重读并分享之前写的一篇文章：
念，即心在今下；把时间花在美好的当下事物上。
此文为TIME杂志2014年2月刊封面文章，核心思想即：活在当下。
今天花了较长时间阅读，并进行修订编排，这也是一种正念mindfulness. 认真阅读，你会有所收获。
原文：Kate Pickert
翻译：鲁强
修订：Alex’s Liwu
正念减压、正念禅修在西方大热已经有一段时间，而把正念与商业，与创新，与领导力联系起来，是这几年的事。值得注意的是，乔布斯作为这种东方文化的私淑弟子，在这其中，起到了一个不无关键的助推作用。
正念作为对mindful的回译，其实不准确，“念”（心在今下）字本身就是mindful最好的写照。“有意识地觉察、活在当下、不带评判”都寓意这一个简单的汉字当中，让我们无言地惊叹于老祖宗的智慧。
正念是一个汇东西方文化为一体，有深刻哲学、美学、伦理学底蕴的神奇概念，细细体味，背后有物理之大真，有人情之大善，更有天地之大美。生命的每一刻其实都是大片，可惜大多数观众都不在场。这里，且让我们一起凝神屏息，静待莲花徐徐开放的那一瞬吧。（肖知兴）
The Mindful Revolution正念革命
The raisins sitting in my sweaty palm are getting stickier by the minute. They don’t look particularly appealing, but when instructed by my teacher, I take one in my fingers and examine it. I notice that the raisin’s skin glistens. Looking closer, I see a small indentation where it once hung from the vine. Eventually, I place the raisin in my mouth and roll the wrinkly little shape over and over with my tongue, feeling its texture. After a while, I push it up against my teeth and slice it open. Then, finally, I chew–very slowly.
我汗津津的手掌中放着几颗葡萄干，时间一分一秒过去，它们变得越来越粘软。这些葡萄干看上去并不怎么美味诱人，不过，根据我老师的指示，我拿起一颗葡萄干细细地看。我注意到葡萄干的皮色的确光泽诱人。再细细看来，我看见了新鲜葡萄从树上摘下时留下的凹痕。然后我拿起葡萄干放进嘴里，用舌头感受着它别致的纹理。之后，我把葡萄干顶到齿间，撕裂它的外皮，再慢慢地咀嚼。
I’m eating a raisin. But for the first time in my life, I’m doing it differently. I’m doing it mindfully. This whole experience might seem silly, but we’re in the midst of a popular obsession with mindfulness as the secret to health and happiness–and a growing body of evidence suggests it has clear benefits.
我其实就是在吃一颗葡萄干，但这是我有生以来第一次以这么独特的方式吃。我是用正念的方式在吃。这个过程看上去貌似匪夷所思，但这实际上就是人们现在正疯狂着迷的正念的一种方法。
The class I’m taking is part of a curriculum called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) developed in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn, an MIT-educated scientist. There are nearly 1,000 certified MBSR instructors teaching mindfulness techniques (including meditation), and they are in nearly every state and more than 30 countries.
正念被认为是通往健康与幸福的秘诀，一系列的证据表明，正念拥有明显的效果。我上的这门课程是由麻省理工学院毕业的科学家卡巴金在1979年开发的正念减压课程的一部分。到目前为止，已经有将近1000名拥有证书的正念减压的教师在美国的每一个州以及世界上30多个国家教授正念的技巧（其中也包括禅修）。
The raisin exercise reminds us how hard it has become to think about just one thing at a time. Technology has made it easier than ever to fracture attention into smaller and smaller bits. We answer a colleague’s questions from the stands at a child’s soccer game; we pay the bills while watching TV; we order groceries while stuck in traffic. In a time when no one seems to have enough time, our devices allow us to be many places at once–but at the cost of being unable to fully inhabit the place where we actually want to be.
吃葡萄干的练习让我们意识到，专心致志于一件事情的难度有多大。技术的发展越来越容易让人们不断地分散注意力。我们可以在观看孩子足球赛的看台上回复同事工作上的问题，我们可以边看电视边支付我们的账单，我们在碰上堵车的时候还可以网购一把。在这么一个人人都时间紧迫的时代，我们身边的设备能保证我们处理各处的问题，但问题却在于我们没法全身心地呆在我们想呆的地方。 （深有同感！）
Mindfulness says we can do better. At one level, the techniques associated with the philosophy are intended to help practitioners quiet a busy mind, becoming more aware of the present moment and less caught up in what happened earlier or what’s to come. Many cognitive therapists commend it to patients as a way to help cope with anxiety and depression. More broadly, it’s seen as a means to deal with stress.
正念为我们提供了一个解决之道。正念技巧结合了其特有的理念来帮助人们平复繁杂的心绪，更专心于当时当地的事情，撇开过去的事情和即将发生的事情。很多认知心理学家把这种方法推荐给病人来对抗焦虑与抑郁，更广泛地说，这种方法被看作是对抗压力的良方。
But to view mindfulness simply as the latest self-help fad（时尚） underplays its potency and misses the point of why it is gaining acceptance with those who might otherwise dismiss mental training techniques closely tied to meditation–Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, FORTUNE 500 titans, Pentagon chiefs and more.但如果仅仅把正念视作一种自我疗治的新潮流，那就低估了它的效果，同时也无法解释为什么正念赢得了那些排斥与禅修相关联的一系列精神训练技巧的人士，这些人包括硅谷的企业家、财富500强的富商巨贾、美国国防部的高级官员等等。
If distraction is the pre-eminent condition of our age, then mindfulness, in the eyes of its enthusiasts, is the most logical response. Its strength lies in its universality. Though meditation is considered an essential means to achieving mindfulness, the ultimate goal is simply to give your attention fully to what you’re doing. One can work mindfully, parent mindfully and learn mindfully. One can exercise and even eat mindfully. The banking giant Chase now advises customers on how to spend mindfully.
