115 Fun Facts About Meditation

Which sacred syllable is traditionally chanted at the start of Hindu prayers, recitations and meditation?

Om is built from three sounds, a-u-m, which Hindu tradition reads as triads such as earth, atmosphere and heaven, so the one syllable is held to contain the whole universe.

Under which tree is the Buddha said to have sat in meditation until he reached enlightenment?

Bodhi tree: the original sacred fig at Bodh Gaya no longer survives, but each time it was cut down it was replanted from its own saplings, so the tree honoured there is a descendant.

Studies link regular meditation to lower levels of which hormone?

Cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, fell along with heart rate and inflammation markers in a 2017 pooled analysis of 45 trials; melatonin, by contrast, has been found to rise after a session.

Tibetan monks build intricate mandalas over days or weeks, then ritually sweep them away, using what material?

Coloured sand is poured into place through metal funnels called chak-pur; once the mandala is complete the monks sweep it up and tip it into a river, a lesson in the impermanence of all things.

Zen master Hakuin's famous koan asks a student to hear the sound of what?

One hand: two hands clapped together make a sound, Hakuin would say, so listen for the sound of one; he set the puzzle to new students in 18th-century Japan and it became one of the most famous koans of all.

Which technology chief executive, a long-time Zen student, was married in 1991 by the Zen priest Kobun Chino Otogawa?

Steve Jobs took up Zen under Kobun in the 1970s and, before founding Apple, thought of giving his life wholly to Zen, even of entering a monastery in Japan.

A 2015 JAMA Internal Medicine trial found mindfulness improved older adults' quality of what?

Sleep: in the 49-person trial, six weeks of mindfulness classes improved sleep quality more than a standard sleep-hygiene course did, and eased daytime fatigue as well.

Raked-gravel Zen gardens such as Ryōan-ji's, designed as aids to meditation, are a hallmark of which Japanese city?

Kyoto's Ryōan-ji sets fifteen rocks in raked gravel so that from any spot at least one is hidden; such gardens are meant to be contemplated from a seat on the veranda, never walked through.

Which measure did a 2013 American Heart Association statement say TM may help to lower?

Blood pressure: the AHA's 2013 review of alternative approaches said TM may be considered, but it ranked exercise and device-guided breathing as better supported by the evidence.

What does the title 'Buddha' literally mean in Sanskrit?

Awakened one: the word comes from a Sanskrit verb meaning to wake up, and it is a title rather than a name, one Buddhist tradition also gives to earlier teachers and to Maitreya, a buddha still to come.

In which Hindu scripture does Krishna teach the warrior Arjuna how to sit and steady the mind in meditation?

Bhagavad Gita: in its sixth chapter Krishna tells Arjuna to set a firm seat of kusha grass, deerskin and cloth in a clean spot, neither too high nor too low, before trying to still the mind.

A 2010 study of US Marines preparing to deploy found mindfulness training protected what under stress?

Memory: working memory normally shrinks under pre-deployment stress, and it did in the untrained Marines; in Amishi Jha's study it grew in those who put in the most mindfulness practice.

The whirling dervishes, whose spinning is a form of active meditation, belong to an order founded by followers of which poet?

Rumi's disciples organised the Mevlevi order in Konya after his death; Turkey outlawed Sufi orders in 1925, and the dervishes' lodge there was turned into a museum.

In yoga, which Sanskrit term covers the breath-control exercises often practised before meditation?

Pranayama is the fourth of classical yoga's eight stages; its immediate goal is to slow breathing to an effortless, even rhythm, freeing the mind from attention to the body.

The practice of 'body scan' meditation primarily involves focusing awareness on what?

Physical sensations, area by area: attention climbs from the toes to the top of the head, and the task is only to notice weight, vibration or warmth as they are, in line with the MBSR course's rule of non-striving.

What do many Eastern traditions call the state of complete meditative absorption?

Samadhi is the absorbed state in which the mind stays fully alert yet untouched by desire or anger; in India a holy person's tomb is also called a samadhi, since such teachers are said to die in that state.

Meditation calms anxiety partly by dialling down the sympathetic nervous system, the branch linked to which response?

