MINDFULNESS Fantastic Mindfulness & Where to Get It
F
ive years ago Time magazine pro- claimed 2014 “The Year of Mindful- ness.” The magazine might have been
somewhat ahead of its time, so to speak, in that the “buzz,” “craze,” “fad” of mind- fulness has exploded in the years following that decree. In its most recent online edi- tion, the British newspaper The Indepen- dent featured articles including: "Mindful- ness May Help Entrepreneurs Who Don’t Have Time to Sleep,” “Uber . . . Offers Passengers Mindfulness Exercises,” “8 Best Mindfulness Apps” and “How Mindful Sex Can Revolutionize Your Relationship.” In a less wistful vein, the New York Times on April 4, 2019, published a report on a number of nations, including the United States, that are now using mindfulness techniques to train soldiers for combat. From magazine covers to mountain semi- nars, mindfulness seems to be on every- one’s mind.
What is “mindfulness” anyway? As the popularity of mindfulness has expanded, an accurate, universally accept- able definition for it has become more elusive. The reality of this—and the prob- lem it creates—is well described by Shinzen Young, an American meditation instructor, who writes, “Mindfulness is currently a sizzling hot topic in many areas of mainstream Western culture. The down- side of this is that some programs being marketed under the rubric of mindfulness have at most a tenuous connection. . . . Specifically, they completely fail to capture
its potential for radical transformation and unconditional happiness.” In other words, the buzz over mindful-
ness has trivialized and disempowered a reality that might be beneficial to the point of being life-changing. So what is mindful- ness? What can it do for us? How can we acquire it? We take a first step toward defining
mindfulness by saying what it isn’t. It isn’t the same as meditation. Mindfulness is a mental state, much as sleep is a mental state. And just as counting sheep may be one method of attaining sleep, so medita- tion may be one of many ways to attain mindfulness. Neither, as some have asserted, is mindfulness simply an American transla- tion of a Buddhist doctrine. To be sure, attaining what we might call mindfulness has been a pursuit of religious people of
all faiths, whether it has been referred to as “revelation,” “enlightenment,” “seren- ity,” “illumination” or a multitude of other descriptive titles. One of the giants in the study of mindfulness is Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn who launched his scientific studies of this concept in 1979 at the University of Mas- sachusetts’ Medical School. Kabat-Zinn, whose interest in the field was focused primarily on stress reduction, has taken great pains to point out that mindfulness is not a religious concept. So what is Ka- bat-Zinn's definition of mindfulness? De- cades ago he referred to it as “moment-to- moment awareness.” More recently he referred to it simply as “the heart being present.” Virtually every thoughtful description
of mindfulness focuses on the quality of being fully aware of the present moment. Because of the human mind’s tendency to
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