如果分散注意力是我们这个时代的显著特点，那么正念在其热忱的信奉者眼中就是对其最为理性的回应。它的强项在于它的广泛适用，尽管禅修是达到正念的必要途径，但正念的最终目标是让你的注意力完全集中在你正在处理的事情上。人们可以通过正念集中精力进行工作、陪伴孩子和学习，人们通过练习也可以精力集中地吃饭，银行巨头摩根大通甚至建议客户通过正念来进行消费活动。
There are no signs that the forces splitting our attention into ever smaller slices will abate. To the contrary, they’re getting stronger. (Now arriving: smart watches and eyeglasses that will constantly beam notifications onto the periphery of our vision.) Already, many devotees see mindfulness as an indispensable tool for coping–both emotionally and practically–with the daily onslaught. The ability to focus for a few minutes on a single raisin isn’t silly if the skills it requires are the keys to surviving and succeeding in the 21st century.
从现今的情况看，这种不断分散我们注意力的力量并没有消减的趋势，相反变得越来越强大（最新的智能手表和智能眼镜会把消息源源不断发到我们的视野之内）。很多正念的信奉者把它视作不管是从精神上还是从实践上对抗这种日复一日的煎熬的必需之法，这样一来，花几分钟的时间把精力集中在一颗小小的葡萄干上的能力并不显得愚蠢，因为这项技能包含了21世纪的生存与成功之法。
REWIRING YOUR BRAIN 重新构建你的大脑
With Tiny Bits of raisin still stuck in my teeth, I look around at the 15 other people in my MBSR class, which will meet every Monday evening for eight weeks. My classmates cite a wide variety of reasons they have plunked down $350 to learn about meditation and mindfulness. One 20-something blond woman said back-to-back daily work meetings meant she couldn’t find time to pause and reset; she had been prescribed the anti-anxiety drug Klonopin. A mother on maternity leave said “being present” with her infant seemed more important than ever, but she was struggling. One man, a social worker, said he needed help dealing with the stress of working with clients trying to get their lives on track.
一些葡萄干的碎屑还塞在牙缝里，我环顾四周看看这个正念减压课程班上的其他15个同学。我们每周一晚上都会见面，持续8周。我的同学们都有一系列的理由花350美金来学习禅修与正念，一个20多岁的金发女孩说，日复一日的工作开会让她无暇停下来积蓄能量，她以前开了很多抗焦虑的药物克诺平；一个正在休产假的孕妇说，产假期间她本应该与即将出生的孩子好好相处，但是她却陷入了焦虑；一个社区工作人员说，他需要借此来使自己能更好地面对帮助其他人返回生活正轨的工作所带来的压力。
Although I signed up to learn what mindfulness was all about, I had my own stressors I hoped the course might alleviate. As the working parent of a toddler, I found life in my household increasingly hectic. And like so many, I am hyperconnected. I have a personal iPhone and a BlackBerry for work, along with a desktop computer at the office and a laptop and iPad at home. It’s rare that I let an hour go by without looking at a screen.
尽管我加入这个课程的本意是了解正念的一些情况，但是我自身也有一些紧张情绪希望可以通过课程学习来缓解。作为一个有全职工作的学步小孩的母亲，我发现自己的生活也是越来越忙碌，我和许多人一样有各种设备连接各种信息，我有一个个人用的苹果手机和一个工作用的黑莓手机，办公室里有一台台式机，家里还有一台笔记本和一台iPad，让我抽出一个小时不看这些屏幕几乎是不可能的事情。
Powering down the internal urge to keep in constant touch with the outside world is not easy.
想要压制自己与外部世界保持不间断联系的内在需求是一件非常困难的事情。（谁说不是呢？）
At the start of each two-hour MBSR class, our teacher, a slight woman named Paulette Graf, hit two small brass cymbals together to indicate we should begin meditating. During this agonizingly frustrating period, which lasted up to 40 minutes, I would try to focus on my breath as Paulette advised, but I felt constantly bombarded by thoughts about my family, random sounds in the room and even how I would translate each evening’s session into this story.
每次在2个小时的正念减压课开始时，我们的老师，一个叫宝莱特•格拉芙的身材修长的女士会敲一下铜钹，我们就开始长达40分钟的禅修时间。在这恼人的40分钟期间，我试图像宝莱特交代的那样，把精力集中在自己呼吸的节奏上，但我总是被家里的琐事、教室里的声响，还有怎样把自己的经历撰写成新闻稿的一系列想法所干扰。
One evening, we were introduced to mindful walking. In our small meeting room, we formed a circle and paced together. “Feel your heel make contact with the floor, then the ball of your foot,” said Paulette. “One foot, then the other.” Anxious feelings about planning the week ahead and emails in my inbox that might be waiting for replies crept into my head even though my phones were off and tucked away. Mindfulness teachers say this kind of involuntary distraction is normal and that there’s no point in berating ourselves for mentally veering away from the task at hand. Rather, they say, our ability to recognize that our attention has been diverted is what’s important and at the heart of what it means to be mindful.
