How to Train a Wild Elephant_ And Other Adventures in Mindfulness - Jan Chozen Bays [71]
In the early years, the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program he founded was modest. His sessions were held in a basement. He taught mindfulness and related techniques in a program of eight weekly two-hour classes and one daylong session that included paying attention to breathing, eating, stress in the body, communication, and caring. This eight-week program continues to this day with small variations. In 1990, Kabat-Zinn put out his first book, Full Catastrophe Living, which contained detailed descriptions of and instructions for all facets of the program he had developed in his stress-reduction clinic at UMass. It spurred a lot of interest. In 1993, Bill Moyers’s documentary Healing and the Mind featured ordinary folks practicing at the clinic, and inquiries soared. So it was no surprise that Kabat-Zinn’s second book, the shorter and more poetic Wherever You Go There You Are, became an immediate best seller when it was released in 1994. This was the beginning of what we now can call the “mindfulness revolution.”
An umbrella organization called the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society exists to chart the course of MBSR. The center does not exert any strong control on how mindfulness, a practice that can’t be trademarked, spreads around the world. It does, however, ask that people respect the integrity of the MBSR program itself, and if they create a variation of it, that they give it another name. Many variations have sprung up, including Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Eating Awareness Training, and Mindfulness-Based Art Training for Cancer Patients, to name just a few. All of them combine a mindfulness component with preexisting ways of helping people who have particular problems and ailments.
MBSR and its offshoots are by far the largest source of secular mindfulness training today. MBSR programs taught by certified MBSR teachers exist in more than five hundred hospitals and clinics worldwide, and more than nine thousand MBSR teachers have graduated from Oasis, the Center for Mindfulness’s professional training program. More than eighteen thousand people have graduated from the stress reduction clinic at UMass alone, and an inestimable number have taken MBSR courses in their hometowns and logged in millions of hours of mindfulness practice. Somebody somewhere is learning it for the first time right now.
In addition to MBSR programs, many groups and programs teach mindfulness in diverse settings. For example, the Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) offers six-week mindfulness classes to students, faculty, staff, and the general public. Integrative Health Partners in Chicago offers four-week programs in mindfulness and stress reduction. In Philadelphia, you can take part in a wide variety of mindfulness-based classes offered by the Penn Program for Mindfulness. Online courses and audio and video programs are widely available as well. Please see the Resources section for more details.
One of the core reasons for the growing acceptance of mindfulness as a beneficial practice that doesn’t require any religious training is that from the earliest days of MBSR, Kabat-Zinn and others sought to prove the practical effectiveness of the technique through scientific studies. In a paper presented by Margaret Cullen, a longtime MBSR teacher who develops mindfulness curricula, at “The State of Contemplative Practice in America,” a dialogue held at the Fetzer Insitute in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in June 2010, she wrote, “There are hundreds of research papers on the effects of mindfulness-based interventions on physical and mental conditions including, but not limited to depression and relapse prevention, anxiety, substance abuse, eating disorders, insomnia, chronic pain, psoriasis, type 2 diabetes, fibromyalgia,