Lesson 11 from Jon Kabat-Zinn's "Letting Everything Become Your Teacher"

In this lesson from Jon Kabat-Zinn's Letting Everything Become Your Teacher, we're reminded that receptivity and acceptance is what allows healing, not force of will.

Awareness requires only that we pay attention and see things as they are. It doesn’t require that we change anything. And healing requires receptivity and acceptance, a tuning to connectedness and wholeness. None of this can be forced, just as you cannot force yourself to go to sleep. You have to create the right conditions for falling asleep and then you have to let go. The same is true for mindfulness. It cannot be developed through force of will and striving. That kind of effort will only produce tension and frustration.

Reprinted from LETTING EVERYTHING BECOME YOUR TEACHER: 100 Lessons in Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn © 2009 by Jon Kabat-Zinn.  Reprinted by arrangement with the Random House Publishing Group.

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Letting Everything Become Your Teacher