一天晚上，我们开始学习正念行走。在我们那个小会议室里，我们围成一个圈一起走。“感受你脚跟着地的瞬间，然后再是前脚掌。”宝莱特说道，“先迈一只脚，再迈另一只。”尽管我的手机已经关机放好，但是关于怎么安排下周的工作，关于收件箱里需要回复的邮件等等相关的焦虑情绪却还是悄悄地进入我的思绪当中。老师说这种不自觉的注意力分散属于正常的情况，没有必要因为从手中的任务走神而苛责自己，反倒是我们这种能够意识到自己走神的能力是非常重要的，他们说这正是正念的关键。有一些做法会让人联想到是对“新纪元运动”应对压力的做法的复制。
Some of this may sound like a New Age retread of previous prescriptions for stress.
有一些做法会让人联想到是对“新纪元运动”应对压力的做法的复制。
l 新纪元运动，又称新时代运动，是一种去中心化的社会现象，起源于1970-1980年西方的社会与宗教运动。新纪元运动所涉及的层面极广，涵盖了灵性、神秘学、替代疗法，并吸收世界各个宗教的元素以及环境保护主义。它对于培养精神层面的事物采取了较为折衷且个人化的途径，排拒主流的的观念。另外还有多种名词指的就是新纪元运动，包括自我心灵（self-spirituality）、新心灵（New spirituality）以及身–心–灵（Mind-body-spirit）。
Mindfulness is rooted in Eastern philosophy, specifically Buddhism. But two factors set it apart and give it a practical veneer that is helping propel it into the mainstream. One might be thought of as smart marketing. Kabat-Zinn and other proponents are careful to avoid any talk of spirituality when espousing mindfulness. Instead, they advocate a commonsense approach: think of your attention as a muscle. As with any muscle, it makes sense to exercise it (in this case, with meditation), and like any muscle, it will strengthen from that exercise.
正念根植于东方哲学，受佛教影响最大，但是有两个因素让它独树一帜，并赋予了它实用的外表来让它进入了主流当中。其中一点就是其聪明的营销方式。卡巴金和其他支持者在推荐正念的过程中都很巧妙地规避了关于宗教性的话题。取而代之的是他们采用了一个常识性的方法，那就是把一个人的注意力想象成人身上的肌肉。像肌肉一样，注意力也需要锻炼（以禅修的方法），同样，通过锻炼，注意力就会变得更加强大。
A related and potentially more powerful factor in winning over skeptics is what science is learning about our brains’ ability to adapt and rewire. This phenomenon, known as neuroplasticity, suggests there are concrete and provable benefits to exercising the brain. The science–particularly as it applies to mindfulness–is far from conclusive. But it’s another reason it’s difficult to dismiss mindfulness as fleeting or contrived.
另一个相关的，也许更好地回应质疑声音的因素是，科学研究得出的有关我们大脑的适应性与重组能力的成果。这个现象被称作神经适应性，它表明训练大脑会有确实的、可被证明的成果。这项科学研究被运用在正念的训练上，尽管还没有得出结论性的成果，但这正是正念难以被简单地视作只是流行一时的、人为炒作的方法的另一个原因。
Precisely because of this scientific component, mindfulness is gaining traction with people who might otherwise find mind-body philosophies a tough sell, and it is growing into a sizable industry. An NIH report found that Americans spent some $4 billion on mindfulness-related alternative medicine in 2007, including MBSR. (NIH will release an update of this figure later this year.) There’s a new monthly magazine, Mindful, a stack of best-selling books and a growing number of smartphone apps devoted to the concept.
正是由于这个科学成分吸引了原本觉得身心哲学难以接受的人，并发展成为了一个可观的产业。据美国国家卫生研究院的报告显示，美国人在2007年在正念相关的药物及疗法上面花费将近40亿美元，其中就包括正念减压课程（美国国家卫生研究院会在今年发布的报告中将更新这一数据）。有一本新的月刊《正念》，一系列的畅销书以及越来越多的智能手机应用正在关注这一概念。
For Stuart Silverman, mindfulness has become a way to deal with the 24/7 pace of his job consulting with financial advisers. Silverman receives hundreds of emails and phone calls every day. “I’m nuts about being in touch,” he says. Anxiety in the financial industry reached a high mark in the 2008 meltdown, but even after the crisis began to abate, Silverman found that the high stress level remained. So in 2011, he took a group of his clients on a mindfulness retreat. The group left their smartphones behind and spent four days at a resort in the Catskills, in upstate New York, meditating, participating in group discussions, sitting in silence, practicing yoga and eating meals quietly and mindfully. “For just about everybody there, it was a life-changing experience,” says Silverman.
对于斯图尔特•希尔曼来说，正念已经成为他应对一天24小时、一周7天无间断地为金融咨询师提供咨询工作的一个途径。希尔曼每天会收到成百上千的邮件与电话，“我已经被这些联系我的人逼疯了。”他说。金融行业的焦虑情绪在2008年的金融危机时达到了最高点，之后尽管危机渐渐消退，但希尔曼发现工作上的高度紧张依旧存在，所以在2011年，他带领着一群他的客户来到了一个休养寓所进行正念训练。这群人把自己的智能手机丢在一旁，来到纽约北边卡茨基尔的一个度假区呆了4天。期间他们每天就是禅修、参与小组讨论、静坐、练习瑜伽，并且用正念的方法安静地吃一日三餐。“对于参加那次活动的每一个人来说，那都是具有改变生命意义的经历。”希尔曼说道。
The Catskills program was run by Janice Marturano, a former vice president at General Mills who began a corporate mindfulness initiative there and left the company in 2011 to run an organization she started called the Institute for Mindful Leadership. (About 500 General Mills employees have participated in mindfulness classes since Marturano introduced the concept to the company’s top managers in 2006, and there is a meditation room in every building on the company’s Minneapolis campus.) Marturano, who ran a well-attended mindfulness training session at Davos in 2013 and wrote a book called Finding the Space to Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership, published in January, says most leaders she encounters feel besieged by long work hours and near constant connectivity. For these people, there seems to be no time to zero in on what’s important or plan ahead.
