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About the Author

JAN CHOZEN BAYS, MD, is a pediatrician, a meditation teacher, and the author of Mindful Eating. She is also the abbess of Great Vow Zen Monastery in Oregon, where the mindfulness exercises in this book were developed and refined. She is also a wife, mother, and grandmother. She likes to garden, work in clay, and play marimba. For more information visit www.greatvow.org/teachers.htm.

Other books by JAN CHOZEN BAYS

Jizo Bodhisattva

Mindful Eating

For more information please visit www.shambhala.com.

Excerpt from The Mindfulness Revolution by Barry Boyce

eISBN 978-0-8348-2739-4

Introduction

Anyone Can Do It, and It Changes Everything

Mindfulness. It’s a pretty straightforward word. It means the mind is fully attending to what is at hand, what you’re working on, the person you’re talking to, the surroundings you’re moving through. It is a basic human capacity. It’s not a talent. We all have it. We all need it. And yet, it is so often elusive. Our mindfulness can slip away from us in an instant, and we are lost in distraction or engrossed in obsessive thoughts or worries about the future. Even in the midst of the intense pain that can come from an injury, illness, or loss—as much as such moments seemingly captivate our attention—mindfulness can fade so that we become more caught up in our inner story than what we are actually experiencing.

Given that it’s so easy for us to stray from our awareness of the present moment, mindfulness long ago became a discipline. By taking time away from the pressures and needs of daily life to work only on mindfulness, with no other project at hand, we refresh our ability to be mindful when we return to our everyday activities: taking care of a household, raising children, working, exercising, playing sports, volunteering, and so on. This practice has often been called meditation, but since that term also covers a number of other types of practices, we use the term mindfulness as shorthand for “mindfulness meditation practice.”

This book is about how to engage in that practice, which anyone can do since the only requirement is to pay attention to your breath and your body. This book is also about how just taking part in this simple practice can enhance all areas of your life and—dare I say—change how you approach life. It’s not necessarily a monumental change; it’s more a small shift that can make a difference day in, day out. As one new practitioner put it, “My mindfulness practice provides me with a way to observe the stressful situations around me and not become caught up in them. It has taught me how to pause, and then in that moment, I can make the choice whether to respond or react to what’s going on.”

Historically, the most prominent practitioner was the Buddha, and mindfulness became the basis for the spiritual tradition that bears his name. The practice existed in various forms in southern Asia prior to his time, and it seems likely that similar forms of practice focusing on an awareness of body and mind in the present moment have existed in many cultures. In the last thirty years, the practice of mindfulness has been taught as a secular discipline detached from any involvement in Buddhism or any other faith tradition. It can be practiced equally by people of any religious faith and those who have no religious faith, based as it is on fundamental mental and physical capabilities that all human beings have, irrespective of any ideological views they may hold.

The pioneer in establishing mindfulness as a secular discipline is Jon Kabat-Zinn. In 1979, Kabat-Zinn, trained as a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had been a yoga and meditation practitioner for many years. He took some time off from his job in the gross anatomy lab at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Medical Center in Worcester to do a meditation retreat. It occurred to him while he was practicing that hospital patients could use some mindfulness.