Fight-or-flight is the sympathetic system's alarm setting, which speeds the heart and breathing; pooled trials find that meditation lowers heart rate as that activity eases.

In the context of meditation, what does the term 'open monitoring' typically involve?

Open monitoring means non-judgmental awareness of whatever arises, with no fixed object; teachers usually train focused attention first, because only a calmed mind can drop its object and simply watch.

Brain scans link mindfulness training to calmer responses in which region, often called the brain's fear centre?

Amygdala responses to emotional images fell after eight weeks of mindful-attention training, even when the volunteers were not meditating; a separate study found its grey matter grew less dense as stress eased.

The earliest clear records of meditation (dhyana) appear in which philosophical texts attached to the Vedas?

The Upanishads are the last layer of the Vedas and mark a turn from ritual to inner inquiry; the earliest date from around the middle of the first millennium BCE, well before the Puranas.

Which Chinese martial art is often described as 'meditation in motion'?

Tai chi is practised as an unbroken series of slow, gentle moves with names like 'white crane spreads its wings'; a Harvard health guide puns that it might as well be called medication in motion.

In the classical eight limbs of yoga, which stage comes immediately before meditation (dhyana)?

Concentration (dharana) means holding the mind steady on one point; when that hold becomes an unbroken flow of awareness, the texts call it meditation, the next limb.

The Chinese Buddhist phrase xinyuan, for an unsettled mind, compares it to which animal?

Monkey: xinyuan, 'heart-monkey', pictures the mind leaping restlessly from thought to thought; the companion phrase yima, 'idea-horse', completes the Chinese idiom for a distracted mind.

Which Christian group traditionally worships in shared silence, speaking only when someone feels moved to?

Quakers call it waiting worship: with no sermon or set order, the meeting sits in silence until someone feels led to speak, though many Quaker churches, especially in Africa, hold services with hymns and a pastor instead.

In Buddhist teaching, what is described as the "far enemy" of mettā (loving-kindness)?

Ill will is loving-kindness's 'far enemy', its plain opposite; the Visuddhimagga's subtler 'near enemy' is worldly affection, which looks like love but clings.

The Pashupati seal, whose central figure some read as sitting in a yoga pose, comes from which civilisation?

Indus Valley: the seal was dug up at Mohenjo-daro in the 1920s, and John Marshall read its horned, seated figure as an early Shiva, a reading later scholars such as Doris Srinivasan have challenged.

A Zen koan poses a riddle reason cannot solve in order to stir up what in the student?

Great doubt is the aim: the student concentrates on a single word such as the 'mu' of a famous koan until, in the Zen phrase, the ball of doubt shatters into insight.

A meta-analysis first published in 2017 found meditation had small-to-medium effects on empathy, compassion and what kind of behaviour?

Prosocial behaviour means acts that help others; a 2018 review then found the compassion gains appeared only against do-nothing control groups, or when the meditation teacher was a co-author of the study.

What is kinhin, which Zen practitioners do between long periods of seated meditation?

Kinhin is walking meditation: practitioners pace slowly in a straight line or a circle between periods of zazen, keeping attention on each step and on the breath.

John Teasdale's 2000 trial found the mindfulness course MBCT cut relapse after three or more bouts of which illness?

Depression: MBCT lowered relapse only in patients with three or more past episodes; in those with just two it made no difference, which is why the course is aimed at people whose illness keeps returning.

Which of the four Buddhist brahmavihāras is defined as feeling another being's pain as one's own?

Compassion (karuṇā) is the wish to free other beings from pain, treating it as one's own; it is said to grow out of mettā, and the four brahmavihāras together are known as the divine abodes.

What is the Japanese name for the round cushion on which zazen is traditionally sat?

The zafu is the round cushion placed on a zabuton, a thick flat mat; it raises the hips so that both knees can rest firmly on the mat, giving the sitter a stable three-point base.

How many beads does a Hindu japa mala, used to count mantra repetitions, traditionally have?

A japa mala has 108 beads plus a larger 'guru' bead that marks the start and end of a round and is never counted; in Buddhist malas the 108 are said to stand for humanity's mortal desires.

