How the Mindfulness Movement Went Mainstream -- And the Backlash That Came With It

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http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/how-mindfulness-movement-went-mainstream-and-backlash-came-it

In 1979, a 35-year-old American Buddhist and MIT-trained molecular biologist was on a two-week meditation retreat when he had a vision of what his life’s work—his “karmic assignment”—would be. While he sat alone one afternoon, it all came to him at once: he’d bring the ancient Eastern disciplines he’d followed for 13 years—mindfulness meditation and yoga—to chronically sick people right here in modern America. What’s more, he’d bring these practices into the very belly of the Western scientific beast—a big teaching hospital where he happened to be working as a post-doc in cell biology and gross anatomy. Somehow, he’d convince scientifically trained medical professionals and patients—ordinary people, who’d never heard of the Dharma and wouldn’t be caught dead in a zendo or an ashram—that learning to follow the breath and do a few gentle yoga postures would help relieve intractable pain and suffering. In the process, he’d manage to reconcile what was then considered fringy, New Age folderol with empirical biological research, sparking a radical new approach to healing in mainstream medical practice.

Not exactly a modest scheme, and in retrospect, it seems astonishing that this nervy young guy—Jon Kabat-Zinn, the originator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)—would manage to pull it off. And yet, as the now oft-told origin story goes, he convinced the medical bigwigs at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Medical Center that this idea was worth trying. With a core body of “interns”—anybody on staff who wanted to learn about meditation—he set up shop and began putting patients through an intensive 10-week (now 8-week) program of weekly classes, yoga postures, 45-minute guided home-meditation practice six times a week, and an all-day retreat during the sixth week. The idea was to teach a set of active self-regulation skills that patients could practice by themselves to help them cope with medical conditions—chronic pain foremost—for which standard medical remedies, such as drugs, rehab, and surgery, had proven useless. The program was, Kabat-Zinn recalled later, “just a little pilot on zero dollars.”

There was just one small impediment to this plan: how was he going to persuade mainstream Americans that this approach wasn’t just New Age hokum? From the beginning, to sell his program to the masses, he decided to use what Buddhists call skillful means, teaching Buddhist principles and practices, but disguising their origin in plain American-style talk—promoting a kind of stealth Buddhism, scrubbed clean of bells, chants, prayers, and terms like dharma, karma, and dukkha, not to mention The Four Noble Truths, The Noble Eightfold Path, and so on. As he has said, “I bent over backward to structure it and find ways to speak about it that avoided as much as possible the risk of its being seen as Buddhist, New Age, Eastern Mysticism, or just plain flaky.”

[MisterP]

1. the 70s had seen a backlash when some psychologists dared to say that maybe we WERE

really thinking and it wasn't a big illusion