Many of us are so overwhelmed with our busy thoughts and our busy lives that we don't know what is really going on, with our bodies, with our lives, and with others—we think we'll “get to it later” as we rush to the next thing. If we stop for a minute, what we can notice is that the busiest thing in our lives are our minds, and that it is our thoughts—what we think we should do, how we think we should do it, how we are possibly going to be able to do it—that are really driving us to distraction. If we could calmly go through our busy day step by step, moment by moment, we might even get more done with much less stress.

Because we spend so much time lost in thought, mindfulness practice begins by training us to focus on our bodies and on our breath, the steam that runs the engine.

How often do you say to someone, or maybe yourself, take a breath? How often do you notice that even stopping for a moment to take a breath can be a soothing break?

The Miracle of Mindfulness

Thich Nhat Hanh, the world-renowned Vietnamese Buddhist monk and teacher, wrote a book with the title, The Miracle of Mindfulness . It came out in the mid-Eighties at a time when I was questioning many of the contemplative paths and practices I'd been working with. Nhat Hanh inspired me with his clear and compassionate approach to mindfulness meditation, to mindfulness in every moment. He inspired me to really wash the dishes, not thinking about something else or even looking out the window. In doing so I realized how many moments of warm soapy water and the pleasure of wiping and rinsing and stacking, all the intricacies of this simple task, I had been missing. And then of course I began to notice all the other moments where I was missing out on the full experience but spacing out or by being lost in thought.

This is the miracle of mindfulness, that we can practice it at any time in any place in any moment and that by simply slowing down and paying attention, we can begin to see all of life's riches opening up to us.

Theoretically simple but sometimes difficult at the beginning, as most of our (untrained) minds are, as the Buddha says, like wild monkeys, we can take it step by step, breath by breath, gently without judgment, bringing our minds back again and again to each moment as much as we are able.

One of the pioneers in mind-body behavioral medicine is Jon Kabat-Zinn. He applied the ancient Buddhist practice of mindfulness meditation in a clinical setting at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center over thirty years ago. He developed a program into which he incorporated aspects from behavioral science such as group participation and discussion and daily practice tapes and homework assignments. A training program and study center was also established, which, along with other emerging programs in this field, conducted a range of studies to examine the efficacy of this approach to healing. At first the patients in the program were those who tried it as a last resort, but as even these people began to show signs of improvement, word spread as did the studies and the training programs. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programs are now an established component in the ever-growing field of complementary medicine and are taught in medical and healing centers across the world.