这个卡茨基尔项目是由贾妮思•马图雅诺运营的，她曾经是通用磨坊食品公司的副总裁，曾经在公司内发起了一起正念禅修的倡议。她在2011年离开了公司并成立了一个叫做正念领导力的机构（自从马图雅诺在2006年向公司高层管理人员介绍了这个概念之后，通用磨坊食品公司已经有将近500个员工参与到了正念课程之中，而且在公司位于明尼阿波利斯的厂区的每一幢楼房内都有一间禅修室）。马图雅诺在2013年的达沃斯经济论坛上开展了一个参与度极高的正念训练班，并且在1月份出版了她的新书《寻找领导的空间：一部关于正念领导力的使用指南》。她说道，她认识的领导者大多数受困于极长的工作时间和几乎要随叫随到状况，对于这些人来说，他们无法把精力集中在重要的事情或者有关将来发展大计的事情上去。
There’s evidence they’re correct. Researchers have found that multitasking leads to lower overall productivity. Students and workers who constantly and rapidly switch between tasks have less ability to filter out irrelevant information, and they make more mistakes. And many corporate workers today find it impossible to take breaks. According to a recent survey, more than half of employed American adults check work messages on the weekends and 4 in 10 do so while on vacation. It’s hard to unwind when your boss or employees know you’re just a smartphone away. Says Marturano: “The technology has gone beyond what we are capable of handling.”
有证据表明，他们的做法是不正确的。研究者发现，同时进行多任务的处理会导致全局效率的下降。那些在工作中不断切换任务的学生和工作者，因为不能够剔除无关的信息，会犯更多的错误。实际情况是，很多公司职员发现自己无法从工作中抽身出来休息一下。据最新的调查显示，大部分的美国成年职工在周末的时候会查看工作信息，40%的职员甚至在休假期也会查看。原因是，当你的老板或员工知道，只要通过智能手机就能够轻易联系到你，那么你就很难抽空放松一下。马图雅诺说，“技术的发展已经超出了人们的把控能力”。(Damned True!)
It might seem paradoxical, then, that Silicon Valley has become a hotbed of mindfulness classes and conferences. Wisdom 2.0, an annual mindfulness gathering for tech leaders, started in 2009 with 325 attendees, and organizers expect more than 2,000 at this year’s event, where participants will hear from Kabat-Zinn, along with executives from Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Google, meanwhile, has an in-house mindfulness program called Search Inside Yourself. The seven-week course was started by a Google engineer and is offered four times a year on the company’s Mountain View, Calif., campus. Through the course, thousands of Googlers have learned attention-focusing techniques, including meditation, meant to help them free up mental space for creativity and big thinking. It makes sense in a way. Engineers who write code often talk about “being in the zone”（全神贯注地） the same way a successful athlete can be, which mindfulness teachers say is the epitome of being present and paying attention. (Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said his meditation practice was directly responsible for his ability to concentrate and ignore distractions.) Of course, much of that world-class engineering continues to go into gadgets and software that will only ratchet up our distraction level.
这看上去会显得比较矛盾，硅谷反倒成为了正念课程和正念会面的温床。每年一度的正念大会“智慧2.0时代”开始于2009年，当时有325位参加者，今年有望达到多于2000人的参加人次,在大会上，与会者会听到卡巴金和Twitter、Instagram和Facebook公司总裁的分享。同时，谷歌公司也有一个内部的正念课程叫做“搜寻内在的自己”。这项长达7周的课程是由谷歌的一个工程师率先提出，每年会举办4次，地点在公司位于加州的 Mountain View园区。通过这项课程，几千位谷歌员工学习到了集中注意力的技术——这其中就包括禅修——来帮助他们拓展思维空间，以激发创意和大思维。这一点是有理可循的，工程师在编程的时候经常会像成功的运动员一样，处于一种不受外界打扰的专注状态，这一点在正念教师的眼中就是注意当前、集中思想的关键（苹果公司的联合创始人史蒂夫•乔布斯说过他的禅修训练正是他集中注意力、排除干扰的直接方法。）。当然，很多他的世界级的程序设计最终成为了我们日常生活中各种应用程序，而这些却大大加深了分散我们注意力的程度。
But lately there’s been some progress in tapping technology for solutions too. There are hundreds of mindfulness and meditation apps available from iTunes, including one called Headspace, offered by a company of the same name led by Andy Puddicombe, a former Buddhist monk. Puddicombe, 40, co-founded Headspace in the U.K. in 2010 and opened a new office in Los Angeles in 2013 after attracting venture capital. The company offers free content through an app and sells subscriptions to a series of web videos, billed as a “gym membership for the mind,” that are narrated by Puddicombe and explain the tenets of mindfulness and how to meditate.
