Episode 2: The History of Mindfulness

E02 - The History of Mindfulness - Becoming Mindful Podcast

Hello! It’s Jackie and Maria again. In our second episode of Becoming Mindful, we look into the history of mindfulness: where it came from, what paths did it take and what are examples of mindfulness practices around the world.

Which mindfulness practices have you heard of before? Which ones would you like to start doing? Please, let us know in the comments.

Show Notes & Links

🎵 Music: Sweet by Benjamin Tissot | Royalty Free Music | www.bensound.com

TRANSCRIPT

Maria: Hello and welcome to the Becoming Mindful Podcast. Today we were talking about the history of mindfulness and mindfulness practices around the world. Hi, am Maria,

Jackie: and I’m Jackie. And we are becoming mindful.

Maria: All right, welcome back, everyone who has listened to our first episode this month we want to split the podcast in the two pieces.

Maria: The first half. Jackie and I will talk about some facts about the history. So it’s gonna be more of a lecture style, and then the second half we want to discuss the different facts about the history of mindfulness, as well as the practices that we have mentioned. But first let’s check in.

Maria: How are your practices going, Jackie, what have you done?

Jackie: I feel like lately I’m getting recommitted to my practice. Especially, doing this podcast and talking about it. I’m starting to bring mindfulness into my daily life. I do feel like though, that I’m scattered all over the place and kind of reaching for different practices all over and I don’t really have an integrated practice right now.

Jackie: It’s a little messy. So that’s where I’m at, trying to hone that in and focus a little bit better, but still working. How about you, Maria? How are you doing?

Maria: Yeah. Similar. So ever since we started this podcast, I almost feel like I’m getting worse at it. I don’t know. It feels like it’s also a little scattered.

Maria: Although I’ve tried to incorporate it a little bit more. So the awareness part, more like in like little moments, when I’m outside and appreciating the nature and focusing on the feeling that I have, like the wind and the light and those kind of things.

Maria: So I think that one is working better, especially because the weather is nicer and we are outside more. But I do feel like otherwise I’ve not done much progress. I wanted to implement some more practices which I haven’t. Something more regular or something more structured, so it’s like something I do every day versus just an ad hoc thing.

Jackie: Yeah, I totally get that.

Maria: Yeah. Definitely something we need to take a look at.

Maria: Let’s start with the history and the practices around mindfulness. Where did mindfulness come from? Where did it start? How did it develop? And Jackie, I’m gonna have you start talking about the most known commonly known origin of mindfulness.

Jackie: Yeah, it’s good to have a foundation for where these teachings come from.

Jackie: To start with, most of our common modern practices can be traced back to Buddhism. So we’re talking like 2,500 years ago. And mindfulness in Buddhism is a pathway to become aware and to awaken. It’s about transcending ego, so about enlightenment even. But Buddhist practices can also be practiced very secular and without religious contacts, so it can be practiced complimentary to any religion.

Jackie: So it’s really about building presence by training your attention. Very similarly, there are very deep roots in Hinduism. Hinduism has been using meditation as a practice for over 4,000 years. So they have been using meditation as a mindfulness practice for their entire history, and that differs in the purpose of mindfulness and Hinduism versus mindfulness and Buddhism in that the meditation is really meant to connect the meditator with the divine. So that is the object in meditation. in Hinduism.

Maria: So a little bit more of a direct link to the religious part .

Jackie: Yeah, exactly. And I also wanna mention Jainism here because meditation is a central tenet of Jainism.

Jackie: And in that religion, it’s about achieving full knowledge and awareness. So there’s a lot of similarities here, but also some differences and some intricacies of the different approaches to the practice. And then there’s a ton of variants within these areas as well. So as you dive into Buddhism or Hinduism or Jainism, you’ll find lots of different avenues that you can go down in different approaches to the practices.

Jackie: Let me go through a few of the common practices from these lineages. The most common practices are meditation and breath work. So we’re really familiar with those mindfulness practices today. So those have carried through the years and are definitely part of how we practice mindfulness today, and we’re all pretty familiar with those practices.

Jackie: As I said there’s a lot of variances within the practices in Buddhism and Hinduism. They’re very diverse. These are very large cultures, and so there’s a lot of different ways that the teachings are interpreted. So I can’t get into all of that, but that’s a very high level overview of some of those teachings and practices.

