Meditation - The beginning and some science
Once you start to experience mindfulness you soon discover there are hundreds of books that will explain to you what it is and how to do it. One thing they will all agree on is the start point and so here it is. Mindfulness has its origins in Buddhism, but it is a secular practice and is taught without any religious connotations. Mindfulness is the 7 th step of the Noble Eightfold path taught by the Buddha. Jon Kabat-Zinn is considered the father of mindfulness in the west. When he attended a retreat led by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, he realised that there was a use for mindfulness in the treatment of chronic medical conditions. In 1979 Jon Kabat-Zinn adapted Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings into an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course (MBSR) which he then developed over the next ten years at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre. The MBSR course was set up because Jon Kabat-Zinn felt that the patients he was seeing who suffered fr...