Today's podcast episode is about mindfulness and chances are if you've been engaged in the world in any sort of way over the last five or so years

you've heard this term. It's almost impossible to check out of a grocery store

without seeing some sort of magazine about mindfulness. It's very hard to listen to

any personal development, podcast, and not hear something to do with mindfulness.

Even in medical facilities, in hospitals, they're prescribing mindfulness as forms of therapy and also forms of healing.

There are mindfulness-based stress reduction programs. forms of therapy and also forms of healing.

There are mindfulness-based stress reduction programs

within hospitals to supplement your usual health care.

So this is becoming a big thing

and it's creeping up through the floorboards of school systems, of hospitals,

of organizations and businesses. A large part of the work I do is speak about mindfulness in corporate context and in school systems.

And it's been very exciting to see it grow and of course like anything that grows, especially in the US, there's the potential for it to be trivialized or diluted.

And there's something interesting happening with mindfulness where it's simultaneously being oversold as the silver bullet and

woefully misunderstood and underappreciated for the depth of what it's pointing to and the transformational

capacity it can have in our lives.

So hopefully after this episode you have a new understanding and appreciation for what this thing called mindfulness is.

And to start this exploration, I want us to do a little exercise in practice.

I brought these bells with me. They make a very

pleasant ringing sound and I'm going to invite you to just tune into the sound of the

bell when I ring it from the moment it begins all the way until it dissolves into silence.

Now I know sometimes when we're listening to podcast, we're just trying to get information, we don't really want to do anything. We're off to the next thing. You don't need to change anything

you're doing. You don't need to shift your posture, go anywhere special. Just listen to the sound of the bell and see if you can follow the sound from the moment it begins

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