Which yoga posture, known in English as Corpse Pose, is the usual position for lying-down relaxation and yoga nidra?

Savasana looks like the easiest pose in yoga, flat on the back with eyes closed, yet teachers warn against underestimating it: lying completely still and relaxed is treated as an art to be learned.

Which string of beads is used to count prayers while meditating on a set of 'mysteries'?

The rosary's beads come in groups of ten called decades, and each decade is a cue to meditate on one mystery, an event in the lives of Jesus and Mary; Pope Pius V fixed the standard list in the 16th century.

Which ancient sage is credited with the Yoga Sutras, the text that sets out yoga's eight limbs?

Patanjali did not invent yoga: he gathered older Samkhya, Buddhist and ascetic teachings into the Yoga Sutras, and only one of its eight limbs concerns posture, the rest dealing with conduct, breath and the mind.

Buddhist meditation reached China in the 2nd century CE by way of which trade network?

The Silk Road: monks and texts travelled its overland routes from Central Asia into Han China, where An Shigao, by legend a Parthian prince turned monk, began translating meditation manuals in 148 CE.

What is the common instruction given when the mind wanders during meditation?

Gently return to the anchor: guides call the drifting natural, not a failure, because each time a lapse is noticed and attention is brought back, the 'muscle' of attention gets a little stronger.

A 2011 study found eight weeks of mindfulness training raised grey-matter density in the hippocampus and regions linked to what?

Regulation of emotion: Hölzel's team reported the change after an eight-week MBSR course, though a larger 2022 replication with 218 volunteers found no such structural change.

Which English-born writer and radio speaker popularised Zen for the Beat Generation with The Way of Zen (1957)?

Alan Watts called himself a 'philosophical entertainer' and won his following as a volunteer broadcaster on Berkeley's KPFA radio; The Way of Zen became one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism.

In Zen monasteries, what is samu, a practice that sits beside formal meditation in the daily schedule?

Samu means doing a simple task mindfully, the physical chores that keep a monastery running; Zen traces it to the Chinese master Baizhang and his maxim 'a day without work is a day without food'.

Which measure of the body's energy use fell within minutes in Wallace and Benson's 1971 study of meditators?

Oxygen consumption dropped within minutes although the subjects stayed fully awake, so Wallace, Benson and Wilson titled their paper 'A wakeful hypometabolic physiologic state': the body idling while the mind stayed alert.

In meditation, 'equanimity' means what?

Equanimity is composure undisturbed by emotion or pain; Buddhist teachers stress that it is not coldness, naming indifference as its 'near enemy', a look-alike that only resembles calm.

Buddhism's five hindrances to meditation include sensual desire, restlessness and which other pair?

Sloth and torpor (thīna-middha) are the dullness and drowsiness that sap effort; the Buddha names them among five hindrances that must be overcome before the mind can settle into the absorptions called jhāna.

In which classic meditation posture does each foot rest on the opposite thigh?

Full lotus puts each foot on the opposite thigh, the pose in which the Buddha is often carved; forcing the legs into it can injure the knees, so teachers offer half lotus, with only one foot up, as an alternative.

What is a 'mudra' in some meditation and yoga practices?

A mudra is a symbolic hand gesture: the Sanskrit word means 'seal' or 'mark', and in zazen the hands rest in the cosmic mudra, left over right with thumbs lightly touching.

Meditation can reduce the frequency of what kind of repetitive negative thought pattern?

Rumination, the habit of replaying the same worries, eases because practice trains people to see a thought as a passing event instead of following it; reviews find that this drop explains part of the benefit to mood.

In the late 1960s the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi became world-famous as spiritual adviser to which band?

The Beatles studied with him in Bangor, Wales, in August 1967, then decamped to his ashram in Rishikesh in 1968, a trip that produced many of the songs on the White Album.

The TM technique is practised twice a day, eyes closed, for about how long each time?

20 minutes, morning and evening, sitting comfortably with the eyes closed; each student is given a private mantra by a teacher and told to keep it secret.

Which film director's foundation, set up in 2005, funds TM lessons for at-risk groups such as veterans and the homeless?