但是，最近也出现了一些运用技术寻找解决方法的新进展。在苹果的网上音乐商店里，有上千种关于正念禅修的应用程序。其中有一个应用叫做“头脑空间”，是由一家由安迪•普迪科姆领导的同名公司开发的。40岁的普迪科姆曾经是一个佛教僧人，在2010年，他在英国联合创立了头脑空间公司，并且在 2013年获得投资之后在洛杉矶开设了公司新的办公室。公司通过应用程序免费提供内容，并将内容卖给制作网络视频的公司，制作了一个被普迪科姆叫做“精神健身房”的系列，这些视频说明正念的要点以及禅修的方法。
“There’s nothing bad or harmful about the smartphone if we have the awareness of how to use it in the right way,” says Puddicombe. “It’s unplugging by plugging in.”
“如果我们能够有意识地以正确的方法利用智能手机，那么它就不会给我们造成负面的影响和伤害。”普迪科姆说道，“你用它实际上是为了摆脱它。”
THE SCIENCE OF DESTRESSING 减压的科学
Jon Kabat-Zinn, the father of MBSR, doesn’t look like the kind of person to be selling meditation and mindfulness to America’s fast-paced, stressed-out masses. When I met him at a mindfulness conference in April, he was dressed in corduroys, a button-down shirt and a blazer, with wire-rimmed glasses and a healthy head of thick gray hair. He looked more like the professor he trained to become than the mindfulness guru he is.
正念减压课程的创始人乔•卡巴金看上去并不像是一个能把禅修与正念推广到快生活节奏、压力过剩的美国大众中的人。我4月份第一次在一次正念会面上见到他时，他穿了一条灯芯绒裤子、一件休闲衬衫和一件运动衫，戴着金属框眼镜，长着一头浓密健康的灰色头发。他看上去更像是他本来的教授身份，而不像一个正念的专家。
But ultimately, a professor may prove more valuable than a guru in spreading the word on mindfulness. The son of an immunologist and an artist, Kabat-Zinn, now 69, was earning a doctorate in molecular biology at MIT in the early 1970s when he attended a lecture about meditation given by a Zen master. “It was very moving. I started meditating that day,” he says. “And the more I meditated, the more I felt like there was something else missing that science could say in terms of, like, how we live as human beings.”
但是总的来说，教授的身份应该比一个推广正念概念的专家更有价值。现年69岁的卡巴金是一个免疫学者和一个艺术家的孩子。1970年代早期，他在麻省理工学院攻读分子生物学的博士学位的时候，参加了一场由禅学大师讲授禅修的讲座。“这场讲座非常发人深省，”他说道，“我越是禅修，就越是强烈地感受到科学所不能定义的领域，就像我们如何以人类特有的方式生活。
By 1979, Kabat-Zinn had earned his Ph.D. and was working at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center studying muscle development and teaching anatomy and cell biology to medical students. On a meditation retreat that year, he had a revelation. What if he could use Buddhism-based meditation to help patients cope with conditions like chronic pain? Even if he couldn’t alleviate their symptoms, Kabat-Zinn speculated that mindfulness training might help patients refocus their attention so they could change their response to pain and thereby reduce their overall suffering.
”到了1979年，卡巴金拿到了他的博士学位，并且在马萨诸塞大学医学中心学习肌肉发育，同时向医学生教授解剖学和细胞生物学。在那年的密集禅修期间，他得到了一个启发，他想到他是否能用以佛教思想为基础的禅修方法来帮助病人应对像慢性病痛这样的病状。即使他不能缓解症状，但他发现正念训练能够帮助病人转移注意力，这样他们就会以其他的方式应对病痛，并且借此减轻他们的痛苦。
With three physicians, Kabat-Zinn opened a stress-reduction clinic at UMass based on meditation and mindfulness. “It was just a little pilot on zero dollars,” he says.
Almost immediately, some of the clinic’s patients reported that their pain levels diminished. For others, the pain remained the same, but the mindfulness training made them better able to handle the stress of living with illness. They were able to separate their day-to-day experiences from their identity as pain patients. “That’s what you most hope for,” says Kabat-Zinn, “not that you can cure all diseases, but you could help people live in a way that didn’t erode their quality of life beyond a certain point.” Eventually Kabat-Zinn’s program was absorbed into the UMass department of medicine and became the MBSR curriculum now used by hundreds of teachers across the country.
卡巴金和其他三位医生一起在在马萨诸塞大学建立了基于正念禅修的一个减压诊所。“那仅仅是一次无成本的尝试。”他说道。很快就有诊所的病人反应他们的疼痛感减轻了。对其他一些病人而言，疼痛感依旧没有变化，但正念训练能让他们更好地应对带着疾病过活所带来的压力。他们能够把他们的日常生活和他们的病人身份区分开来。“这是你最希望得到的结果，”卡巴金说道，“不是你能够治好所有的疾病，而是你能够帮助他们把生活质量保持在较好的条件下。”最终卡巴金的项目被吸纳进了马萨诸塞大学的医学部，进而成为了现今全国各地上千名教师教授的正念减压课程。
In the years since, scientists have been able to prove that meditation and rigorous mindfulness training can lower cortisol levels and blood pressure, increase immune response and possibly even affect gene expression. Scientific study is also showing that meditation can have an impact on the structure of the brain itself. Building on the discovery that brains can change based on experiences and are not, as previously believed, static masses that are set by the time a person reaches adulthood, a growing field of neuroscientists are now studying whether meditation–and the mindfulness that results from it–can counteract what happens to our minds because of stress, trauma and constant distraction. The research has fueled the rapid growth of MBSR and other mindfulness programs inside corporations and public institutions.
