Jon Kabat Zinn, Founder of MBSR

Jon Kabat-Zinn is an American based scientist, writer, and meditation teacher who founded Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) . As a Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the UMass Chan Medical School, he brought ancient Buddhist meditation practices into mainstream medicine and psychology.

  • Founder of MBSR: Created a widely-researched, 8-week program in 1979 to help patients cope with chronic pain, anxiety, and stress.
  • The Center for Mindfulness: Established the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society (CFM) at the University of Massachusetts in 1995. 
  • Scientific Backing: Conducted extensive research on how mindfulness and MBSR impact the brain, the immune system, and mind-body healing.

 


What is Mindfulness?

According to Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness is:
 "the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment."

He emphasizes that it is not a religious practice or a mental trick, but rather a fundamental human capability. 

He has authored numerous internationally recognized books on meditation, including: 
  • Full Catastrophe Living (his seminal work on using MBSR to face stress and illness)
  • Wherever You Go, There You Are (an accessible guide to everyday mindfulness)
  • Coming to Our Senses
  • Mindfulness for Beginners 

Jon Kabat-Zinn: My first experience of formal practice—or even learning about it—happened one day in 1965. I was a molecular biology student in the laboratory of Salvador Luria, a soon to be Nobel Laureate, and I was depressed out of my mind over the Vietnam War. Walking down the halls of MIT, I saw a sign on the wall: The Three Pillars of Zen: A Talk by Philip Kapleau, at the invitation of Huston Smith, who at the time was a professor of philosophy and religion at MIT. I had never heard of either of them, but there was something about that sign that drew me in—perhaps it was the iconography of the three pillars, or the mystery of the word “Zen.” 

MIT is a community of thousands of people, but it turned out that only about four people showed up for the talk. I was one, and Kapleau’s talk took the top off my head. He told a personal story about how, as a reporter at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, hearing the testimony about the Nazi atrocities at an unimaginable scale had had a profound effect on him. Somehow, after that experience, he wound up sitting in a Zen monastery in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, in the wintertime.

He arrived with all sorts of body problems, including ulcers. The monastery had no central heating, so he was meditating in the freezing cold. He was highly motivated and committed fully to adhering to the rigors of the practice, no matter what. And, as he said in his talk, after six months of this intensive practice under such difficult conditions, his ulcers disappeared, and he felt like his mind had recuperated from the trauma of the Nuremberg trials. He had found himself, in a certain way. 

At that moment, the thought ran through my mind:

“This is what I’ve been looking for my whole life.” 

The Emergence of MBSR:

I reached a point during my years working in the lab as a post-doc where I was asking, “What am I doing with my life? What am I really supposed to be doing?” And so, in the third year, I began to talk to doctors in various clinics in the hospital, which at UMass at the time was in a different part of the same building as the medical school. I met with the heads of the primary care clinic, the orthopedic clinic, and the pain clinic and asked them simple things like, “What percentage of your patients do you feel you help?” And they told me, maybe 15 or 20 percent. And I’d say, “My god, what happens to the others?” And they said that they either get better on their own or they never get better.

A light bulb went off in my head. I said, “Do you think it would be of value if we set up an outpatient stress reduction clinic in the form of a course based on mobilizing the intrinsic healing capacities of human beings through fairly intensive training in mindfulness meditation and mindful hatha yoga, and you referred all the people you no longer knew what to do with?” All three heads of the clinics immediately thought of patients of theirs who might benefit from such a program.  

So, I wrote a proposal to the hospital administration for a pilot outpatient program to test the feasibility and clinical effectiveness of bringing meditation and yoga into medicine. Part of it would involve carefully documenting outcomes and reporting them in the medical and scientific literature. I explained my own relationship to meditation, that I had been a student of the Korean Zen master Seung Sahn, as well as other meditation teachers over the years, and had a PhD from MIT in molecular biology. You could see the wheels turning in people’s minds: “He must know what he’s doing.” So, they let me do it, even though I had no professional credentials for working with human beings. 

I felt quite trepidatious at first, especially because, right off the bat, the pain clinic referred a number of patients they categorized as “failures to treatment.” It turned out they were the best people to work with, because they had no place else to go. They had exhausted all their other options: back surgeries, many of them multiple times; as well as lidocaine injections targeting various “trigger points”; counseling and psychotherapy; headache clinics—the whole pain armamentarium, and they were still suffering. So, they were open to the proposal that, just as an experiment, instead of turning away from or trying to obliterate your pain, we’re going to put the welcome mat out for it. We’re going to investigate the experience of pain by attending to it carefully, with the sense that maybe you’ll be able to differentiate it from suffering. Because, while you’re going to have pain at one point or another in your life, how you are in relationship to it can make an enormous difference in terms of how much you are suffering.

I am often asked me to give a one-word definition of mindfulness, aside from pure awareness, the other thing I say is relationality, because how you are in relationship to the actuality of experience matters and is potentially transformative and liberating. It is also a domain in which we all have considerable degrees of freedom and agency. But to access those degrees of freedom reliably, each one of us has to “exercise the muscle” of mindfulness through the ongoing and sometimes highly repetitive practice of paying attention systematically, in new ways. We have to learn the how of bringing this quality of attention to moment-by-moment experience through practice, through cultivation. So, that’s a little bit on the subject of how MBSR got started.