David Lynch took up TM in 1973 and said he never afterwards missed a session; his 2006 book Catching the Big Fish describes how the practice fed his film-making.

A US appeals court ruled in 1979 that a TM course was religious, barring it from being taught where?

Public schools: in Malnak v. Yogi the court pointed to the course textbook and to the puja, a ceremony involving offerings to deities, and so ended the course in New Jersey high schools.

The Maharishi laughed so often in early TV interviews that he earned which nickname?

The giggling guru was a physics graduate of Allahabad University who then spent 13 years with his own teacher in the Himalayas; his devotees preferred to call him His Holiness.

The Maharishi's TM-Sidhi programme, launched in the mid-1970s, added which optional advanced practice?

Yogic Flying: practitioners sit cross-legged and hop forward; the movement describes the hopping as only the first of three stages, with hovering and true flying said to follow.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, who brought mindfulness into medicine, earned his MIT PhD in which field?

Molecular biology: Kabat-Zinn earned his MIT PhD in 1971 under Nobel laureate Salvador Luria, and spent his MIT years campaigning against military research before turning to stress reduction.

Which Kabat-Zinn book lays out his eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course?

Full Catastrophe Living borrows its title from the film Zorba the Greek, whose hero, asked whether he has ever married, lists wife, house and kids as 'the full catastrophe'.

The Jesus Prayer, a short phrase repeated continuously as a form of meditation, belongs chiefly to which branch of Christianity?

Eastern Orthodox monks made it the heart of the hesychast tradition; it goes back to the desert monks of fourth-century Egypt, one of whom taught a pupil to say it with every breath.

MBCT, an eight-week group course built by Segal, Williams and Teasdale, pairs mindfulness with which approach?

Cognitive behavioral therapy supplies the framework: MBCT adds MBSR-style mindfulness to its methods and teaches 'decentering', noticing thoughts without treating them as facts.

Which former Buddhist monk co-founded the Headspace app with Richard Pierson in 2010?

Andy Puddicombe, who spent a decade as a Buddhist monk, founded Headspace with Richard Pierson in 2010; it began as an events company selling meditation CDs, and the app did not arrive until 2012.

Headspace's monk-turned-co-founder went on to earn a degree in which subject?

Circus Arts: after ten years as a monk he trained briefly with the Moscow State Circus, then took the degree in London while drawing up the first plans for Headspace; he had abandoned a Sports Science course years earlier.

Which 1971 book by former Harvard psychologist Ram Dass became a counterculture guide to meditation and yoga?

Be Here Now took its title from a phrase Ram Dass's guide used on their travels; first handed out as a pamphlet by the Lama Foundation commune in New Mexico, it went on to sell more than two million copies.

The Calm app grew out of which 2011 web project by co-founder Alex Tew?

Do Nothing for 2 Minutes dared visitors not to touch mouse or keyboard for that long; Tew, who as a student had sold a million pixels of ad space for a dollar each, said he built it with information overload in mind.

Calm's Sleep Stories have used archival recordings of which famously soothing TV host?

Bob Ross knew that viewers dozed off to The Joy of Painting and approved, joking, 'I love hearing that you've never watched a full episode of me'; Calm launched its Sleep Stories in 2016.

Cardiologist Herbert Benson coined which term for the body's reversal of stress?

Relaxation response: Benson's 1975 book of that name reduced meditation to four ingredients, a quiet place, a comfortable position, a passive attitude and any simple word or phrase to repeat.

Former ABC newsman Dan Harris says he took up meditation after what 2004 incident?

An on-air panic attack in 2004 pushed Dan Harris to give up drugs and, in time, to try meditation; he left ABC News in 2021 to give his full attention to his meditation podcast.

Monk Matthieu Ricard, 'happiest person in the world', became French interpreter to whom in 1989?

The Dalai Lama's French interpreter since 1989, Ricard had walked away from a genetics career at the Pasteur Institute in 1972 to study in the Himalayas; he calls the 'happiest' label absurd.

The Insight Meditation Society, founded in 1975 in Barre, is in which US state?