Jackie: Around the seventh or eighth century though, Buddhism started to spread from India to China, and there it met the indigenous tradition of Taoism, and that really gave birth to Zen Buddhism. And whether you know it or not you are probably a little bit familiar with Zen Buddhism. What this practice is about is seeking one’s own Buddha nature through meditation.

Jackie: Zen really emphasizes meditation and the idea is to let go of your thoughts. This practice is actually very disciplined, but it is devoid of most religious aspects. So there’s no mention of God or the creation of the world, and it’s also absent of anything like the afterlife or karma or some of the concepts that you might find in Buddhism.

Jackie: So it’s really, I guess you could call it minimalistic. If you take it from a really high level of view, Zen is about realizing the true nature of this reality. So it’s illustrated really well by Zen master Hakuin, who was asked by a student what happens after we die. And he responded, why ask me? And the student said, because you are a Zen master.

Jackie: And Hakuin said, but not a dead one. So there’s a number of practices that you might be familiar with in Zen Buddhism.

Jackie: One of those that I really wanna mention is walking meditation, which is about paying very close attention to every step you take. So mindfulness with each step. And it’s typically done on a specific path or in a labyrinth. But it can be done anytime you’re walking. So being completely mindful of each step you take.

Jackie: Another practice is zen brush painting and calligraphy. And these are about being present with each stroke of your pen or your brush. And it is the physical representation of this spiritual experience. So it’s a practice, again, of presence and of surrender.

Jackie: And finally, there is the practice of zazen that I want to mention, and that is very simply just sitting and letting go. So you can see the theme of this zen approach to mindfulness.

Jackie: A Japanese Zen master Dogan, who you may have come across some of his teachings. He said to study Buddhism is to study yourself. To study yourself, is to forget yourself and to forget yourself, is to realize your intimacy with all things. Wow. Yeah, so I love the simplicity of that. Yeah.

Jackie: Finally as talking about these origins of our contemporary practices of mindfulness, I want to bring in yoga since so many of us are familiar with this practice, at least on a surface level.

Jackie: Yoga is an entire philosophy in itself. So again, not a religion. And this could be practiced secularly or in conjunction with any religion and it incorporates and exercises, mindfulness through physical movements, which is the part of yoga you’re probably most familiar with. But also through breath work and meditation. So the practice is about presence and concentrations.

Jackie: Yoga originated in India and is a foundational aspect of the Hindu religion, but it’s also associated with Buddhism and Jainism and Bhakti, and it has many lineages. And so yoga is a intentional practice that we’ve seen very adapted in our life and in the United States. So that is a whole philosophy in practice around cultivating mindfulness.

Jackie: But let’s take a broader view of the history of mindfulness. We might be most familiar with those origins from Eastern religions, but there is mindfulness all over the world. So Maria, can you talk a little bit about that?

Maria: Yeah. So I wanted to talk a little bit more about mindfulness and other indigenous cultures.

Maria: So first of all, I wanna tell you what are indigenous cultures? So indigenous cultures are also sometimes called tribal people, first people, natives or indigenous people. So there’s about 477 million people that fall under that with 5,000 different groups in 90 different countries.

Maria: So all over the world we have about 4,000 plus unique languages there. We do see most of them in the Asia-Pacific realm. That’s about 70%. We have about 16% in Africa, 11% in Latin America, in the Caribbean, about 1.6 in the North America space, and then just very small percentage 0.1% in Europe and Central Asia.

Maria: Wow. Yeah, I know. So there is a lot of indigenous people and some examples include the Innuit of the Arctic. We have white Mountain Apaches in Arizona, the Yanomami and the Tupi people of the Amazon, some people in East Africa, like the Maasai and other tribal people like Bontoc people of the mountain regions in the Philippines.

Maria: But there’s so many different examples. As I said before, 5,000 different groups all over the world. And those people also do have mindfulness practices actually. The concept of mindfulness exists pretty much everywhere within indigenous cultures and you can see it in different practices.

Maria: I wanted to talk about some examples. For example, the Medicine Wheel meditation, which is used by indigenous groups in North America. So Medicine Wheel is a view of sectioning life into four different areas. We have spiritual, physical, emotional, mental as well as the seasons or the different colors, different stages of life, different elements. Everything is grouped into four areas. And there is a meditation that is done around that medicine wheel.

Maria: Another example would be, and I hope I don’t butcher this word, the hikitia te ha breathing exercise based on the Te Ao Maori, so the Maori worldview. Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand.

Maria: We also see mindfulness techniques very much represented in music in the indigenous groups, dancing and singing. And a good example would be the throat singing of the Inuit women. Very interesting technique. There’s a lot of focus and a lot of mindfulness in there as well.

