Mindfulness Before Monasteries: An Ancient Human Inheritance
 
In this talk, Dr King explores the idea that mindfulness is far older than modern wellness culture, and even older than its formal articulation in Buddhist traditions. His central claim is that the capacities we now associate with mindfulness, such as embodied attention, emotional regulation, situational awareness, and presence under pressure, were once essential to human survival.
 
Using the example of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, particularly the hunt or foraging, Dr King suggests that mindfulness was never simply a mental exercise. To track, wait, listen, move carefully, regulate fear, and stay attuned to the environment required a deeply embodied form of awareness. He will then connect this with early Buddhist teachings, where mindfulness is grounded strongly in the body, and contrast both with the modern tendency to treat mindfulness as something primarily cognitive, individual, and disembodied.
 
A slightly provocative but accessible reflection on mindfulness as something rooted in our evolutionary inheritance, refined in contemplative traditions, and urgently needing to be reclaimed in modern life as an embodied practice.

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Rodney King holds a PhD in Mindful-Embodied Leadership, earned through the University of Leicester’s School of Business. He is a grassroots philosopher, mindfulness teacher, author, and lifelong martial artist whose work explores the meeting point between embodied practice, martial arts as a way of life, and lived wisdom.

He also holds an MSc in Health Psychology, with a focus on Nature Connectedness, and an MA in Leading Innovation and Change. An APPA-certified Philosophical Counsellor and Accredited Fellow Coach with the IAPC&M, Rodney is currently pursuing a second PhD as a doctoral student in Applied Philosophy at Rhodes University.

Rodney is the founder of the Mindful Warrior Immersion, a five-day in-person experience on the Isle of Man, where he explores mindfulness not simply as a practice on a cushion, but as something we learn to embody in the difficult, beautiful, and unpredictable conditions of real life.

He is also the author of The Path of the Mindful Warrior, Walking Lived Philosophy Home, and Wild & Free in the City.

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