Hello and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast.

This is episode number 139.

I am your host Noah Rochetta.

Today I'm going to share the audio of a recent interview I did with Dr. Sarah Shaw, author

of a new book called Mindfulness, where it comes from and what it means.

Dr. Sarah Shaw is a faculty member and lecturer at the University of Oxford.

She has taught and published numerous works on the history and practices of Buddhism,

including an introduction to Buddhist meditation and the spirit of meditation.

Without further delay, here is the audio from my interview with Dr. Sarah Shaw.

What inspired you to write this book?

It's something that's always interested me.

I've always noticed that mindfulness gets described in different ways, in different historical periods.

And then Casey Kemp and Nico Odysseus to Shambhala actually asked me to do a short history of mindfulness.

So I had to make it very short, which is very, very difficult.

But I did enjoy doing it.

It's something that's just always interested me that I often read articles about mindfulness

and they can be quite rigid about it's this or it's that or it's this.

And I must have 100 on my computer.

And some of them are really quite dogmatic.

But what I liked was the way that in different settings, the word just gets used slightly differently

and has a slightly different feel and application with an underlying thread of what it is.

But people that keep things alive by sort of changing formulations a bit

...