Maria: Also if you look at the aboriginal peoples of Australia they’re playing the didgeridoo instrument? And that requires a lot of mental focus as well as focusing on your breathing and the physical sensations.

Jackie: I didn’t know that the didgeridoo was that complex?

Maria: Yeah, it is definitely very very, it’s almost like a meditation. And you can also think about a lot of the songs and a lot of the dancing is a very repetitive nature, similar to what you’ve mentioned before for the other practices in the East Asia realm, right? That’s a common theme.

Maria: And the question obviously becomes too, do we have anything in the European space that resembles mindfulness practices? We’ve talked about indigenous people, we’ve talked about the east Asia Hindus and Buddhism roots. Is there anything on the European side or did that all just come over?

Maria: But there actually are.. So we have, for example, the Neopagan and the Celtic Druidism. They have a lot of breathing exercises what they also call breathing prayers.

Maria: And we also have animistic shamanism, which also share a lot of the traits with the Buddhist practices. So these groups do have a lot of Focus also on the nature. So we have some seasonal and nature aware practices foraging. There’s a lot of practices also around the menstrual cycle.

Maria: So the awareness of that cycle and how this changes throughout the cycle, how different things change and how people behave of that. So there’s an awareness there too. A lot of things around the local flora and fauna and gardening as well as a lot of crafts, like weaving and those kind of things, right?

Maria: What is also interesting is, you may not really think about it like that, but even if you look at Christianity, The core of it. You do have mindfulness techniques in there. So if you think about the contemplative practices in the Christian religion.

Jackie: Yeah, definitely a lot of singing too, and repetition.

Maria: Yeah, so there are definitely a lot of different practices around the world that are also mindful and not everything mindfulness related comes only from the Buddhism, Hinduism roots.

Jackie: Yeah, I love it. It seems to naturally emerge independently again and again everywhere.

Maria: Absolutely. Yes. But especially in more nature oriented societies. So if we have the indigenous cultures that are a lot closer to nature and to the planet, right?

Jackie: So let’s talk now about how all these practices started coming here to the United States and to our popular culture. And to begin that conversation, let’s go back to the sixties in the United States. When we were having massive cultural revolution and ideas around our health and wellness and what a good life is. All those ideas were changing.

Jackie: People were starting to get back to nature. We had writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thoreau. And people were reading more. And they were reading things like Walden, like you were saying you’re getting back to nature and getting close again with our natural selves.

Jackie: And so at this time too, with this cultural revolution, so much happened. So we had artistic expression exploding. We were promoting free thinking, and there was new mindfulness around nutrition and holistic health practices and natural remedies. Yoga and meditation and eastern spirituality started to become popularized in the west.

Jackie: A few prominent teachers were bringing those practices over and having lectures at universities across the United States bringing those practices over. And then as it started to enter mainstream, you saw celebrities getting into it. The Beatles really helped make Hindu meditation specifically popular in the United States when they actually traveled to India to study transcendental meditation with Maharishi, who is a renowned yogi and guru.

Jackie: And transcendental meditation is mantra meditation. So they popularized that and made it I don’t wanna say mainstream, but started getting a huge movement going in the United States.

Jackie: I think it’s important to pause here and reflect on that time just a little bit, because in the sixties when we were moving more into an awareness or mindfulness approach.

Jackie: There was a lot of turbulence, like we were becoming more mindful of things like discrimination and sexism, and we were more mindful of what we let authorities do with power that we gave them, like the police or the people who run things. And I know as I’m saying this, you are with me and seeing parallels to what’s going on today and I don’t have any answers right now.

Jackie: I’d love to hear maybe from some people who lived through that time, but I think it’s important for us to reflect on that and ruminate on that. Because becoming more mindful it’s not A simple process. You’re really churning up a lot of stuff maybe that needs to be dealt with that is sitting in our past just waiting to be addressed.

Maria: Yeah. And especially if you think about how it’s like cycles. You think about what I talked about indigenous cultures having these mindfulness techniques. So you have the native people having these already and essentially getting stripped of them, right? With reeducation and all these horrible things that are happening. And then essentially the western side becoming aware of this and being more mindful and taking on these practices from these indigenous cultures. And then that all leads to this turbulence, right?

Maria: But then here we are again.

Jackie: The histories that we’ve been talking about, mindfulness has been a part of these cultures for so long.

Maria: Right, thousands of years.

