02.06.2026 The Power of Awareness with Jon Kabat-Zinn This February, Jon Kabat-Zinn is Lion’s Roar’s online resident teacher. As the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and a pioneer of the American mindfulness movement, Jon has spent more than six decades bringing clarity, warmth, and depth to mindfulness as a liberative, human practice to meet the challenges of our times with wisdom and compassion. Each Wednesday this month, Jon is guiding a free live meditation on Zoom, with an additional live talk on Thursday, February 12, where he’ll explore how meditation and wisdom can support us in meeting what he famously calls “the full catastrophe” of life, both individually and collectively. In our first gathering on Wednesday, Jon invited us to pause and remember something essential about meditation practice: “This is not just one more thing you have to squeeze into your day to be a good person, or a good meditator, or a good Buddhist,” he reminded us. “It's a radical act of sanity to stop the flow of doing and drop into being for a moment.” “The real meditation practice,” he reminded us, “is life itself.” If you’d like to practice with Jon live, you can register here for free to gain access to our weekly Wednesday meditations and the February 12 talk. We hope to see you there! Below, you’ll find a three-part conversation series with Jon and Lion’s Roar editor-at-large Melvin McLeod, reflecting on the mindfulness movement past, present, and future. Together, they explore what it means to bring awareness into a world that urgently needs it and how mindfulness can serve as the key to fostering a more compassionate society. These conversations offer a human view of mindfulness — not as a simple trend or technique, but as a liberative practice rooted in awareness, compassion, and community. May they be of benefit.  —Lilly Greenblatt, digital editor, Lion’s Roar The Power of Awareness The founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction, Jon Kabat-Zinn is considered the father of the American mindfulness movement. Here, he talks to editor-at-large Melvin McLeod about the essence of mindfulness and how it offers liberation from limiting, self-imposed narratives. This is the first installment of a three-part series. Mindfulness is an invitation to wake up to what is unfolding in the present moment, including the experience of being embodied. It is pointing to your own miraculous nature in this only moment, located someplace between when you were born and when you’re not going to be around anymore. With every moment and every breath, we have, to a first approximation, an infinite number of opportunities to drop in on ourselves, to be where we actually are, and inhabit or take up residency in awareness itself, rather than being caught up 24-7 in being lost in thought and/or trying to get someplace else, or wanting a “special experience,” without recognizing that this very moment in which you are alive is itself extraordinarily special, even if it looks entirely ordinary. ADVERTISEMENT Why Jon Kabat-Zinn Brought Mindfulness to the Mainstream Jon Kabat-Zinn was a yoga teacher and meditator with a PhD in molecular biology — then he founded mindfulness-based stress reduction and sparked the American mindfulness movement. In this second installment of a three-part conversation, he tells editor-at-large Melvin McLeod about the experiences and insights that shaped his journey. All of a sudden you discover that there’s a hidden but readily accessible dimension called “awareness,” within which experience can be held and known in a way that’s intrinsically and immediately free—though initially not for long, because we drop back into not being so aware and falling more into thinking and emotional reactivity. But then, in any moment, we can realize that and intentionally move back into awareness. Attention and intention working together in a yin-yang kind of synthesis or melding that people begin to recognize and work with as part of their practice. The Mindful Future Mindfulness isn’t just about cultivating personal well-being. In this final installment of a three-part conversation, Jon Kabat-Zinn talks to Melvin McLeod about how mindfulness is the key to fostering a more compassionate, ethical society. There are infinite ways to approach meditation practice, but when you drop into it fully, the first thing you experience—when you learn to rest in and take up residency in awareness — is the direct, nonconceptual experience of interconnectedness and belonging. You are whole, and simultaneously part of a larger whole, nested in an even larger whole, and on and on endlessly. This direct experiencing of interconnectedness and nonseparation naturally evokes compassion and loving-kindness and a deep sense of intrinsic connection to others.