Hong Kong and mindfulness

Hong Kong sits year after year near the top of the world's working-hours league tables; we live small, walk fast, and eat against the clock. If one city most needs to learn how to pause, it is hard not to think of Hong Kong. And in fact, mindfulness has already been quietly putting down roots here.

It began at the universities

Over the past decade and more, local universities have been the driving force behind mindfulness in Hong Kong: research centres brought in MBSR, MBCT and related courses, ran local studies verifying how these methods work in a Chinese society, and trained the city's first generation of mindfulness teachers. From the very beginning, mindfulness landed in Hong Kong with academic rigour attached.

Then into the schools

The more striking recent development is in schools: mindfulness-in-schools programmes — led by local universities and funded by charitable foundations — are bringing the practice into Hong Kong's primary and secondary schools, training teachers to practise first themselves, then carry awareness into the classroom. When a city starts teaching its children to notice their breath and their emotions, this is no longer a niche interest. It is becoming the next generation's basic skill.

One thing still missing: Cantonese

But one gap has been there all along: language. The world's most popular mindfulness apps have no Cantonese; many excellent courses are taught in English. Yet mindfulness is an inward practice — when you are trying to settle and listen to yourself, nothing is closer to home than your mother tongue. Research and experience both tell us the same thing: the mind settles most easily in the language it knows best.

This is the space Mindfulness Asia wants to fill: guided practice in Cantonese, classes in Cantonese, The Pause Journal with a Cantonese voice — from the free practices to the eight-week course, everything in the language Hongkongers know best. This city deserves a mindfulness that speaks its own voice.