Home & Lifestyle, Wellness
Meet Your Instructor
Lesson time 06:52 min
A pioneer of the Western mindfulness movement, Jon Kabat-Zinn has dedicated his life to sharing the benefits of mindfulness and meditation.
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Topics include: Meet Your Instructor
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] JON KABAT-ZINN: Taking your seat in meditation is taking a stand. Each and every moment is an opportunity to investigate the nature of your mind. When you bring awareness to a moment, a universe of new possibilities arises. To be mindful is to befriend the present moment as it is, to discover the beauty of your life while it's still yours to live, and most of all, to wake up. [MUSIC PLAYING] I realize that it's very important since you've enrolled in this course that, in some sense, you have a framework for understanding why at least I think mindfulness is important to cultivate in one's life. And over the past 40-plus years of offering mindfulness-based stress reduction and all sorts of other mindfulness-based programs, we've learned a lot about how the mind-body connection can actually influence well-being and healing. And now it's spread to medical centers and clinics virtually around the world on pretty much every continent. And it's very gratifying to see mindfulness spreading in the world where people's lives actually light up. I've worked with thousands of medical patients over the years. And they always say basically the same thing. "My meditation practice gave me back my life." When I was working in the Massachusetts prisons teaching mindfulness, it felt like giving food to starving people. It felt like providing an oxygen line straight into the heart about what was most fundamental about being alive, about having a body, about being human. And the biggest motivator of people to come to mindfulness is that your life isn't working. In one way or another, you're suffering. You're not completely at home in your body, in your mind, in your world. And there's a lot of anguish, a lot of grief, a lot of pain associated with that not quite rightness. What I've discovered since then is it doesn't matter what your motivation is for landing within the domain of mindfulness. Any motivation whatsoever will do. The important thing is to enter the doorway. And everybody will do it differently, too. It's not like, oh, the more that we meditate the more we become like one hero of ours who we think is the great meditator. No, that's absurd. You will never be Mother Teresa. You will never be the Dalai Lama. You will never be whoever you are hero or guru of the moment is. The only chance you have is to be yourself. You don't have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming the Dalai Lama. But you do have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming you. But you should know from the beginning that I'm not kidding around. And I invite you to also not kid around with yourself. I don't care at all about what you think about me because I'm not the subject. I'm not the curriculum. You're the curriculum. Something brought you to this particular program. What was that? It can't just be mere curiosity about some personage or some face or some reputation associated with a name. Has to be some kind of inner sense that maybe s...
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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