Mindfulness for Stress Reduction

Jon Kabat-Zinn has defined mindfulness meditation as “the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally”. By focusing on the breath, the idea is to cultivate attention on the body and mind as it is moment to moment, and so help with pain, both physical and emotional. He believes that meditation is the “radical act of love and sanity.” 

Jon Kabat-Zinn had been meditating since 1965, but had no compunction in playing the Buddhism right down. “I got into this through the Zen door which is a very irreverent approach to Buddhism,” he says. He talks a lot about dharma, the term for the Buddha’s teaching, but he’s not a Buddhist and remarks that to insist mindfulness meditation is Buddhist is like saying gravity is English because it was identified by Sir Isaac Newton.

The UMass Stress Reduction Clinic opened its doors in 1979 and taught people mindfulness for stress reduction when experiencing chronic back pain, victims of industrial accidents, cancer patients and sometimes paraplegics. Stress impacts all of us and especially people who are experiencing pain and various illnesses. Mindfulness for stress reduction can help.

Mindfulness courses ultimately derived from his work are now being rolled out in the UK to school pupils, convicts, civil servants and even politicians. It is prescribed on the NHS in some areas to prevent recurrent depression, with 2,256 people completing eight-week courses last year. The course reduces the likelihood of relapse by almost a third, according to an analysis of nine trials. In the US, the NBA basketball champions, Golden State Warriors, are the latest poster boys for the practice after their coach, Steve Kerr, made mindfulness one of the team’s core values.

“He is Mr Mindfulness in relation to the secular strand,” says Lokadhi Lloyd, a meditation teacher in London who has been on courses led by Kabat-Zinn. “Without him, I don’t think mindfulness would have risen to the prominence it has.”

Supporters such as Willem Kuyken, a professor of clinical psychology at Oxford University, even suggest that Kabat-Zinn’s pioneering work could one day see him mentioned in the same breath as Darwin and Einstein. “What they did for biology and physics, Jon has done for a new frontier: the science of the human mind and heart,” says Kuyken.

Adapted from an interview published in The Guardian, “Master of mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn: ‘People are losing their minds. That is what we need to wake up to’ ”

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