Dr. Ellen Langer

It's one thing.

Now think of it.

If it's one thing, wherever you're putting one mind and body, you're putting the other.

What that means is that our minds have enormous control over our bodies.

And once we recognize that, then we can harness some of our own power and cure many of the disorders or certainly help along many of the problems that afflict too many of us.

Okay, yes, very important.

So when people hear the word mindfulness, in spite of the fact that I've been doing this for over 50 years, people still think of meditation.

Meditation is fine, it's just different.

Okay, to meditate, you take yourself out of the world and you sit still for 20 minutes twice a day.

It's a practice.

And what it's supposed to do, it's not mindfulness.

It's supposed to lead you to become more mindful.

Mindfulness, as I study, it is not a practice.

It's just a way of being.

And it results from a deep, deep, but easy, appreciation of the power of uncertainty.

We're taught by our parents, by schools, everything you read are giving us these absolutes, these rules, as if we know that this thing is true right now is going to be true forever.

Everything is always changing.

Everything looks different from different perspectives.

So we can't know.

Now, this came to mind to me years ago, but it's really, for me, it was a very important incident.