This has been a really big week for mindfulness. This practice is not new – in fact it has been around for over 2500 years – but it is finally having its day! Before jumping ahead to cheer for all the recent accolades, let’s just take a minute, take a deep breath and allow space for this moment to sink in, one in which mindfulness will be recognized by the masses as a significant tool for maintaining a healthy life.

Mindfulness has been part of our Western culture for the greater part of the past 30 years and has long been synonymous with at least one of two prominent figures. Jon Kabat-Zinn, whom I refer to as the “Grandfather of Mindfulness in the Western World” developed a program in 1979 called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts designed for chronically ill medical patients, in which he taught mindfulness and meditation to use their minds to change their bodies. Every scientific study ever conducted on the effects of a MBSR course proves the benefits by showing a significant decrease of symptoms and increase in quality of living. About 25 years ago Jack Kornfield, a trained Buddhist monk, co-founded Spirit Rock, a Buddhist retreat center in Northern California, and is seen as one of the key teachers of mindfulness.  But if you weren’t in the mindfulness community, or don’t watch Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday, you may have not ever have heard of these men or been privy to their significant contributions.

Over recent years, mindfulness programs have been developed all over the country in our health care industry, our military, our education system, and in the business world. More key players (like Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio) have discovered mindfulness and are now crusading or congressional funding of mindfulness programs. But again, unless you were somehow up to date on the meditation practices of Congress members, you may not have known about it.

Five years ago, a conference that started out fairly small in San Francisco has now grown in its exposure and impact with its annual conference occurring over President’s Day weekend to over 2000 world-wide attendees. Wisdom 2.0 asks the question: “How do we live with awareness and connection in a digital age?” and brings together leaders in the spiritual world with leaders in the business world like Arianna Huffington, Bill Ford and Silicon Valley’s major players to create space and conversation. It’s brilliant – but again, if you don’t run in spiritual or tech circles, you may not have heard about it.

Photo by Peter Yang for ESPN

But all that has now changed. Two major events in Mindfulness’s timeline have occurred in one week, and most people in the nation were affected one way or the other. The current issue of Time magazine, dated February 3, 2014, hit mailboxes and newsstands last week. The cover story is dedicated to The Mindful Revolution. For those of us in the mindfulness community it felt huge. Yes, we have had the Mindful magazine out for nearly a year now, but again, unless you knew about that or found it on the stands at Whole Foods, you might not know. But my social media updates, news feed and twitter feed were buzzing about the huge exposure mindfulness was getting from TIME. There was tangible energy floating through the mindfulness world as this trusted, newsworthy magazine touted a practice that we all know to be life-changing in its promises, time-tested in its tools and grounded in its roots. It was now getting not just legitimate, secular exposure, but endorsements stating clearly and succinctly how everyone could bring this practice into their lives and experience the benefits of greater presence, awareness, balance, joy and peace (not to mention the health benefits). I know I personally felt pride and though I’ve been a mindfulness educator for over two years, it felt like it was now finally nationally recognized as a practice that was not just something “other” people did. Mindfulness is for everyone and TIME magazine showed that.

And as the universal law of the spirit works, timing is everything and there are no accidents. So, if you happened to be not in the loop of TIME magazine (although I have to say, it took me days to find a copy cause every store I went to was sold out, so clearly people caught on fast!), then I am most certain that you may have fallen into the other category of watching the Super Bowl. Okay, even if you didn’t watch it, you had to know it was happening. The team that won by a whopping 35 points, beating out record-breaking Peyton Manning, is the Seattle Seahawks…a football team that just so happens to practice mindful meditation.

Back in August 2013, ESPN magazine featured a story on the Seahawks, with a picture of players meditating, with a tag line referring to their belief that a “kinder, gentler philosophy is the future of football.” The article talked about their Coach Pete Carroll’s philosophy of introducing a sports psychologist, Mike Gervais, who guided the players in yoga and meditation with the invitation to “breathe in, breathe out and open their minds.”

Rather than a typical coach screaming at the players, Coach Carroll believes that “happy players make for better players.” He tries to implement practices that guide the players to be in the moment, relax and offers tools for dealing with stress. Well, this little experiment of Carroll’s has paid off with the biggest reward the NFL can offer!

Seahawks players Russell Okung was quoted in that article as saying, “Meditation is as important as lifting weights and being out here on the field for practice. It’s about quieting your mind and getting into certain states where everything outside of you doesn’t matter in that moment. There are so many things telling you that you can’t do something, but you take those thoughts captive, take power over them and change them.”

Wow, an NFL player whose team is still celebrating as I stay up late to write this, summed up the tenants of mindfulness so eloquently: quiet your mind, be in the moment, acknowledge and let go of thoughts that aren’t serving you, have power of your negative thought patterns and cycles, and the importance of bringing these tools into your everyday life. I hardly could’ve said it better myself.

Posted on 2/3/2014

Written by Joree Rosenblatt

Joree Rosenblatt has a Master’s in Counseling Psychology and is a mindfulness educator in the Bay Area. In addition to working at a K-8 private school teaching mindfulness to students, she teaches her original curriculum to adults, and onsite in corporations, in the Fundamentals of Mindfulness and Mindful Parenting. Joree’s true passion is raising her two daughters, mindfully of course…well, most of the time! Even though she already is a rock star mom, Joree practices mindfulness every day, and when all else fails, she remembers to take a moment and just breathe.

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