Mindfulness. A word who's meaning still evades most people, despite its ever growing popularity in mainstream culture. Just what is mindfulness? What is this fad which has swept the West and been a cornerstone of Eastern religions for thousands and thousands of years? What is this thing that monks on mountain tops, famous hollywood stars, medical practitioners and yoga teachers, are all doing? And why is it such a big deal?

Mindfulness is "moment to moment non-judgmental awareness. It is cultivated by purposefully paying attention to things we ordinarily never give a moment's thought to. It is a systematic approach to developing new kinds of agency, control, and wisdom in our lives, based on our inner capacity for paying attention and on the awareness, insight, and compassion that naturally arise from paying attention in specific ways." This is the definition that one of my favorite teachers Jon Kabat-Zinn puts forth in his book 'Full Catastrophe Living'. Through mindfulness practice, we learn to be a witness to our own thoughts, our own experience. We learn how to slow down our experience, to see and catch our thoughts and storylines we create. We learn to step outside of the ruminating brain. We learn how to work with the limbic brain. This has enormous implications for health and wellness.

If you could reduce your stress - your anxiety, your insomnia, your high blood pressure, your blood sugar, the aging process, and increase your endorphins, your interpersonal skills, your mental and physical resiliency, and your capacity for joy - for free, just by altering the way you pay attention, wouldn't you do it? Herein lies the immense draw mindfulness has across such a broad spectrum of people, fields and geographical locations. The promises are many. And the results are proven. PubMed is littered with studies strongly supporting the use of mindfulness interventions. 

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If you would like to learn more about this practice and how to begin to incorporate it into your life, I offer mindfulness workshops and guided meditation and mindfulness exercise instruction. 

Email me at Jenna@mindbodynourishment.org to attend or schedule a workshop, or purchase an audio of my meditation or mindfulness instruction.