If there is one thing you will find across the board in all approaches to mindfulness practice, it is the idea of practice. The child doesn't know that, but the child gets from the mother this sense that there's a larger way to hold this whole thing. 5. A powerful sense of gratitude. I'm not saying it's easy, it's not easy, but in a sense you could say, 'Well what else is there to do? Rachael Kohn: Well speaking of death, sometimes the warnings are in the experience of pain, and the medical use of meditation to alleviate pain is something that I think is still mysterious to me at any rate. ↑ Ancient India had aeroplanes, nuclear weapons, says chief of India's premier history body: Professor Y Sudershan Rao, the head of the Indian Council of Historical Research, has been criticized by fellow historians for comments that Hindu epics are adequate to understand the ancient world, rather than relying on evidence or research.

We travel the world, using yoga postures to learn about nature, geography and culture across the continents. It seems that the battle over what yoga means, and what it should mean, will continue in the U.S. A study published in 2003 by Mayo Clinic researchers, who followed 1,362 men between ages 50 and 79 over a 66-month period, found that those who used NSAIDs regularly had half as much likelihood of developing prostate cancer as those who did not. John Kabat-Zinn: Yes, well first of all there is a huge amount of mystery of pain, and even though now we can do brain studies of people who are in serious, chronic pain, in the moment that they're in that pain. John Kabat-Zinn: Well this is an experiment that anybody out there listening who's in pain, can play around with, and you do need to do it with a certain degree of discipline, because at first we're so unfamiliar with awareness we may not even know what we mean, but if you bring awareness to your pain in the present moment, and then just stay in the awareness scene, so to speak, of the pain, without all the thoughts about how this is killing me, it's ruined my entire life, I'll never get over it, I may as well kill myself, which are just thoughts, by the way, they are not the reality, they are just little thoughts being secreted by the brain, no neuroscientist actually knows even what a thought is, but they're very, very powerful, and very often negative thoughts carry a lot of negative emotion with them.

John Kabat-Zinn: Well first of all I've got to say that it's very nice to speak with you because you've obviously read this book with great detail and sensitivity in mind, and yes, I do use that phrase 'falling awake', because it's an occupational hazard with lying down meditations that as soon as we get a little bit relaxed, we'll fall asleep, we'll go unconscious, because most of us first of all are sleep deprived ourselves, and we're running around like crazy, trying to get everything done in our lives, and finding that there's no end to the To Do lists. John Kabat-Zinn: You can learn to fall awake, and that's the whole point, is that when you begin to pay attention to your own mind and your own awareness there are very, very simple ways to cultivate, and they are methods, so that you could call them techniques to cultivate the lens that you would bring to the present moment. You're not even call it pain, just lay out the welcome mat for it and see if you can hold them in awareness. So you can do it running, you can do it making love, you can do it chopping vegetables, I mean it's more a way of being than it is sort of operationalising a technique or a series of techniques.

That is a profound physiological resting place that actually restructures your body, your brain, your mind in ways that we are now able to study in very refined methodologies that suggest that taking some time every day in a formal sense, to cultivate non-doing, stopping, being still, and being kind to oneself, to come back to your question of before, this is a radical act of kindness, a radical act of love towards yourself, After 1 year of yoga to stop for a moment in this way and fall awake rather than to fall asleep. The real meditation is the seeing through those lenses, the feeling, the sensing, the touching, the being in touch with your own experience when you are awake lying on the floor or in your bed experiencing your body and the breath moving in and out of your body and your thoughts moving back and forth all over the place and you rest in an awareness that can hold all of that thought without being perturbed by any of it. The ‘emergency’ biscuits we bought earlier are calling out to me, but I stay strong and grab an easy peeler.