那之后许多年，科学家们已经证明，禅修与积极的正念训练能够降低皮质醇水平和血压，提升免疫反应，甚至可能会影响基因表现。科学研究同样表明，禅修能够影响大脑结构本身。基于大脑结构能随着经历而改变的发现，而不是先前所认为的，人一旦成年之后大脑的结构就固定不变了，越来越多的神经学家正在研究禅修以及随之产生的正念是否能够抵消压力、创伤以及注意力不断分散给大脑造成的影响。这项研究进一步加速了企业和公共机构内部关于正念课程项目的建设。
“There is a swath of our culture who is not going to listen to someone in monks’ robes, but they are paying attention to scientific evidence,” says Richard J. Davidson, founder and chair of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Davidson and a group of co-authors published a paper in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2004 that used electroencephalography to show that Buddhist monks who had logged at least 10,000 hours of meditation time had brains with more functional connectivity than novice meditators. The monks also had more gamma-wave activity, indicating high states of consciousness.
“我们的文化中有一个特点，那就是不会去听从僧侣的话，但是他们却非常关注科学证据。”理查德•J•戴维森说道。他是位于威斯康辛大学麦迪逊校区的魏斯曼中心下面的健康大脑观察中心的创始人与主席。戴维森和他的几个联合作者在2004在声望很高的《美国国家科学院报告》上发表了一篇文章。他们运用脑电图学得出的结论是，那些用了10000个小时以上用来禅修的佛教徒的大脑比普通的禅修者的大脑要有更好的功能连通性。同时，这些僧人的脑中有更多的伽马波活动，这显示他们处于意识的更高层次。
Of course, most people will never meditate at the level of a monk. But neuroscientists have shown that even far less experienced meditators may have more capacity for working memory and decreases in mind-wandering.
当然，大部分的人不会花那么多时间去禅修，但是，神经科学家发现即使禅修的时间不那么长，这些禅修者在工作中同样具有更好的记忆并且减少思维的游走。
Many of the studies on mindfulness and meditation have been funded by individual private donors and have not met the highest scientific standards, leading the NIH to declare in 2007 that future research had to be “more rigorous.” Perhaps to this end, the NIH has funded some 50 clinical trials in the past five years examining the effects of mindfulness on health, with about half pertaining to Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR curriculum alone. The NIH trials completed or now under way include studies on how MBSR affects everything from social-anxiety disorder to the body’s immune response to human papilloma virus to cancer-related fatigue. Altogether, in 2003, 52 papers were published in scientific journals on the subject of mindfulness; by 2012, that number had jumped to 477.
当时，关于正念与禅修的很多研究都是由个人提供研究资金的而且研究并没有达到高端科学领域。这导致2007年美国国家卫生研究院表示，未来这方面的研究要更加严格地进行。也许是为了达到这个目的，在过去5年中，美国国家卫生研究院资助了50多个有关正念对健康影响的临床研究项目，其中将近一半的项目专门研究卡巴金的正念减压课程。美国国家卫生研究院已经完成和正在进行的研究包括了对正念减压课程方方面面作用的研究，包括其对社会焦虑失衡的影响、对身体免疫反应的影响、对乳头瘤病毒的影响以及对癌症相关的疲劳感的影响。在2003年，总共有52篇以正念为题的文章发表在科学期刊上，到2012年，数量已经攀升到477篇。
MINDFULNESS GOES MAINSTREAM 正念走向主流
Tim Ryan, a democratic Congressman from Ohio, is among those pushing to use more federal funds for mindfulness research. Stressed and exhausted, Ryan attended a mindfulness retreat led by Kabat-Zinn in 2008 shortly after the election. Ryan turned over his two BlackBerrys and ended the experience with a 36-hour period of silence. “My mind got so quiet, and I had the experience of my mind and my body actually being in the same place at the same time, synchronized,” says Ryan. “I went up to Jon and said, ‘Oh, man, we need to study this–get it into our schools, our health care system.’”
俄亥俄州的民主党众议员蒂姆•瑞恩是很多支持用更多的联邦财政资金来进行正念相关研究的人士之一。深感压力巨大、疲惫不堪的瑞恩在2008年的总统选举之后参加了由卡巴金领导的一个正念训练营。瑞恩当时关掉了他的两个黑莓手机，经过36个小时的安静完成了那次训练。“我的整个大脑都安静下来了，我第一次感觉到我的身体和我的大脑形成同步的节奏，”瑞恩说，“我跟乔说‘哦，伙计，我们必须好好研究这个，并把它带进学校，带进医疗机构’。”
In the years since, the Congressman has become a rock star among mindfulness evangelists. His book A Mindful Nation was published in 2012, and Mindful, launched in May 2013, put Ryan on the cover of its second issue after he secured a $1 million federal grant to teach mindfulness in schools in his home district. Ryan has hosted meditation sessions and a mindfulness lecture series on Capitol Hill for House members and their staffs. The effort, says Ryan, is all about “little candles getting lit under the Capitol dome.”
之后数年间，这位众议员已经成为了推广正念项目的活跃分子。他的两本书《正念国家》已经在2012年出版，《正念》杂志在2013年5月发行。他自己的照片成为了《正念》第二版的封面，因为他获得了100万美元的联邦财政资金用来在当地选区的学校教授正念课程。瑞恩已经在国会山为议员们和他们的职员召开了禅修见面会和正念课程系列讲座。瑞恩说，所有这些努力都是为了“在国会大厦的穹顶下点起希望的星星之火”。
Elizabeth Stanley, an associate professor at Georgetown, is trying to do the same for those in uniform. Stanley was an Army intelligence officer deployed to the Balkans in the early 1990s. After she left active duty, Stanley enrolled in a doctoral program at Harvard and pursued an MBA at MIT–at the same time–planning a career studying national-security issues.
