When Jon Kabat-Zinn introduced Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction to the Western world in 1979, he transformed clinical practice, making mindfulness digestible for a lay audience seeking to answer the larger questions of who we are and what makes for a happy life. “Mindfulness,” he once said, “is a gateway into the full dimensionality of being human.”
In this video clip from his Networker Symposium keynote address, Kabat-Zinn explains how just taking time to stop and be with ourselves is a radical act.
As Kabat-Zinn notes, mindful awareness helps us correct the false narrative we often tell ourselves about who we are and what our purpose is.
“The message of mindfulness,” he says, “is an invitation to everybody to wake up to the true dimensionality of who we all are, and to move in a direction of maximizing the good that comes from our activities and minimizing the harm both to ourselves and others.”
