Mindful Nation UK.

I am deeply honoured to have been invited to contribute to this All-Party Parliamentary Report. I extend my personal thanks and that of the wider mindfulness community to the Parliamentarians and all those whose hard work has brought it to this stage in an ongoing process that carries so much vision and promise for the United Kingdom and for the world.

Mindfulness is a way of being in wise and purposeful relationship with one’s experience, both inwardly and outwardly. It is cultivated by systematically exercising one’s capacity for paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally, and by learning to inhabit and make use of the clarity, discernment, ethical understanding, and awareness that arise from tapping into one’s own deep and innate interior resources for learning, growing, healing, and transformation, available to us across the lifespan by virtue of being human. It usually involves cultivating familiarity and intimacy with aspects of everyday experience that we often are unaware of, take for granted, or discount in terms of importance. These would include our experience of the present moment, our own bodies, our thoughts and emotions, and above all, our tacit and constraining assumptions and our highly conditioned habits of mind and behaviour. Mindfulness practices in various forms can be found in all the meditative wisdom traditions of humanity. In essence, mindfulness - being about attention, awareness, relationality, and caring - is a universal human capacity, akin to our capacity for language acquisition. While the most systematic and comprehensive articulation of mindfulness and its related attributes stems from the Buddhist tradition, mindfulness is not a catechism, an ideology, a belief system, a technique or set of techniques, a religion, or a philosophy. It is best described as “a way of being”. There are many different ways to cultivate it wisely and effectively through practice.

Basically, when we are talking about mindfulness, we are talking about awareness – pure awareness. It is an innate human capacity that is different from thinking but wholly complementary to it. It is also “bigger” than thinking, because any thought, no matter how momentous or profound, illuminating or destructive, can be held in awareness, and thus looked at, known, and understood in a multiplicity of ways which may provide new degrees of insight and fresh perspectives for dealing with old problems and emergent challenges, whether individual, societal, or global.

Awareness in its purest form, or mindfulness, thus has the potential to add value and new degrees of freedom to living life fully and wisely and, thus, to making wiser and healthier, more compassionate and altruistic choices – in the only moment that any of us ever has for tapping our deep interior resources for imagination and creativity, for learning, growing, and healing, and in the end, for transformation, going beyond the limitations of our presently understood models of who we are as human beings and individual citizens, as communities and societies, as nations, and as a species.

In the past 40 years, mindfulness in various forms has found its way into the mainstream of medicine, health care and psychology, where it has been broadly applied and continues to be evermore extensively studied through clinical research and neuroscience. More recently, it has also entered the mainstream of education, business, the legal profession, government (witness this very report and the mindfulness programme in Parliament that gave rise to it), military training (in the USA), the criminal justice system, etc. Interest in mindfulness within the mainstream of society and its institutions is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon, supported by increasingly rigorous scientific research, and driven in part by a longing for new models and practices that might help us individually and collectively to apprehend and solve the challenges threatening our health as societies and as a species, optimizing the preconditions for happiness and wellbeing, and minimizing the causes and preconditions for unhappiness and suffering.

As a consequence of these varied and complex developments over the past 40 years, this report may be a singular and defining document, suggesting as it does that mindfulness has the capacity to address some of the larger challenges and opportunities to be found in the domains of health, education, the workplace, and the criminal justice system by tapping into interior resources we all possess but that are mostly undeveloped or underdeveloped in our education system and in our society more broadly, at least up to this point in time. If the unique genesis of this document as a collaborative effort across all parties in Parliament is recognized and its forward-looking recommendations for further research and implementation followed and actualized by government and other agencies, there is no question in my mind that the repercussions and ramifications of this report in the United Kingdom will be profoundly beneficial. Indeed, they will be addressing some of the most pressing problems of society at their very root - at the level of the human mind and heart. By the same token, it is hard to imagine that this document will not also serve as an inspiration and model for other nations and governments to look toward and to take up its recommendations in their own distinctive ways.

I look forward to following with great interest the outcomes of this unique undertaking. Once again, I extend a deep expression of gratitude to all those whose hard work and engagement with mindfulness in their own lives and in their communities has brought us to this point.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Lexington, Massachusetts

July, 2015