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>> And people will say to us after eight weeks in our Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Clinic
at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center that they felt
like they got their life back in some way.
And these are people with cancer of various kinds, heart disease, chronic pain conditions,
people who've in some sense not gotten satisfaction
from the mainstream health care system.
And where the invitation in MBSR, mindfulness based stress reduction is
to actually do something for yourself that no one else on the planet can do for you.
And it really involves this quality
of cultivating what I would call affectionate attention or mindfulness,
and they're specialized ways that you can use to help facilitate that process.
And so people who understand about meditation or have heard
of meditation often think, oh, yeah, it's about breathing.
Oh, yeah, it's about breathing for instance.
And a lot of our patients when they're finished with the MBSR, and you ask them, "Well,
what did you get out of the program?"
A lot of them will say the breathing.
And I say, "Wait a minute.
You were breathing before you took the MBSR program.
You're going to be breathing for a long time after that.
What are you talking about with the breathing?"
So they're not really talking about the breathing or breathing.
What they're talking about is my intimate relationship
with my breath that I didn't have before.
And that is called awareness, pure and simple or mindfulness.
But when you pay attention to the breath, to the rising of the breath
on the inhalation, and the sensations in the body.
We're not talking about the thinking about the breath, but just the sensation of the wave
of the breath coming in, and then peaks,
and we can feel that peak not breathing in, not breathing out.
The wave of the breath leaving the body, and then the trough, and then the next wave.
And when we ride on those waves, like surfing on the waves of the breath,
first of all, it naturally calms us down.
It naturally slows us down.
It naturally centers the focus of our awareness in the present moment, and in the body.
So when people talk about the breathing, what they mean is mindfulness of breathing.