 Something's Happening Here
By JAMES GIMIAN, Publisher.
Welcome
to our second annual Guide to Mindful Living. If you read the Shambhala
Sun regularly, you know we’ve been increasing our coverage of the
emerging mindfulness movement. At times we even refer to it as the
“mindfulness revolution” (see our recent anthology edited by Barry Boyce
with that very name). While that may seem like overreaching, it starts
with a simple truth: more and more people are taking what they’ve
learned from their longtime commitment to mindfulness, awareness, and
compassion practices, and they’re applying it to all aspects of our
society, in both profound and ordinary ways. All of this great work is
motivated by the aspiration to bring the scientifically proven benefits
of these practices to help us with the difficult challenges of our time.
Something’s
happening here; something very important is coming to light. We get a
hint of it from the stories in this issue: Gina Biegel tells us how
mindfulness is making a difference in teenagers’ lives; Sasha Loring
offers practices for mindful eating; a host of young, very smart
dot-comers are weaving mindfulness into the ethos of their Silicon
Valley startups; and Dr. Michael Baime ties it all together with his
report on the scientific research that’s validating the benefits
practitioners have talked about for years.
But
we know that these are only a few of many great stories about what’s
happening in the mindfulness world. The Shambhala Sun Foundation’s work
to support and build community in the emerging mindfulness movement has
put us in touch with hundreds of projects across North America, with
more arising nearly every day. It seems that the faster we ramp up to
learn about and connect people doing important work in this movement,
the faster the mindfulness projects multiply.
Here’s
an example of what I mean. Senior writer Barry Boyce and I have been in
ten cities since the beginning of the year to catch up with old friends
and meet new ones doing this mindfulness-related work. We’ve attended
inspiring conferences like Wisdom 2.0 in Silicon Valley and Garrison
Institute’s Transformational Ecology.
During
this time, we’ve talked to at least fifteen different organizations
preparing courses and training teachers to offer mindfulness and
compassion classes to a broader audience. Their work is being applied in
settings from preschools to our finest universities, from inner-city
neighborhoods to the boardrooms of our largest corporations, from
political campaigns to the U.S. Marines. (Yes, you heard that right, the
U.S. Marines.) The work we’ve learned about is humbling, extraordinary,
mainstream, and, given the state of the world, maybe just in the nick
of time.
So
what is happening here; where is all this leading? From our
perspective, what’s coming to light is an emerging national community of
people who are joined together in this campaign, even though many don’t
yet know it. A larger community on the verge of recognizing itself
qualifies as a movement. And when a movement reaches critical mass, the
opportunities to make a positive, even revolutionary, impact on our
world increases significantly. The future of all this is looking pretty
bright.
Just
about when we started talking here at the Sun about how to help this
emerging national mindfulness movement turn into a community, we got a
call from our friend Saki Santorelli, executive director of the Center
for Mindfulness. He suggested we partner with them and our friends at
the Omega Institute to host a conference—a community meeting and town
hall, really—for all those interested in learning more. So, it seems,
this emerging movement idea wasn’t just our opinion.
The
Shambhala Sun Foundation wants to report on this movement, and we want
to support it too. We’re very pleased to announce that the mindfulness
conference is now scheduled for Sept. 30–Oct. 1 in New York City. After
lots of searching around with our partners about what to call this
gathering, we decided on “Creating a Mindful Society.” More dots got
connected, and the light bulb went on. So that’s what’s happening here.
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