Massachusetts: IMS was started in Barre by Western teachers newly back from training in Asia, among them Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, and opened its first retreats in an old mansion on Valentine's Day 1976.

Jack Kornfield co-founded which Marin County meditation centre in Woodacre, California?

Spirit Rock, in Woodacre, Marin County, was co-founded by Kornfield, who had trained as a monk in Thailand under forest master Ajahn Chah after a Peace Corps posting there in the late 1960s.

Which Buddhist teacher, called the 'father of mindfulness', coined the term 'engaged Buddhism'?

Thich Nhat Hanh coined 'engaged Buddhism' in the 1960s; exiled from South Vietnam in 1966 for opposing the war, he returned for a visit in 2005 and died at his root temple in Huế in 2022, aged 95.

Plum Village, founded in 1982 by an exiled Vietnamese Zen master, is in which country?

France took in the exiled founder, who first ran a small community called Sweet Potatoes near Paris and bought farmland in the Dordogne in 1982 once it grew too crowded for retreats.

Which US civil-rights leader nominated the monk Nhất Hạnh for the 1967 Nobel Peace Prize?

Martin Luther King Jr. called him 'an apostle of peace and nonviolence' and broke Nobel protocol by announcing his nomination openly; the committee awarded no peace prize at all that year.

Dōgen founded Eihei-ji, one of the two head temples of which school of Japanese Zen?

Sōtō: Dōgen carried the lineage, known in China as Caodong, back to Japan and in 1244 founded Eihei-ji in what is now Fukui Prefecture; it shares head-temple rank with Sōji-ji.

What is Dōgen's term for "just sitting" meditation with no focus on any particular object?

Shikantaza, 'just sitting', renders a Chinese phrase used by Dōgen's teacher Rujing for objectless 'silent illumination'; Dōgen tied it to his central idea, the oneness of practice and verification.

Legend says Chan's first patriarch cut off his eyelids to stay awake in meditation, and which plant sprouted where they fell?

Tea: in the legend the first tea bushes sprang from his discarded eyelids, and ever after the drink kept Chan students awake through their long hours of sitting.

Which semi-legendary first patriarch of Chan is said to have travelled from India to China?

Bodhidharma: Daruma is the Japanese short form of his name, and the round, limbless daruma dolls are said to recall the arms and legs that withered away during his long years of wall-gazing.

The Mahasi Sayadaw method fixes attention on the rising and falling of which body part?

The abdomen: Mahasi Sayadaw told newcomers to start with its rising and falling because that movement is the simpler and easier one to follow, and to come back to it whenever nothing else needed attention.

S. N. Goenka's centres introduce newcomers to Vipassana in free residential courses lasting how many days?

10 days: the standard Goenka course runs ten days of 'noble silence'; food, lodging and teaching cost nothing, and the centres run on donations from people who have completed a course.

Businessman S. N. Goenka first sought a meditation teacher in 1955 to relieve what?

Severe migraines, which doctors could treat only with morphine, sent him to U Ba Khin; the teacher at first refused, saying that coming for a cure devalued the technique, then trained him for 14 years.

Legend has Chan's first patriarch gazing at a wall for nine years at which Chinese temple?

Shaolin Temple, near Luoyang, is where the tale sets his nine silent years; later legend also credited him with training its monks, the root of the temple's fame for martial arts.

Which Vajrayana practice visualises a Buddha or yidam and then dissolves the image into emptiness?

Deity yoga: the meditator pictures a chosen Buddha or yidam, a personal guardian deity, as 'empty yet apparent' like a rainbow, dissolves the image back into emptiness, and repeats the cycle until it holds steady.

Kasina meditation, gazing at coloured discs described in the Pali manual Visuddhimagga, belongs to which Buddhist tradition?

Theravada: the kasinas are among the forty meditation subjects Buddhaghosa sets out in the Visuddhimagga; the meditator stares at the disc until its image can be held in the mind as clearly as it is seen.

Which 16th-century Spanish saint wrote the Spiritual Exercises, a retreat of about thirty days of guided meditations?

Ignatius of Loyola sketched the Exercises in 1522 while living as a beggar at Manresa, where he prayed for hours each day in a cave outside the town; he later founded the Jesuits.

In Tibetan Buddhist tonglen practice, what does the meditator visualise breathing in?

Others' suffering is taken in with each in-breath and relief sent out with each out-breath, deliberately reversing the usual instinct to avoid pain and seek pleasure; the practice is also known as 'sending and taking'.

Dhikr, the Islamic practice of repeatedly reciting God's names, literally means what?

Remembrance: dhikr answers the Qur'an's call to 'remember God with much remembrance'; Sufi orders built ceremonies around repeating his names, counted on the fingers or on prayer beads.

Centering Prayer was developed in the 20th century by three monks of which Catholic order?

Trappist: William Meninger, Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating of St Joseph's Abbey took the name from a fellow monk of the order, Thomas Merton, who wrote of prayer 'centered entirely on the presence of God'.

In Guigo II's ladder of lectio divina, what follows reading, meditation and prayer?

Contemplation is the top rung of the 12th-century Carthusian's ladder: reading, he wrote, puts food in the mouth, meditation chews it, prayer draws out the flavour, and contemplation is the sweetness itself.

Yoga nidra is described as a state of consciousness between what?

Waking and sleeping: in ancient texts the term names the god Vishnu's slumber between cosmic ages, while the guided technique dates only from the 1970s; one version, iRest, was tested with soldiers at Walter Reed.

Kayotsarga, the Jain practice of "giving up the body", involves doing what?

Standing motionless: kayotsarga means 'dismissing the body', and the 17-metre statue of Bahubali at Shravanabelagola shows the pose, with vines climbing his legs because, the story goes, he stood so long.

Which Taoist classic, known for its author's dream of being a butterfly, first records the meditation called 'sitting and forgetting'?

Zhuangzi: in the passage the disciple Yan Hui tells Confucius he has learned to sit and forget everything, the Confucian virtues included, and the master, impressed, asks to become his follower.

Which Canadian singer-songwriter spent much of the 1990s at California's Mount Baldy Zen Center and was ordained a monk?

Leonard Cohen served as personal assistant to his teacher, Joshu Sasaki, and was ordained in 1996 with the name Jikan, 'silence'; he came back down in 1999 and returned to the recording studio.

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika defines trāṭaka as gazing at a small mark until what happens?

Tears flow: the Pradipika says to gaze at a small mark without blinking until the eyes water; it counts trāṭaka among six cleansing techniques and claims the practice cures diseases of the eye.

Vipassana meditators pacing slowly to and fro label each step "lifting", "moving" and what?

Placing: beginners note only two labels a step and add the third later, once that comes easily; at a quick pace a bare 'left, right' is all that is asked, because only a slow step can be split into three.

Kundalini energy, said to lie dormant at the base of the spine, is pictured as what?

A serpent: kundalini, from a Sanskrit word for 'coiled', is pictured as a snake asleep at the base of the spine; postures and breathing exercises are meant to draw it up through six chakras to the head.

Which Eckhart Tolle book did Oprah Winfrey pick for Oprah's Book Club in 2008, hosting ten weekly webcasts on it?

A New Earth shipped 3.5 million copies within four weeks of the pick; eight years earlier Winfrey had recommended Tolle's first book, The Power of Now, in her magazine.

The UN's World Meditation Day falls six months after International Yoga Day, on which turning point of the year?

The December solstice, 21 December, was proclaimed World Meditation Day by the General Assembly on 6 December 2024; it mirrors Yoga Day, which the UN set on the June solstice ten years earlier.

A 2004 study of long-term Buddhist meditators recorded unusually strong, synchronised brain waves of which type?

Gamma waves surged and synchronised while the practitioners meditated and stayed raised after they stopped; the paper's authors included the monk Matthieu Ricard, himself one of the long-term meditators.

Which Oscar-winning actress founded the charity behind MindUP, a mindfulness program for schoolchildren?

Goldie Hawn, who won her Oscar for Cactus Flower, set up the Hawn Foundation in 2003 to bring MindUP's lessons into classrooms.

