23
" From the perspective of the consciousness disciplines, our ordinary state of waking consciousness is severely suboptimal. Rather than contradicting the Western paradigm, this perspective simply extends it beyond psychology’s dominant concern, at least until very recently, with pathology and with therapies aimed at restoring people to “normal” functioning in the usual waking state of consciousness. At the heart of this “orthogonal,” paradigm-breaking perspective lies the conviction that it is essential for a person to engage in a personal, intensive, and systematic training of the mind through the discipline of meditation practice to free himself or herself from the incessant and highly conditioned distortions characteristic of our everyday emotional and thought processes, distortions that, as we have seen, can continually undermine the experiencing of our intrinsic wholeness. "
― Jon Kabat-Zinn , Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
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" Thich Nhat Hanh, the venerable and highly respected Vietnamese meditation teacher, poet, and peace activist, uses the image of cloudy apple juice settling in a glass to describe meditation. You just sit with whatever is present, even discomfort, anxiety, or confusion, with whatever is present, and the mind settles all by itself. "
― Jon Kabat-Zinn , Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
33
" In fact, even if distraction does alleviate your pain or help to cope with it some of the time, bringing mindfulness to it can lead to new levels of insight and understanding about yourself and your body, which distraction and escape can never do. Understanding and insight, of course, are an extremely important part of the process of coming to terms with your condition and really learning how to live with it, not just endure it. One of the ways we speak about it is that the sensory, the emotional, and the cognitive/conceptual dimensions of the pain experience can be uncoupled from one another, meaning that they can be held in awareness as independent aspects of experience. Once you see that your thoughts about the sensations, for instance, are not the sensations themselves, both the experience of the sensory and the cognitive dimensions of the pain experience may change independently. This is also true for our emotional reactions to unpleasant sensory experience. This phenomenon of uncoupling can give us new degrees of freedom in resting in awareness and holding whatever arises in any or all of these three domains in an entirely different way, and dramatically reduce the suffering experience. "
― Jon Kabat-Zinn , Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
37
" Studies by Dr. Herbert Benson of the Harvard Medical School in the early 1970s on people practicing a form of meditation known as Transcendental Meditation, or TM, demonstrated that meditation can produce a pattern of significant physiological changes, which he termed the relaxation response. These include a lowering of blood pressure, reduced oxygen consumption, and an overall decrease in arousal. Dr. Benson proposed that the relaxation response was the physiological opposite of hyperarousal, the state we experience when we are stressed or threatened. He hypothesized that if the relaxation response was elicited regularly, it could have a positive influence on health and protect us from some of the more damaging effects of stress. "
― Jon Kabat-Zinn , Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness