it pours down on us, like a sudden rainstorm, there’s no escaping or stopping it. Stress, like weather, may feel like an uncontrollable force that shapes our lives. Unlike the weather though, we have more control over it than we realize. In fact, it’s helpful to think of stress as having two factors: a stressor and a response. Stressors are the situations or things that cause stress, and responses are the feelings and behaviors that stressors cause in us. Stress happens to us. But we produce our own stress responses.  We can’t control stressors, but we can control our response to them.

(stress + witnesser + response)

Ever heard of congenital analgesia? People born with this condition simply do not experience physical pain. As a result, they often injure themselves unknowingly. Without pain to warn them of danger, they have great difficulty moving safely through the world. Pain is a teacher. It teaches us where our limits lie and how to protect ourselves. We can learn a lot from pain, though it’s hard to discern the lesson when overwhelmed by chronic pain. Mindfulness helps us live with, and even grow from, pain.

Mindfulness for beginners:

Mindfulness is the practice of deliberately paying attention to your present experience without judgment, allowing you to observe your thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surroundings with gentle curiosity rather than getting caught up in them.

As a beginner to the practice, you may feel daunted. Don’t. You have a powerful advantage: beginner’s mind. The renowned Zen master Suzuki Roshi once said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” This teaching points to one of the core attitudes of mindfulness: approaching each moment with fresh eyes and an open heart – just as a child encounters a butterfly or a puddle for the first time.

54321: Cultivating mindfulness is all about cultivating the senses. Why? Well, our senses offer direct, immediate contact with the present moment. When we pay attention through our senses, we step out of our thoughts and into direct experience. This is why sensory awareness is such a powerful gateway to mindfulness.


Practise 3: Now we’ll explore a practice specifically designed to help you work with challenging experiences – whether that’s stress, anxiety, physical discomfort, or any other difficulty. Take a few moments to settle into your posture. Let your breath flow naturally, allowing your body to find its own rhythm of breathing. Now, bring to mind something that’s causing you some stress or difficulty in your life. Choose something that feels manageable – perhaps a mild worry or concern, rather than your biggest challenge. Notice what happens in your body as you think about this situation. As you become aware of any stress or discomfort, resist the natural urge to try to fix or change your experience. Instead, simply acknowledge what’s here: This is stress. This is worry. This is discomfort. Now, bring your attention to where you feel this difficulty most strongly in your body. It might be tension in your jaw, a knot in your stomach, or tightness in your chest. Whatever you notice, let your awareness rest there gently. As you stay with this sensation, notice if it changes at all. Does it pulse? Shift? Change intensity? Does it have a temperature, a texture, a shape? Be curious about your experience, as if you’re encountering this sensation for the first time. Now, imagine you can breathe with this difficult sensation. Don’t try to change it. Breathe with it, as if you’re keeping it company with your awareness. Now, expand your awareness to include your whole body sitting here. Notice that along with any difficulty, there are also parts of your body that feel neutral or even pleasant. Let your awareness hold it all. Take a few more breaths here, remembering that you can return to this practice whenever you
encounter difficulty in your daily life.


You’re developing the capacity to hold stress differently – not as an enemy to fight, but as waves of sensation that you can observe with kind attention. This doesn’t mean you become passive in the face of difficulties. Rather, you develop the ability to respond skillfully rather than react habitually.
When strong emotions arise, they often come with compelling stories about what’s wrong. Mindfulness helps you step back from these narratives and return to direct experience. You discover that emotions, like all experiences, aren’t solid and permanent but rather waves that naturally arise and pass away.

Wherever you go, there you are:

Lake meditation:

Sit down comfortably and close your eyes. Think about your mind as the surface of an ocean. It's vast and beautiful, and there are always waves on the water. Some are small, some are big.

Sometimes those waves get churned up by the winds of stress and anxiety and become very turbulent. Observe these waves. Look at them with curiosity while taking a deep breath. Watch how the ocean's surface slowly calms down again. And in your own time, open your eyes. Many people think that mindfulness aims at eradicating the waves on our mind's surface in order to create calm and tranquility.

An ancient Buddhist practice, mindfulness is about overriding our automatic approach to life. We often do things unconsciously without being fully present in the moment. Mindfulness can teach us how to pay attention to what's happening right now, purposefully and non-judgmentally. The cultivation of mindfulness and meditation is often confused with things like relaxation, stress relief, or self-development. However, mindfulness isn't about aiming for a particular feeling, nor is it about getting somewhere or becoming a particular kind of person. It's about emptying the mind, becoming still, and allowing ourselves to realize who and where we already are.


