treat the chronically ill. This program sparked the application of mindfulness ideas and practices in Medicine for the treatment of a variety of conditions in both healthy and unhealthy people. MBSR and similar programs are now widely applied in schools, prisons, hospitals, veterans centers, and other environments. Mindfulness practices were inspired mainly by teachings from the Eastern World, particularly from Buddhist traditions. Kabat-Zinn was first introduced to meditation by Philip Kapleau, a Zen missionary who came to speak at MIT where Kabat-Zinn was a student. Kabat-Zinn went on to study meditation with other Zen-Buddhist teachers such as Thích Nhất Hạnh and Seungsahn. He also studied at the Insight Meditation Society and eventually taught there. One of MBSR's techniques—the "body scan"—was derived from a meditation practice ("sweeping") of the Burmese U Ba Khin tradition, as taught by S. N. Goenka in his Vipassana retreats, which he began in 1976. The body scan method has since been widely adapted to secular settings, independent of religious or cultural contexts. Kabat-Zinn was also influenced by the book The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James which suggests that religions point toward the same experience, and which 1960s counterculture figures interpreted as meaning that the same universal, experiential truth could be reached in different ways, including via non-religious activities. Popularization, "mindfulness movement" Mindfulness is gaining a growing popularity as a practice in daily life, apart from Buddhist insight meditation and its application in clinical psychology. In this context mindfulness is defined as moment-by-moment awareness of thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment, characterized mainly by "acceptance"—attention to thoughts and feelings without judging whether they are right or wrong. Mindfulness focuses the human brain on what is being sensed at each moment, instead of on its normal rumination on the past or the future. Mindfulness may be seen as a mode of being, and can be practiced outside a formal setting. The terminology used by scholars of religion, scientists, journalists, and popular media writers to describe this movement of mindfulness "popularization," and the many new contexts of mindfulness practice which have cropped up, has regularly evolved over the past 20 years, with some criticisms arising. The latest changes when people moved from real-life meditation sessions to the applications on their smart devices has been even more accelerated by the global pandemic. Modern applications like are adapting to the needs of their users by using AI technology,