Wise Words on Mindfulness from Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn
Posted by George Shears | Filed under Mindfulness Basics
The person who, arguably, has done more than any single other person to bring mindfulness into the mainstream in the U.S. and other Western countries is Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn.
While earning his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology in the 1970′s, Jon also immersed himself in meditative practice, including mindfulness. This led him to the vision of introducing mindfulness to chronic pain patients in a mainstream medical setting as a means of coping with unrelenting pain. He called it the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program.
When I first heard of this project, I couldn’t imagine that he would be successful in bringing such an alien approach to ordinary people who had absolutely no familiarity or interest in meditative mumbo-jumbo.
As it turned out I–along with a lot of other doubting Thomases–were proved to be dead wrong. Through Jon’s passion and unrelenting dedication, this program gradually grew and became phenomenally successful.
It got a huge boost when it was featured in Bill Moyer’s watershed PBS TV series, Healing and The Mind in 1993.
Since then, it has been cloned redundantly and has proliferated in hundreds of medical settings throughout North America and in other parts of the world as well. Its effectiveness as a means of coping not only with chronic pain, but with a myriad of other forms of physical/mental/emotional suffering, has now been strongly documented through a large body of research studies.
His first book, Full Catastrophe Living, along with the following video, provide a comprehensive overview of MBSR.
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: By clicking on the following link, you can get a FREE self-guided program in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, including 6 audios in mp3 format.
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In the summer of 1992, I had the great good fortune of participating in a 5-day professional training workshop with Drs. Jon Kabat-Zinn and Saki Santorelli in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at Omega Institute in New York State. This watershed experience occurred after I had personally been practicing mindfulness meditation for about 16 years. Among its many other
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This blog has been created as a resource to all people who are dedicated to increasing happiness and to decreasing suffering in their lives--and in the world--by learning how to live more wisely and skillfully.It aims to include a distillation of what I have personally learned in theses regards, along with the collective wisdom of many others.