Jackie: Yeah. It’s ingrained in their way of life.

Jackie: And in United States, we’re the melting pot. People came from all cultures. And then we’re trying to more or less shoehorn these practices into this Mixed culture where we’re all coming from a different background, we’re all coming from a different starting point. So it’s an interesting experiment that we’re doing.

Jackie: But looking at different modern interpretations of mindfulness, some of them are really structured like meditation. If you just search for meditation on YouTube, there are endless guided meditations you can find. Even some of the oldest structured practices are really going strong, like vipasana meditation. But we’re also seeing mindfulness being integrated into like modern medicine.

Jackie: Things like mindfulness-based stress reduction, pain management, treating things like ADD, assisting sleep, stress management, and even cognitive therapy. Mindfulness is being used to help prevent depression, relapse, and it’s been shown to reduce relapses by 50%. And it plays on the idea that stress can send us into automatic thought patterns and those can lead to depression.

Jackie: So using mindfulness techniques to break that pattern it’s showing great results. It’s amazing. And then there’s other interpretations of approaches to mindfulness. I think, it’s really about finding what practices resonate with you and fit into your lifestyle. I know people who find mindfulness through cold showers and ice baths. And this actually, dates back to a religious Japanese practice called Misogi, and that’s from a nature-based religion called Shinto. And the cold immersion is about connecting directly to nature and immersing yourself in awareness. So I see people doing that all the way to today. I also see people who say that they find mindfulness when they’re running. And that really brings to mind for me the walking meditation.

Jackie: It’s another form of walking meditation. Is that, like you were saying, like that’s that repetitive where you’re mindful of every step and you’re just there with the practice. And Thich Nhat Hanh said walking meditation is a profound and pleasurable way to deepen our connection with our body and the earth.

Jackie: So again, there’s that nature connection again, too. We can also see mindfulness practices in arts and crafts. Things like knitting, or people find mindfulness in woodworking or doing puzzles. Or fishing. We’ve even got coloring books for adults who practice mindfulness. Really anything that we can immerse ourselves in and not multitask, that really reflects the nature of zazen, which is simple sitting.

Jackie: And Alan Watts said you can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it. I see a lot of that. I see a lot of people nowadays just finding mindfulness and whatever it is they need to do. Yes. And then also, we’re seeing integration into our schools.

Jackie: Teaching breathing techniques to students as well as trying meditation as a detention alternative with very good results. Corporate mindfulness is a real thing. Corporations are offering things like meditation retreats and mindfulness services. Google, apple, and the US Army, a lot of companies in Silicon Valley are offering these kinds of services and I don’t know how I feel about this.

Jackie: I have really mixed feelings. It’s being promoted as something to reduce sick days and increase trust in leadership and boost employee engagement. And really, should that be the motivation behind these practices? Probably not, but at the same time, we can appreciate that they’re being offered to us. And they’re available.

Maria: Yeah. I mean it’s sad that it’s comes down to what benefit does it give the company if you do these kind of things . Versus just doing them because it’s a benefit to the employee.

Jackie: And that brings me directly into my next point, that this really has become an industry in and of itself. And the mindfulness industry is a 1.2 billion industry in the US and it is rising.

Jackie: So it’s crazy because to do these practices really just need yourself. You just need your mind and this industry makes you think that you need an app or essential oils or expensive mats, or mindful jewelry or special props. And I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve bought a lot of these products.

Maria: Yeah, I have some apps. Yes.

Jackie: Yeah. And if it helps you get going, that’s great. But the more I accumulate some of these artifacts and the more mature my practice gets, I’m realizing that they’re just kinda little souvenirs. I guess what I’m saying is, Don’t go out and buy an expensive Tibetan singing bowl unless that practice really resonates with you.

Jackie: Resonates.

Maria: Nice pun.

Jackie: All right, we’ve talked about, how these practices are executed and where they came from. But in the last century we’ve started to verify what the people practicing these have known for thousands of years. That they work. But we’re finally doing studies about them and verifying all of that.

Jackie: Maria, can you. Tell us a little bit about the science and what we’re learning through science.

Maria: Yeah. So from a science aspect, of course when these things become more popular, scientists have started to take a look at them and always wanting to verify these practices.

Maria: Anything that is claimed needs to be verified by science. And so there’s been a lot of studies and there’s also been a lot of attempts at creating practices that are a little more structured or a little more replicable for everyone. That are not based on religions or living environments of specific people. But they’re, broad and applicable to everyone that is human.

