Freaky Facts to keep in mind

1. Mindfulness is being used in research programmes around the world to help people improve their physical and mental health. It’s been trialled for many things, including the treatment of fibromyalgia, stress reduction, helping people to stop smoking and for cancer outpatients with sleep, mood, stress and fatigue symptoms.

2. One of the world’s leading advocates of mindfulness is Jon Kabat-Zinn.
He is the founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He teaches mindfulness meditation as a technique to help people cope with stress, anxiety, pain and illness. “The present is the only time that any of us have to be alive, to know anything, to perceive, to learn, to act, to change, to heal.”

3. Harvard Medical School is also backing mindfulness. It says mounting evidence shows mindfulness can increase life enjoyment, expand the ability to cope with illness, and possibly improve physical and emotional health. It says one of the more popular ways to practice mindfulness is through meditation, which involves sitting or lying down quietly for 20 or 30 minutes, once or twice a day.

4. The practice of mindfulness is being taught and researched at universities all around the world. Even Bangor University in northern Wales now has the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice. It is committed to the relief of suffering and the promotion of wellbeing through the application of mindfulness-based approaches.

5. Mindfulness has been integrated with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy to help people with mental illness. Researchers say the integrated treatment is a paradigm shift in psychotherapy.