TIME subscribers are looking at the article now, but the issue itself won’t hit newsstands until Monday. In the meantime here’s a deeper look and some further reading on the people and practices mentioned in “The Mindful Revolution.”
Kate Pickert, writing for TIME, notes that “We’re in the midst of a popular obsession with mindfulness as the secret to health and happiness—and a growing body of evidence suggests it has clear benefits.” Pickert takes a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course to write the article, and talks about how the course was developed back in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn. The current issue of Mindful features Kabat-Zinn and his pioneering mindfulness work, including his thoughts on the present and future of mindfulness.
“There are tremendous benefits that arise from mindfulness practice, but it works precisely because we don’t try to attain benefit,” says Kabat-Zinn. “Instead, we befriend ourselves as we are. We learn how to drop in on ourselves, visit, and hang out in awareness.”
Pickert points out that calling mindfulness the “latest self-help fad” totally ignores how the practice is gaining acceptance among those who would otherwise considered meditation a bit flaky: Silicon Valley enrepreneurs, Pentagon chiefs, FORTUNE 500…
