Thank you all for joining me once again.

We have been speaking about the history, origins and practice of meditation this week.

But what about the term mindfulness which we hear so often nowadays.

Mindfulness or what is called Mindfulness Meditation has become a very popular part of our culture.

Everybody everywhere is trying to be mindful.

This is a confusing expression because somebody could interpret mindfulness as a full mind

when in fact the purpose of being aware is the emptiness of mind. I personally prefer the word being aware, but I think

a wearfulness is a clumsy word and mindfulness is an accepted word so we shouldn't struggle against it. It's become part of our culture and we should accept it.

The origins of mindfulness were in the tradition of what is called Vipassana.

Bipassna is a Sanskrit word,

which means Insight Meditation.

So let me give you what is a probably good origin of this whole mindfulness movement in the traditions

from where it originally came,

although today even the Buddhists use the word mindfulness

when they talk about meditation.

So I would like to say, let's accept the word,

but let's reinterpret the word

as mindful awareness, which leads to insight. So imagine you are the Buddha and you are sitting under the

Bodi tree, the tree of Enlightenment, and all you're doing is observing your breath with awareness, with no judgment, with no thought process.

You're just a silent witness to the breath.

And what you recognize is that it is the nature of the breath to arise,

to be experienced as a sensation, and then to fall.

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