乔治城大学的副教授伊丽莎白•斯坦利正试图为军队的士兵争取同样的项目。斯坦利早先在1990年代是被派驻在巴尔干半岛的军队情报官员。她退伍之后同时在哈佛攻读博士学位，并在麻省理工学院攻读工商管理学硕士学位，为自己研究国家安全的职业生涯做筹划。
But as the demands of two graduate programs combined with leftover stress from her time deployed, Stanley found herself unable to cope. “I realized my body and nervous system were constantly stuck on high,” she says. She underwent therapy and started practicing yoga and mindful meditation, eventually completing both of her degree programs as well.
但当两个学位的压力加上她服役时遗留下来的压力结合起来，斯坦利发现自己没有能力应对如此强大的压力。“我发现自己的身体状况与神经系统一直处于紧张的状态，”她说，她开始进行治疗，练习瑜伽和正念禅修，最终完成了她两个学位的学业。
“On a long retreat in 2004, I realized I wanted to pull these two sides of me together and find a way to share these techniques with men and women in uniform,” Stanley says. She teamed up with Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist at the University of Miami who studies attention, and together they launched a pilot study with private funding that investigated whether a mindfulness program could make Marines more resilient in stressful combat situations. The findings were so promising, according to Jha, that the Department of Defense awarded them two $1 million grants to investigate further, using an MBSR-based curriculum Stanley developed called Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training. Stanley has been involved in two additional mindfulness studies with Marines since, and Jha has been awarded $3.4 million more in federal grants to study how mindfulness training affects stress among other populations, including undergraduates facing exams and accountants slogging through tax season.
“在2004年一次正念训练期间，我意识到，我想要把我的这两个方面结合起来并且找到一个方式把这些技巧与军队里的其他人分享。”斯坦利说道。她与一个在迈阿密大学研究注意力相关方面的神经科学家阿米希•杰哈一起合作，运用私人的资助发起了一项试点研究，研究内容是，是否正念项目能够帮助海军士兵在高压的作战条件下更加的灵活机动。据杰哈说，他们取得了非常正面的结论，所以国防部奖励她们100万美元的资助金让她们继续深入研究。基于正念减压的课程，斯坦利发明了一套“正念基础思维适应性训练法”。自那之后，斯坦利又进行了另外两项与海军士兵相关的正念项目研究。杰哈再次获得了340万美元的联邦财政资助来研究正念训练对其他在压力之下的人群的影响，包括考试之前本科学生群体以及税务结算季节的会计师群体。
Educators are turning to mindfulness with increasing frequency–perhaps a good thing, considering how digital technology is splitting kids’ attention spans too. (The average American teen sends and receives more than 3,000 text messages a month.) A Bay Area–based program called Mindful Schools offers online mindfulness training to teachers, instructing them in how to equip children to concentrate in classrooms and deal with stress. Launched in 2010, the group has reached more than 300,000 pupils, and educators in 43 countries and 48 states have taken its courses online.
教育家也更加频繁地转向正念训练。考虑到数码科技也正在不断地分散孩子们的注意力，这应该是一件好事（美国青少年平均每月收发超过3000条短信。）一个基于旧金山湾地区的叫做正念学校的项目给教师们提供了网上的正念训练课程，教授他们如何让学生们在课堂上精力集中以及如何应对压力。从2010年项目发起以来，已经有超过30万的学生以及来自43个国家和48个州的教育者已经参加了这个网上课程。
“It was always my intention that mindfulness move into the mainstream,” says Kabat-Zinn, whose MBSR bible, Full Catastrophe Living, first published in 1990, was just reissued. Lately, the professor has also been spreading the gospel abroad. On a November trip to Beijing, he helped lead a mindfulness retreat for about 250 Chinese students, monks and scientists. “This is something that people are now finding compelling in many countries and many cultures, and the reason is the science,” he says.
“我一直希望的就是正念能够进入主流。”卡巴金说道。他的关于正念减压课程的指导书《多舛的人生》发行于1990年，最近又再版了。最近，这位教授还在不断地向国外传播这个理念。在去年11月份去北京的行程中，他为将近250名中国学生、僧侣和科学家组织了一次正念训练营。“在很多国家和文化环境中，人们已经发现了它不可阻挡的趋势，原因就在于它的科学依据。”他说道。
LISTENING TO LIFE 听从生命本身
The MBSR class I took consisted of 21 hours of class time, but there was homework. One week, we were assigned to eat a snack mindfully and “remember to inhale/exhale regularly (and with awareness!),” according to a handout. Since we were New Yorkers, another week’s assignment was to count fellow passengers on a subway train. One student in my class said he had a mindfulness breakthrough when he stopped listening to music and playing games on his phone while riding to work. Instead, he observed the people around him, which he said helped him be more present when he arrived at his office.
我参加的正念减压课程总共有21课时，但除此之外还有课外作业。每周我们需要根据指示用正念的方法吃零食，并且记着有意识的、有节奏地呼吸。因为我们身处纽约，另一个任务就是数地铁上乘客的数量。班上的一个同学说他已经用正念的方法取得了突破。他上班的路上已经不再用手机听歌或者玩游戏了，而是观察他身边的人，这让他到达办公室的时候精神更好。
After eight weeks, we gathered one Saturday for a final exercise, a five-hour retreat. We brought our lunches, and after meditating and doing yoga, we ate together silently in a second-floor room overlooking a park. After the meal, Paulette led us into the park and told us to walk around for 30 minutes in a meditation practice known as aimless wandering. No phones and no talking. Just be present, she said.
