Mindfulness Marches On

Can mindfulness get any hotter? The mainstream spotlight continues to grow on this subject, which I have blogged about several times. In particular, see Time magazine’s seven page February 3, 2014 cover story, “The Art of Being Mindful.” And Mindful magazine continues to do interesting work. The cover story of the February 2014 issue, “No Blueprint, Just Love,” is an eight page interview with one of the best-known figures in the field, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is also a major presence in the Time article.

Kabat-Zinn, founding Executive Director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, began his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program as a small project in 1979, and it has grown to worldwide prominence. He is one of the speakers at the big Wisdom 2.0 conference, Feb 14-17, in San Francisco. And an updated edition of his classic book from 1990, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, was recently released, with a preface by Thich Nhat Hanh.

I also wrote about mindfulness in my new book, Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way, especially about the work being done by Jeremy Hunter, an Assistant Professor at the Drucker School. Jeremy was included in a recent Schumpeter column, “The mindfulness business,” in The Economist. If you live in Southern California, be sure to attend the Drucker Business Forum February 13th event in Pasadena, “Mindfulness – where business and the behavioral sciences intersect,” with Jeremy and Nick Udall, CEO of nowhere and chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership.

The Time article mentions another mindfulness luminary, Janice Marturano, founder and executive director of the Institute for Mindful Leadership; and a former high-ranking executive with General Mills. There is an excerpt from her new book, Finding the Space to Lead, in Mindful’s issue with the Kabat-Zinn cover.

Finally, the always-thoughtful Tony Schwartz, whom I wrote about in 2011, has a provocative sanity check in his recent New York Times blog post, “More Mindfulness, Less Meditation.”  Meditation-focused or not, mindfulness is not going away. The situation is summed up nicely in the headline of Carolyn Gregoire’s recent article in The Huffington Post:  “Why 2014 Will Be The Year Of Mindful Living.”