Mountain meditation:

Think of a beautiful, prominent mountain. That mountain could be any shape or form, as long as it resonates with you. As you envision the image of this mountain in your mind's eye, note how big and still it is. Maybe your mountain is covered by trees or has a shiny, snowy top. When you feel ready, bring the image of the mountain into your own body and become one with the image. Your legs become the mountain bays, your head becomes the lofty peak, and your spine is straight. Feel it like a mountain, calm, strong and observing. Whether birds are singing in the trees or freezing rain is pouring down onto the earth, it's all the same to the mountain. The weather is just happening. The mountain doesn't take it personally. In the same way, you can simply experience and honor the emotional storms, preoccupations and strong feelings within yourself without taking them personally. Slowly open your eyes again.


Walking meditation:
The key is to slow down, taking one step at a time, to increase presence and awareness. There truly is no place you need to be right now, except for being fully present in your own body. Bring your attention to every movement you make, each footstep, and how you raise, move, and place your feet. If you're walking in nature, listen to your surroundings and feel the presence of the trees, birds, and other humans. Try to hold on to this appreciation for Mother Nature and keep walking with dignity. Every day activities like climbing the stairs provide more opportunities to practice informally. 

Lying down meditation:
As you lie on the floor, consciously release your muscles. This will help your mind to open and release any pressing thoughts. Now imagine that you're sinking into the floor and feel your breath moving in your body. You can choose to focus on your body as a whole or follow the breath to different parts of your body such as the feet, the pelvis or the hands. Allow yourself to simply feel what's currently present. Feel how your spine connects with the floor. Stay with one more full in-breath as it comes in and one full out-breath as it goes out.

Mindfulness can become lax with the anticipation of finishing. The transition out of your meditation practice can sometimes feel very blurry or bumpy, but even this experience can be met with mindfulness. Bring genuine curiosity to the impulses that tell you it's time to stop your practice and try to put the ego aside that's rushing through the last moments of your practice. It probably comes as no surprise that your ego is the biggest obstacle you'll face on your path to mindfulness. For instance, when you experience a significant moment during meditation, you might start congratulating yourself on doing so well. But be wary of such feelings, as they may be your ego giving you a false sense of having made it to a higher level in your practice. If this happens and you feel like the I is taking over, try asking yourself where exactly you're supposed to get to. Remember that meditation is not about arriving at a particular destination. It's about understanding and appreciating the present moment to the fullest. In such moments, Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests asking ourselves, Who is the I who is asking who I am?

The ego, he says, is merely a construct. That being said, mindfulness isn't about ridding ourselves of our sense of self. It's about balancing it, mitigating its impact, seeing things as they are, and understanding that everything is connected and constantly changing. When we realize that everything is interdependent, we discover that there is no isolated, independent me. The only me that exists is me in relation to all other forces in the world. This becomes very apparent through loving kindness meditation.

Developing Mindfulness Through Breathing Ever wonder why you often feel disconnected from the present, lost in a whirlwind of thoughts? A feeling of separation is all too familiar for those suffering from depression. The solution may be simpler than you think, and it's right under your nose, literally. Let's do a short breathing exercise. Whether you're focusing on your breath while sitting quietly or feeling the ground beneath your feet while you're walking, mindfulness offers a way to anchor yourself to the present. By observing without judgment and continuously returning to the moment, you're not just calming your mind, you're becoming aware. The fact is, every emotion we feel, whether it's a surge of anger or a pit of sadness, offers a chance for understanding if we just stop and lean into it.

Naturally, everyone has a limit to how much discomfort they can handle. But believe it or not, with mindfulness, we can expand our comfort zones bit by bit, just like stretching a muscle.

When each breath we take is a kind of mini meditation, this simple act creates a buffer around the pain, giving us room to process without feeling overwhelmed. It's not about pushing emotions away, but rather creating space to feel and heal.

Emotions, as intense as they might be, aren't permanent. They come and they go, just like rain showers. If we can stand still, even in the middle of an emotional storm, we realize that it's just water. With time, those feelings pass, leaving us stronger and wiser. It's worth noting that we all have unique patterns of reacting to our feelings. By recognizing these, we can better understand our triggers and emotional responses.

The breathing space for 3 minutes:  You're in a rush, the day's getting chaotic, and you feel like you're losing control. Using this tool for just three minutes can help you switch off autopilot and return to the being mode. To start, just be. For a mere 60 seconds, immerse yourself in the present. Notice your thoughts without judgment. Feel whatever emotion you're feeling, whether it's light as a feather or as heavy as a boulder. Second, anchor yourself to your breath. Take one minute to get in sync with the rhythm of your breathing. Feel your chest rise, then gently fall. Finally, for the third minute, let your awareness expand. Feel your body, from the top of your head to the tips of your toes.