八周之后的一个周六，我们聚在一起做最后的一次训练，那是一次长达5个小时的正念训练。我们都带了自己的午饭，做完禅修和瑜伽之后，我们在二楼一间会议室一边安静地吃饭，一边鸟瞰公园的景象。午饭之后，宝莱特领着我们走到公园里，让我们到处走30分钟作为禅修训练，也就是无目的的闲逛。不能打电话也不能互相说话，仅仅感受处在当时当地的感觉，她说道。
As I looked across a vast lawn, I easily spotted my fellow MBSR students. They looked like zombies weaving and wandering alone through groups of friends and families lounging on picnic blankets or talking and barbecuing. I saw a group of 20-something men playing Frisbee, young kids riding bikes and a pair of women tanning in the sun.
我的视线穿过巨大的草坪清楚地看到了我正念减压班上的同学们，他们像僵尸一样独自穿梭游荡在一群群躺在野餐布上相互交谈或者正在烤肉的朋友们或者家人们中间。我看到一群20多岁的小伙子在玩飞盘，小孩子们在骑自行车，两个女人正在晒太阳。
I had lived close to this park for three years and spent hundreds of hours exploring it, but what struck me as different on the day of the retreat were the sounds. I noticed the clap, clap of a jogger’s sneakers going by on a paved path. I saw a group playing volleyball on the lawn, and for the first time, I heard the game. The ball thudded when it hit the grass and whapped when it was being served. The players grunted when they made contact. Thud, whap, grunt. Whap, whap, thud. I heard a soft jingling, and I knew just what it was. A dog with metal ID tags came up behind me and passed by. Jingle, jingle.
我已经在这个公园附近住了3年，花了上千个小时在公园里四下走动观望，但训练营那天的情形却有不同，这让我十分惊讶，不同就在于声音。我听到了慢跑的人从铺砖的路上跑过时运动鞋发出的啪嗒、啪嗒的声音。我看见一群人正在草坪上打排球。这也是我第一次听到比赛的情况。球落在草地上砰地一声，发球时发出的哐的一声。选手们咕哝着相互交流。落地声、发球声、咕哝声。哐、哐、砰。我听到一阵清脆的金属撞击声，我立刻就知道那是什么声音了。一条戴着金属身份标签的狗从我身后走来经过。叮当，叮当。
After the prescribed half hour, we returned to our meeting room with Paulette. We had a brief group discussion about how we could continue our mindfulness training through other classes, and then we folded our chairs and put them away in a closet. Silently, we eased down a set of stairs and out the front door. I made it all the way home before I turned on my phones.
规定的半小时过去之后我们回到宝莱特所在的会议室，我们做了一个关于怎么能够通过其他课程继续正念训练的小组讨论之后，我们收起了椅子，放进了壁橱里。我们轻轻地走下楼梯，出了前门。我一直到家后才打开了手机。
In the months since, I haven’t meditated much, yet the course has had a small–but profound–impact on my life. I’ve started wearing a watch, which has cut in half the number of times a day I look at my iPhone and risk getting sucked into checking email or the web. On a tip from one of my MBSR classmates, when I’m at a restaurant and a dining companion gets up to take a call or use the bathroom, I now resist the urge to read the news or check Facebook on my phone. Instead, I usually just sit and watch the people around me. And when I walk outside, I find myself smelling the air and listening to the soundtrack of the city. The notes and rhythms were always there, of course. But these days they seem richer and more important.
课程结束之后的几个月来，我并没有做太多的禅修，但是这个课程确实使我受到了非常微妙但又非常巨大的影响。我戴了手表，这样能让我每天看苹果手机的次数减半，也减少了被迫查邮箱和搜网页的次数。我听从了一个我正念减压班上同学的意见，就是当我在餐厅吃饭，同伴起身去打电话或者上厕所时，我抑制住了在手机上看新闻或者查Facebook主页的冲动。取而代之的是，我经常坐在那儿观察我身边的其他人。当我出门时，我发现自己能够闻到空气中的味道，聆听到城市的节奏。当然，这些音节与韵律其实一直都在我们身边。但是，这些时候它们显得更加丰富和重要。
正念禅修5步：
属于基础的禅修，训练在不做任何事情的情况下把思维转向自己的内心，一开始可能不那么容易做到。但是，研究表明这样能缓解压力并且增强专注度。
1. 盘腿坐在座垫上或者正坐在椅子上，背挺直，肩部自然放松，然后深呼吸，可以闭上眼睛。
2. 注意呼吸的节奏。不要刻意改变呼吸的节奏，而要专注感受呼气与吸气的过程。
3. 当脑海中产生其他想法导致走神的时候，意识到走神的状态，并重新把思维带回到关注呼吸的节奏。
4. 不要因为走神而感到挫败，也不要因此懈怠。你的任务仅仅是意识到思维的游走，并重新把思维带回到关注呼吸的节奏。
5. 开始时每天做这个练习10分钟，持续一周。之后，越规律地进行禅修训练，就越能在其他事情上保持专注力。
6. 可伴随禅修正念音乐进行练习。
正念小提示：
1. 戴手表。这样就可以避免用手机看时间，也不会因其他无关信息走神。
2. 不要在床上用手机。等你完全清醒之后再查看各种电子设备。
3. 多亲近自然。尝试徒步旅行，欣赏周边的美景，并且要抑制住一味拍照分享的冲动。