Jackie: I think that’s really important. Cause some people have some ideas that these practices are just for certain religions or it’ll make them a certain religion if they do them. So I think, yeah. So having that secular approach is really important, I think, to make it accessible.

Maria: Yeah, so these practices also obviously came from a lot of the research that you’ve been talking about that we are trying to figure out how these practices are effective and how we can Replicate them for different groups and boil them down to the basis of what really is benefiting, right?

Maria: So there is sometimes with religion, you have things around them that are specific to the religion or that are maybe not the core of what this practice is about. And what is the benefit of this practice? So that was the ideas to strip it down.

Jackie: Take the dogma out.

Maria: And then also to use that for studies, right?

Maria: You can apply that to the study group or the test subjects, and then they can do this, and then you can figure out what the results are and how they, it impacts them, right? Some of these things that were developed is definitely breathing meditation.

Maria: So it’s very simple, just different breathing techniques. Because that’s very basic as well. Everyone breathes. Focus on your breathing. Also body scan meditation. So that’s one that is very focused on the feelings within your body and how your different organs and your different body parts feel like. So you’re doing a kind of a scan, right?

Maria: And then also loving kindness meditation. So that’s thinking about other people with compassion and broadening that out from the loved ones to pretty much everyone.

Jackie: Yeah, I love loving kindness, meditation.

Maria: Very great technique. It just makes everything brighter, right?

Jackie: Yeah, that’s a great way to put it.

Maria: And then one of the big ones is the mindfulness based stress reduction that was developed (MBSR) which is a secular program that is one of the largest non-religious based mindfulness meditation program. So the roots do come from the spiritual teachings, but it is based on proven medical and psychological research. There’s no religious remnants in there. That’s the big one.

Maria: Now with all of these, because there’s a lot of studies we really have somewhat of two sides in the science world looking at meditation. So we have one side that is a little more skeptical.

Maria: So they’re looking at some studies where they have not shown meditation or mindfulness to be much more beneficial than any other active treatments like exercise therapy or even prescription drugs. So within those studies they thought that the results were rather moderate. So also some studies have shown that there is no impact on depression or anxiety in teens. Or that it doesn’t have much of an effect for serious mental illnesses like bipolar disorder and so on.

Jackie: That makes sense.

Maria: Yeah, and I can see that too. And again, a lot of these studies, yes, maybe the impact wasn’t as great and it always depends on how these studies are laid out. How long, what timeframe? Is this like an ingrained practice or is this something that they’re doing over a shorter time period?

Maria: But and I can also see reading a lot about disorder that things like anxiety or depression without therapy some of the mindfulness tactics, I can see how they would even be harmful. If you’re left alone with your thoughts and you’re not ready for that that you could actually even escalate some of these.

Jackie: Especially if there’s any trauma in your past or anything like that. It’s so important that these practices are being studied more. We can integrate them into modern medicine and what our current practices are.

Maria: Yeah, exactly. So I think you have to take these sometimes with a grain of salt.

Maria: I think often this is also Maybe the disprove of some of the beliefs that maybe meditation is some magical treatment, which it isn’t. So I understand. But there’s also counters to that. That there’s a lot of studies now out there that actually do show a lot of impact on our brain of these practices. Especially if they’re done regularly, over a longer time period. So we have the activation of the prefrontal cortex regions and that these practices then can harness the benefits of neuroplasticity. Even neuroplasticity wasn’t known for the longest time, right?

Maria: It was thought that, okay, so once you’re an adult, your brain, that’s what it is. But that’s not the case. Your brain can still grow and change and you can change patterns in your brain. So it’s really never over. Like this whole thing, you can’t teach an old doc’s new tricks, is wrong.

Maria: And they’ve been seeing in these studies too that with these practices, especially when they’re done regularly over a longer time period that the neuroplasticity is harnessed by changing brain patterns through the repetition. Right? And with that, they have done studies that they did find that an effective treatment of things like obsessive compulsive disorders or anxiety. Also the prevention of the relapse and depression and also drug addictions.

Maria: Wow. So I think, you have to take these with a grain of salt and there’s a lot of studies out there and there’s a lot of work out there and we are getting more and more of these too. So I think some of these views will change over time. But it’s very interesting.

Maria: So if you look at the the science-based approach now of how they’re trying to come up with something universal. You can see like what they end up with is what we’ve been when we talk now about these different practices around the world, right? How you can see the similarities. Some of the reoccurring themes, right?

