An intrinsic irony of this perspective on the centrality and unity of awareness — especially when people come to the medical center for training in MBSR with a medical diagnosis and the accompanying sense that there is something wrong with them that needs to be put right — is that in our way of seeing things, they (and we) are already whole, even when we have some kind of problem or disease. And that is why we say to people that from our perspective, as long as you are breathing there is more right with you than wrong with you, no matter what is wrong.
For those participating in MBSR, we systematically pour energy in the form of attention and awareness into what is already right with us, just as an experiment, and see what happens. We are not ignoring what is wrong, just letting the rest of the health-care team take care of that aspect of things, while we attend to those other very basic elements of our experience — often taken totally for granted — such as that we have a body in the first place, that we are breathing, that we can sense the world in various ways, that the mind generates thoughts and emotions seemingly endlessly, that we have the capacity for kindness toward ourselves and others, that we can be patient and trusting. When we bring these dimensions of our being into awareness, life itself becomes the meditation practice.