Hello and welcome to the Being Well podcast. My name is Forrest Hansen.

Today we're starting the first episode focused on our new topic of

mindfulness, which we'll be exploring in four different episodes over the next month.

Today we're primarily focusing on the concept of studying the mind and particularly looking at how you can really use

mindfulness in a practical way in your day-to-day life.

I'm joined today as always by Dr. Rick Dad how you doing tonight really good happy to be here

Mindfulness has become an increasingly mainstream topic yeah once you've made it to the cover of time magazine

That's kind of the sign that you're in the

broader American consciousness. But more in the context of what we're doing here, which is really

focused on strength development, how do you think about mindfulness? How do you use that

term in your work? How do you use that term in your life as opposed to that kind of

just spacious awareness of sitting on the cushion? It reminds me of this

quotation from the Godfather of Psychology in America,

William James. To paraphrase a little bit, he said the capacity to bring back a

wandering attention is absolutely fundamental to being your own person.

And then he went on to say that the education of attention would be the education par excellence.

So it's in that larger context that this notion of mindfulness is so relevant and useful because

if you're not mindful mindful you're forgetful. People define

mindfulness in different ways these days. Sometimes the word is so stretchy it

hardly means anything at all. I go back to the roots of it in the ancient

Indian meditation traditions 2,500 or so years ago in which mindfulness was defined as essentially sustained moment to moment presence.

You are recollected, you are gathered together, you are collected together in the present moment continuously.

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