Jackie: They all bring in an element of calming the mind. So whether that’s through meditation or through a practice like walking meditation or as you mentioned, the singing or dancing. It’s about really bringing inner peace, right?

Maria: Yeah. You have a lot of meditation or repetition. Yeah. Like the chanting, the mantras. A lot of inward focus, but also again the awareness of nature or certain activities. The single focus versus multitasking. it’s focusing on either yourself, your insight, or something on the outside, but it’s the awareness and the focus ended up being in the present.

Maria: Yeah. What we talked about in last episode was, which was the common denominator.

Jackie: Yeah. And there’s a theme in all the cultures that we were discussing. Like you said, of connecting to something outside of yourself. So we had some of those practices were about connecting to your own Buddha nature or connecting to the divine.

Jackie: But also, there were some interpretations of connecting with nature. And in yoga it’s called samati, finding a union with everything. Yeah, there’s that aspect, that outwardly aspect that compliments that inner work and that inner calm and peace of mind. So there’s definitely that connection piece too that compliments the inner calm, right?

Maria: Yeah. And also, if you think about the loving kindness is connecting with other humans, right?

Jackie: Yes. And yourself.

Maria: And yourself. Yeah, absolutely. So the question becomes how can we integrate some of these things into our lives? We’ve heard a lot of different practices and some of them are linked to a religion, so obviously that wouldn’t be something that will take over if they do not fall in within our religion.

Maria: But I think we can learn from all of them and there’s a lot of different things that can be done. Let’s think about some of them then.

Jackie: Yeah. Let’s actually make a commitment here and pick a practice that we are gonna, for homework, integrate into our lives for the next podcast.

Maria: Yeah, I know there’s quite a few different ones that we’ve heard. If you think about the nature-based ones:, walking meditation and then definitely some sort of meditation or even the drawing part, the Mandela, the different arts and crafts and so on.

Jackie: You said walking meditation, I could do that.

Jackie: Give me a reason to make sure that I spend some mindful time in nature every day.

Maria: Yeah, but I think that the everyday component is really important too because as I said I’ve done certain things here and there. Also with the research that I was quoting before, there is this repetitive, regular component that really makes this effective.

Jackie: Yeah. Very good point.

Maria: I think it has to be something every day, probably even at the same time every day.

Jackie: All right. What can we do every day?

Maria: Let me do this. I’m gonna do mindfulness meditation while I’m brushing my teeth in the morning.

Jackie: Oh, I like that. Now it’s connected to something that you’re already doing, and you’re definitely gonna do it every day unless you don’t brush your teeth. Yes. Yeah. I think you will.

Maria: Yes. With the pandemic and everything, it was maybe not every day. I didn’t say anything.

Jackie: Got a little casual.

Maria: Yeah, I know. I know.

Maria: Yes, that will be mine. I’m picking that. Obviously there’s gonna be other things that I’m gonna do, but I just wanted to commit to that one.

Jackie: Okay. I will commit to walking meditation every day. I have a path around my property that probably takes about 10 minutes to walk, so I’ll do that every day.

Maria: Perfect. That is perfect. Let’s do that and then we can check back next time, how we’ve been doing. And hopefully our listeners can also take away some of the practices and adopt them into their life. We picked something. We’ll talk about it next episode.

Maria: So next episode, we were going to talk about the people of mindfulness. So some of the prominent who’s of mindfulness. We’ve mentioned some last episode (Episode 1: Let’s Become Mindful) and this episode, and we wanted to go through and introduce them a little bit, talk about what their thoughts were around mindfulness. But I think we also wanted to bring up something that we’ve noticed and talked about is the personal life or the personal views of some of these people and how you can reconcile that with the teachings. So the question of, can one take advice from someone who is not perfect, and where do we draw the line?

Jackie: That’s a great question. When studying anything, being mindful of who we look up to.

Maria: Right. So that’s what we wanna talk about next episode.

Jackie: All right, so we hope you’ll continue to join us and learn with us through this ongoing open conversation. You can find more information about how to subscribe and links to everything we talked about today in our show notes and on our website becomingmindfulpodcast.com and on our social media @BecomingMindfulpodcast.

Maria: Thank you for listening. And if you like this episode and want to hear more subscribe. We also appreciate any comments question and we use, for example, let us know if you picked a specific mindfulness practice and wanna try it in the coming months. And which ones are your favorites. And until then be well.

Jackie: Thanks, bye.

June 30, 2021 Add Comment

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