This is NPR's Life Kit. I'm Shireen Marisol Maraji and this episode is meant to help you

manage your reactions to the stress and uncertainty and difficulties that are all around us.

By slowing down and paying very close attention.

The kind of awareness that we're talking about is so big and so open-hearted and so spacious

that it sees the good, the bad and the ugly of the human condition all at once and it doesn't

get caught or imprisoned by any of it to the point that we can't function anymore.

That's our guide, John Kabat-Zinn.

I guess I'm best known for something called mindfulness-based stress reduction or MBSR,

which is a program that is now in hospitals and medical clinics around the world,

but it started out in 1979 in the basement of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.

John was interested in something now called participatory medicine, which is engaging people

in their own healing alongside their hospital treatments and their medications.

And he found that the patient's heat-taught mindfulness meditation had much better health

outcomes and there have been a number of scientific studies that have proven this over the years.

If you chart the number of papers in the scientific and medical literature on mindfulness,

it's going exponential for about the past 20 years and it's really phenomenal.

You have a definition of mindfulness that you call an operational definition and I'm going to

try and tell you what your definition is to see if I'm right. It's the awareness that arises

from paying attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgmentally. How'd I do?

Perfect. The short-hand version is mindfulness awareness. So one could say no big deal,

except that it turns out awareness is a very, very big deal. It gives us new degrees of freedom

for dealing with the challenges that are facing us as individuals and also as species.

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