What the Hell is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness has been getting a lot of press lately. This week, while standing in line at the grocery store, I looked over and saw a magazine with a girl sitting in lotus position with the heading "Mindfulness" in big letters across the front. As someone who has been studying Buddhism, meditation, and mindfulness for about 14 years, it was exciting to me to see something like this in the grocery store. What was even more exciting was the fact that it was not a stand alone obscure magazine in a health food store. It was a special edition of Time magazine!

While mindfulness has been a practice in many eastern cultures and religions for thousands of years, in the west it seems to have been ignored and even condemned in some places. People like Alan Watts and Ram Dass are two names that come to mind when I think of pioneers, but their approaches were based on their experience with religion and turned a lot of people who are devout in their own religions off to the ideas of mindfulness.

For hundreds of years, Zen Buddhists have been preaching the benefits of mindfulness and sharing the techniques for creating a stress free life, but perhaps the person who deserves credit for bringing these practices into the mainstream is Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts. Kabat-Zinn, a student of Zen philosophy and founder of the Cambridge Zen Center, recognized the benefits of mindfulness in regards to stress and health and in 1979 created the Stress Reduction Center at the University of Massachusetts. He realized waaaaay back then that there were some serious benefits to this mindfulness, and if anyone can demonstrate its value, I feel like a Professor of Medicine at a prestigious school is probably just the guy.

Slowly but surely, mindfulness practice is making its way into the consciousness of the general public.  It has become painfully obvious that mindfulness is beneficial to everyone in the world. Advances in science are proving that it's not just some mystical bullshit. Bodies actually heal from meditation. People actually become more happy from practicing mindfulness.

In our fifth installment of The Bromagination Podcast, we discuss mindfulness as a benefit and a way to start eliminating the useless stress in your life in order to make room for the stuff you actually enjoy. We'll be sharing with you some techniques to get you started as well as some techniques to help you continue to practice mindfulness in your daily lives. We'll be diving deep into the subject and we're hoping you get as much out of our mindfulness episode as you will from practicing mindfulness.