Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

“We momentarily lose touch with ourselves and with the full extent of our possibilities. Instead, we fall into a robotlike way of seeing and thinking and doing.”

Kabat-Zinn, in urging his readers to live mindfully, warns of the consequences of the opposite: living mindlessly, connecting to his large theme, The Pitfalls of Living in Ignorance. The consequences of losing touch with oneself is a “robotlike” experience of life. This means losing connection with, and thus losing enjoyment, with one’s surroundings and experiences.

“To allow ourselves to be truly in touch with where we already are, no matter where that is, we have got to pause in our experience long enough to let the present moment sink in.”

Developing the theme of The Importance of Mindful Living, Kabat-Zinn reminds readers that, despite the busyness of modern life, we must take time to pause. This allows the present moment to fully sink in and be registered and appreciated. Without doing this, according to Kabat-Zinn, we rush through life in an automated state, seeing only our thoughts and interpretations of the world, rather than fully appreciating the world as it is in front of us.

“We usually fall, quite unawares, into assuming that what we are thinking—the ideas and opinions that we harbor at any given time—are ‘the truth’ about what is ‘out there’ in the world and ‘in here’ in our minds. Most of the time, it just isn’t so.”

Kabat-Zinn postulates that, if we are preoccupied with the clutter of our own thoughts, which is inevitable unless we make a concerted effort to do otherwise, we don’t actually see the world as it is. Instead, we see it through a veil of our own thoughts, which project our expectations, preferences, frustrations, and beliefs onto our surroundings. This obscures our surroundings and prevents us from engaging with them.