Home & Lifestyle, Wellness
Healing the World
Lesson time 13:41 min
The world needs mindfulness now more than ever. Discover how to apply your mindfulness practice to many issues facing us today.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: We Are Cells of the Same Body • Small Changes Can Have a Big Impact
Teaches Mindfulness and Meditation
Mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches you how to incorporate meditation into your everyday life to improve your health and happiness.
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[MUSIC PLAYING] - As far as mindfulness is concerned, I'm not kidding around. Life is very, very challenging. There's so much stress, so much pain, so much illness. And that is even without pandemics and-- and global warming and the kinds of things that we're now facing at this juncture of humanity on the planet where waking up is not a luxury. And it's an absolute necessity or we're going to be winding up in-- under conditions that everybody agrees are going to be virtually intolerable for human life on this planet. And so we need to in some sense take care of the totality of what we are while we have the chance. We need to wake up not simply to our own suffering as individuals and optimize our own health and tilt things in the direction of health and well-being by changing how we live from moment to moment. We need to be concerned for the health of ourselves, our children, our grandchildren and future generations in a way that is as far as I'm concerned an intimate part of taking responsibility through the cultivation of mindfulness. So we're at that kind of a moment of potential awakening on a planetary level. And we can talk more about that in terms of satellite photographs of what's happening to the glaciers and to the Atlantic polar ice cap and to Antarctica. And this is all subject to meditative awareness because we can see what's happening. And that's just global warming in the environment and then not just global warming in the environment because it's all this "us-ing" and "them-ing," this "other-ing" that we're seeing tear the country apart where even in families people can't talk to each other because they're attached to one view of human nature or in the other view of human nature. And it seems to be a total impasse because everybody's stuck in their fortified selves. But you see the scope of mindfulness is such that we can pay attention to that as much as we can pay attention to chronic pain conditions in our lower back or headaches or anxiety or depression. We need to pay attention to the full repertoire of what's in our faces as human beings. If we're really honest about liberating human suffering, we have to include the ways in which we are creating our own human suffering as the species that's supposed to know its own nature and then be aware of the knowing itself, this Homo sapiens sapiens. So there's been a convergence where now it's not just about mindfulness and medicine. It's about mindfulness, medicine, and medicine for the entire planet. But it all has to do with waking up to recognizing our true nature and to act in ways that have integrity and that are based on the kind of ethical foundation of doing the least damage possible, causing the least harm. So that would be a medicine for the planet. And I love that because then, well, welcome to the love affair. We're not dead yet. But the question is, are we alive yet? [MUSIC PLAYING] Einstein is famous for having said in response to a letter that...
About the Instructor
A pioneer of the Western mindfulness movement, Jon Kabat-Zinn has spent more than 40 years studying, teaching, and advocating the benefits of mindfulness. In his MasterClass, he teaches you how to cultivate a mindfulness practice, reduce your stress, and soothe your thoughts with meditation and movement. Jon shares expert tips and guidance that meets you where you are. Let this class help you make the most of being alive.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn
Mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches you how to incorporate meditation into your everyday life to improve your health and happiness.
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