Mindfulness is about life

“The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment.  The challenges we face, the choices we make, the places we go, and the work that we do all become occasions for opening to the life we are actually living and the life that is ours to live if we show up fully and pay attention.  You could say life itself is the meditation teacher, curriculum, and the gift that comes to us through showing up for life in its fullness and meeting it with our fulness….  The risk is that we will sleepwalk through large swaths of our lives on autopilot, unwittingly practicing mindlessness and getting better and better at it, and more and more remote from ourselves and the world: ‘The great escape’….  It is life itself that is the meditation practice, the real arena of mindfulness.  In that spirit, everything and every moment becomes practice and an occasion for waking up….  Wakefulness, as best we can muster it, brought face to face with the human condition itself, this is the challenge of a life lived, and lived fully in the only time we ever get to live or learn or love: This moment, this now.”—Jon Kabat-Zinn, passage via Ken Pope, transcribed from a workshop