The Origins of Mindfulness
In the last decades, three strands of Buddhism have gained popularity in the west: Zen, Tibetan Buddhism and Vipassana (also used synonymously with Theravada). Zen originates in China, Korea, Japan; Tibetan in Tibet with the Dalai Lama as their spiritual leader; and Vipassana in Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka.
Mindfulness stems from the Buddhist Vipassana or insight meditation. Vipassana means clear-seeing. It teaches that our suffering comes from not seeing things as they really are. So it encourages us to see things as they really are and find freedom from suffering.
In the late 1960s and 70s, many young people in the West went to the East to study the Eastern traditions and religions. Some brought these teachings back to the West, with three of them being especially influential in the Vipassana tradition: Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg. They founded the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Meditation Center, both still active and vibrant communities.
One of their students, Jon Kabat-Zinn, was a scientist at MIT with a PhD in molecular biology. During a retreat, he saw that much of our suffering is mind-made and unnecessary, and healing can be found by simple practices like focusing on the breath. He had the vision to turn these Buddhist learnings into a class that anyone could attend even if they are not Buddhist.
He approached the MIT hospital and got permission to use the cafeteria in the basement for his first mindfulness classes in 1979. He invited all the department heads of the hospital to send him “the most difficult” patients - patients with chronic pain, cancer, depression etc. that the Western medicine couldn’t cure. He taught these patients how to live with their chronic conditions and how to relate to their experiences differently. He called this “the big medicine”.
It worked! The patients learned to live with their conditions. For some patients, the health problems disappeared. Other patients reported feeling more content, happy and positive even though the symptoms didn’t disappear.
Kabat-Zinn knew he had to do rigorous research for mindfulness to be accepted in the West. His first book came out in 1990, called Full Catastrophe Living. He standardized his mindfulness classes for research and replication under the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) name.
Since then, there have been many scientific studies conducted and many mindfulness classes taught in the West across many meditation centers and teachers. In the last 5-10 years, mindfulness practices have been spreading into schools, prisons, parliaments, governments.
Sources:
Wolf, Christiane & Serpa, Greg. A Clinician’s Guide To Teaching Mindfulness. 2015.
