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Exploring mindfulness

Published on November 30, 2023   8 min

Other Talks in the Series: Workplace Wellbeing

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0:00
Hello. My name is Niamh Imbusch. I am a lecturer in the Faculty of Business at Technological University Dublin in Ireland. In today's lecture, we are going to be exploring mindfulness.
0:15
In considering mindfulness, we will be attempting to answer three important questions. First, what is mindfulness? As we will find, it means different things to different people. Second, how does it work? What does it do? Third and finally, what do we mean by mindfulness based interventions?
0:39
To answer the first question, what is mindfulness? I invite you to step back in history. Accounts vary as to the date of the Buddha's birth, possibly around 564 BC. Siddhartha Gautama, Buddha regarded as the founder of Buddhism, used the term Sati, which is in the Pali language, to refer to a framework of principles and practices leading to insight and the overcoming of suffering. These lie at the heart of Buddhist practice. In the early 1900s, the Pali Canon, that is the collection of written scriptures of Theravada Buddhism was translated into English. The term mindfulness was used to replace Sati. The word mindfulness has largely held the same meaning until the late 1970s, when a more secular approach was developed.
1:33
In the late 1970s, a medical practitioner called Jon Kabat-Zinn established a stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn was a long time practitioner of Zen Buddhism and also enjoyed the benefits of Hatha yoga. He combined elements of these practices with his scientific knowledge to develop a program called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, MBSR. Offering it firstly to people attending a clinic for chronic back pain. That program and variations of it, are today offered by medical centers, hospitals, and even workplaces. He describes mindfulness as paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and non judgmentally. You can read more about this program in his book, Full Catastrophe Living.