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Beginners Mind

Dr. Jon Kabat Zinn | 2:39

Transcript

Beginner's mind, is a lovely orientation to bring to the present moment. This moment is always fresh, always new. We've never been in this one before. And yet we bring so many ideas and attitudes and desires to every moment that we can't actually allow ourselves much of the time to see things as if for the first time. 


Imagine bringing awareness to your children with beginner's mind so that you actually see them, not through your lenses of ideas and opinions about your children. But afresh the miracle of them, the amazing nature of them. 


So this is something that we could bring to any moment. It has the virtue of sometimes we're so expert that our minds are just full of, you know, our expertise, but it leaves us without any realm for novelty or new possibilities. In the mind of the expert, they say there are very few possibilities, but in the beginner's mind, their infinite possibilities, because we come to it fresh. So it's a kind of a discipline to try to bring beginner's mind to every aspect of your life, and not be so stuck in our ideas and opinions about how much we like this or don't like that, or what the outcome of a particular situation might be. And when we come to things with this freshness, it actually, again, has tremendous transformative qualities associated with it. 


And when you bring it to other people, and you're open and spacious with them, and don't insist that they be the way they were half an hour ago or two years ago, or whatever it is, they feel seen and recognized and met in a way that they might not otherwise experience that benefits them. And it also benefits us


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