Sign in Get started

WELL-BEING WISDOM WONDER PURP

The Father Of Mindfulness on What

Mindfulness Has Become
An interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn, creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress
Reduction.

Drake Baer in Thrive Global Follow

Apr 12, 2017 · 6 min read
If any one person has helped shepherd the
word “mindfulness” into the American
mainstream and make meditation the
kind of thing that scientists and doctors
take seriously, it’s Jon Kabat-Zinn. Back in
1979, he introduced the world to what
would become Mindfulness-Based Stress
Reduction (MBSR), an eight-week course
first developed to help people with pain
management. It has since been shown to
help with depression, anxiety and a host
of clinical and nonclinical issues, down to
the inflammation of neurons themselves.
Kabat-Zinn also helped found the Stress
Reduction Clinic at the University of
Massachusetts Medical School, where
much of the original clinical research on
mindfulness interventions was originally
carried out; it’s since grown into the
Center for Mindfulness in Medicine,
Health Care and Society. Today, a search
for MBSR leads to more than 22,000
results on Google Scholar. Kabat-Zinn has
also authored ten books. His most
famous, Wherever You Go, There You Are,
has sold more than a million copies since
Jon Kabat-Zinn.
it was first published in 1995. In the
nearly four decades since MBSR made its
debut, more than 24,000 people have completed the course at UMass alone, and popular culture
has begun to absorb the practice’s fundamental point: If you attend to yourSign in you Get
mind, canstarted
change
your life.
Thrive Global spoke with Kabat-Zinn about the mindfulness revolution that he helped kickstart,
WELL-BEING WISDOM WONDER PURP
the pros and cons of mindfulness becoming mainstream and if it’s even possible to be mindful
with your phone on. The below interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Thrive Global: Did you ever expect mindfulness to become so mainstream, such an everyday
thing?
Jon Kabat-Zinn: I did, actually, have a vision in 1979 that came to be true: That mindfulness
would have a tremendous impact if the science said that it had been clinically successful at the
medical center where I was starting MBSR. Then, because of its impact on mainstream medicine
and neuroscience and health care, it would move out into society.
The whole idea was to transform and heal the world, and I know that sounds arrogant, but that
was, in fact, the sense of it. But mindfulness is something at the heart of Buddhist practice — it’s
not like I made up “mindfulness” in 1979.
TG: This gets to what’s been called “McMindfulness,” the fashionable consumer culture
that’s grown around the so-called “Mindfulness Movement.”
JKZ: One of the byproducts of rapid spread of dharma wisdom in the world is that people will
latch onto anything that’s hot and try to make a buck off of it, use it for advertising purposes to sell
more jewelry or hamburgers. That’s not necessarily entirely bad. It’s a sign that mindfulness is
actually going through society.
In terms of clinical work — MBSR and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy — the general sense is
that the level of depth and fidelity to deeply embodied practice is enormous. I am not worried
about the robust health of mindfulness in the world at all.
TG: Is it possible to have a more mindful relationship with technology?
JKZ: You can be more mindful of how addicted you are, but unless you impose behaviors on
yourself, it’s like heroin. It’s not like you can live without technology — I own an iPhone. But you
can’t live with it unless you find some kind of way to not lose yourself in digital reality to the point
where you forget that your body is analog.
It’s a matter of not being there for an experience because you were texting about it or tweeting
about it. That can happen when you have a baby. You’re not there for having a baby because you’re
sharing the experience so fast. You want to get feedback about what you said so much that you
miss your own analog experience. That would be a tragedy.
My son and I teach retreats for Silicon Valley leaders, and it’s largely with the hope that the people
who brought us this technology might recognize how wonderful and how simultaneously harmful
and distracting and addicting it is, and find ways to utilize and transform it so we don’t just create
a deeper and deeper hole for ourselves.
The biggest distractor is not your iPhone — it’s your own mind. You can’t stop your mind from
secreting thoughts, but what you can do is not be caught by them. That’s an art form and that’s
what mindfulness training is about.
TG: Is what you do “secular mindfulness”?
JKZ: I assiduously avoid the word secular. As soon as you say secular mindfulness, you’re
abstracting the sacred out of it.
TG: The sacred?
JKZ: It’s not really about the breathing, or the object of attention, but it’s the attending itself. We
are so seduced by thinking and emotion and we don’t realize that awareness Sign in leastGet
is at started
as powerful
of a function. It can hold any emotion, no matter how destructive, any thought, no matter how
gigantic. WELL-BEING WISDOM WONDER PURP
That’s where the transformative power lies, that you’re adding a measure of deep introspection
and perception to ordinary experience. And then realizing: There is no such thing as ‘ordinary
experience.’ Everything is extraordinary.
TG: Seeing the extraordinary in the everyday is part of the path.
JKZ: Mindfulness represents a new way of being in relationship with yourself, one that’s catalytic
of a new way of ongoing learning and healing. The transformation comes with the understanding
that you are not your thoughts about yourself. You are far far bigger, more nuanced and
multidimensional than who you think you are, the story of you.
In some sense, it’s befriending yourself. You don’t have to meditate in a cave for 50 years; you just
need to realize that. These meditative practices are really meant to recognize and learn to inhabit
that domain of being, as opposed to fragment it into the sacred-secular divide, the mind-body
divide, or the self-other divide.
TG: But is anything lost from the mainstreaming process?
JKZ: The challenge is when you take something that’s thousands of years old, that’s really
grounded in very deep wisdom, how do you bring it into the mainstream without destroying it in
the process?
It’s inevitable that some people might say, you’re decontextualizing mindfulness. What would be
lost are a bunch of amazing things from ancient religions and traditions that are very different if
you’re in Japan, Thailand, Vietnam or Tibet. They’re different, but tributaries within the same
river. If you’re a Buddhist, then an enormous amount of the beauty in the culture would be lost.
But Buddhism is never about ‘Buddhism’ [as a religion]. It’s about suffering and recognizing the
causes of suffering and the potential for liberation from suffering.
I could make the argument, and of course I do all the time, that if there were something lost in
taking some element of meditative practice at the core of the Buddha’s original life and trying to
bring it into the mainstream for anybody and everybody, the potential benefits far outweigh the
costs. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is only eight weeks long and it’s meant to be a
launching pad.
The Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist. A religion grew around his community. His realizations were
universal realizations about suffering, the nature of suffering and the nature of the human mind.

Wisdom Mindfulness Buddhism Psychology Time Well Spent

901 claps

WRITTEN BY

Drake Baer Follow

 Senior writer at @thriveglobal covering the social and brain
sciences. Formerly New York Mag, Business Insider, Fast Sign in Get started
Company.
WELL-BEING WISDOM WONDER PURP

Thrive Global Follow

More than living. Thriving.

See responses (17)

More From Medium

More from Thrive Global More from Thrive Global More from Thrive Global

How Technology is 21 Quotes That (If How You Do

Hijacking Your Applied) Change Anything Is How
Mind — from a You Into a Better You Do Everything
Former Insider Person Ryan Holiday in…
Mar 13, 2018 · 5…
Tristan Harris in… Ryan Holiday in…
May 18, 2016 · 16… Sep 6, 2018 · 16…