Mindfulness teacher George Mumford was brought in to steady which NBA team after its star left for baseball in 1993?

Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson, a long-time practitioner himself, wanted a teacher his players would trust once Michael Jordan had gone. Mumford went on to work with many of Jackson's title-winning teams.

Engineer Chade-Meng Tan created the mindfulness course Search Inside Yourself for staff at which technology company?

Google gave Tan the official job title "Jolly Good Fellow", and his in-house classes grew into a bestselling book of the same name.

Which food do newcomers taste and eat with full attention in a famous exercise from the MBSR program?

A raisin is tasted and eaten as mindfully as possible in the exercise, which the MBSR program introduced and which is often a newcomer's first taste of the practice.

Harvard's Matthew Killingsworth studied mind-wandering by pinging volunteers at random through an app on which device?

An iPhone app asked people at random times what they were doing and how they felt. Minds wandered far more in daily life than in the lab, and people were less happy when they did.

Which 19th-century New England writer does the founder of MBSR name as a forerunner of the interest in mindfulness?

Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden, is cited as a predecessor along with Emerson and Whitman, for writing in the 1840s about the cost of an inattentive mind.

Which streaming service made the 2021 animated docuseries Headspace Guide to Meditation with the mindfulness app?

Netflix released the eight-episode series on New Year's Day 2021, each animated instalment running about twenty minutes.

Which ancient Greek school of philosophy, founded by Zeno of Citium, included practices resembling mindfulness?

Stoicism prized prosoche, or attention, a discipline Epictetus addresses in his Discourses and that Seneca and Marcus Aurelius also describe.

In Buddhist teaching, 'right mindfulness' is the seventh element of which set of practices leading to liberation?

The Noble Eightfold Path places right mindfulness after right effort, and describes it as a quality that guards or watches over the mind.

Which Harvard psychologist, the first woman tenured in her department, is nicknamed the 'mother of mindfulness'?

Ellen Langer earned the nickname with a 1989 book arguing the idea could be applied to business, education, science and art; she had won tenure in 1981.

Shunryu Suzuki's 1970 book popularised which Zen attitude of openness, also a founding principle of the MBSR course?

Beginner's mind, shoshin in Japanese, means meeting a subject without preconceptions, as a novice would, however advanced the student has become.

Which brain system, most active during daydreaming and mind-wandering, shows reduced activity during meditation?

Default mode network activity involves thinking about oneself, the past and the future, so quieting it fits the practice's aim of staying with the present moment.

Which psychologist made mindfulness the core skill of DBT, a therapy first proven for borderline personality disorder?

Marsha Linehan, herself a Zen teacher, called the skills psychological and behavioral translations of Eastern meditation practices.

Which mindfulness-based treatment did psychologist Steven Hayes develop around 1982 to build psychological flexibility?

Acceptance and commitment therapy is said aloud as "act"; Hayes first called his approach comprehensive distancing.

Which founder of the Pali Text Society first translated the word sati as 'mindfulness' in 1881?

T. W. Rhys Davids chose the word for 'right mindfulness' in a volume of translated suttas, glossing it as the active, watchful mind.

Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist of meditation, founded the Center for Healthy Minds at which US university?

Wisconsin–Madison has been his base since 1984, and his lab there is known for studying the neurological effects of meditation.

Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, author of the bestselling guide Mindfulness in Plain English, is a monk from which country?

Sri Lanka is Gunaratana's homeland; he moved to the United States in 1968 and is founding abbot of the Bhavana Society, a monastery and retreat centre in West Virginia.

Which Ohio congressman, later a 2020 presidential hopeful, wrote the 2012 book A Mindful Nation?

Tim Ryan served two decades in the House, and his book argues for the practice of mindfulness in both private and public life.

Which 2014 bestseller did ABC newsman Dan Harris write about squaring meditation with a competitive career in TV news?

10% Happier topped the New York Times bestseller list and gave its name to the podcast Harris later left ABC News to focus on.

In dialectical behavior therapy, what name is given to the balanced state that blends reason with emotion?

Wise mind is the synthesis of the rational and the emotional, and the therapy's six mindfulness skills are meant to bring clients closer to it.