There are many reasons why mindfulness meditation has become a buzzword in current mainstream culture. The tensions of life in the early 21st century have certainly created an urgent demand for it. But perhaps the single most important figure in the mainstreaming of mindfulness has been Jon Kabat-Zinn, creator of the MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) training program. This accessible brand of mindfulness training has helped thousands of people alleviate the harmful effects of not only stress but also medical conditions ranging from chronic pain to psoriasis.

Who is Jon Kabat-Zinn?

Kabat-Zinn was working on a Ph.D. in molecular biology at MIT in Boston when he attended a lecture on meditation by the Zen Buddhist teacher Philip Kapleau. Both before and after completing his doctorate in 1971, Kabat-Zinn studied meditation with prominent Buddhist teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh and Seung Sahn, and also at the Insight Meditation Center in Boston, where he later became a teacher.

By 1979, he was doing postdoctoral work in cell biology and anatomy at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and had 13 years of meditation training and practice under his belt. During a two-week meditation retreat, he had a vision of his “karmic assignment” in life. He’d use the insights he’d gained from Buddhism to help Americans suffering from chronic health conditions and stress. To carry out that mission, he convinced the University of Massachusetts Medical School to let him establish the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic there.

Why did he call it mindfulness?

His choice of the term mindfulness was carefully considered. It’s the English word commonly used to express a central tenet of Buddhism—sustained, focused, nonjudgmental attentiveness to the here-and-now. Yet it doesn’t sound overtly “Buddhist,” or even foreign. In the 1970s, the average American still tended to regard meditation as the domain of hippies, New Agers, weirdos, kooks, free spirits and other counterculture, nonmainstream types.

Kabat-Zinn realized that this simple cultural barrier was depriving millions of the benefits to be derived from meditation. So he coined terms like the corporate-sounding acronym MBSR to bridge that cultural divide and stand in place of words such as samadhi, vipassana or shamatha. Also, by framing the goal as stress reduction rather than, say, enlightenment, he gave his meditation program a more pragmatic, “down-to-earth” tone.

“I bent over backwards 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,” Kabat-Zinn says.

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Who else was involved in the mindfulness movement?

Kabat-Zinn was a pioneer, but he wasn’t entirely alone. In 1975, Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson published his best-selling book The Relaxation Response, which has sold more than four million copies. Relaxation was Benson’s code word for meditation. But it’s a somewhat vague one. A soak in a hot tub, a game of golf or a massage are all forms of relaxation. But they aren’t the same thing as meditation, nor do they produce the same effect.

Mindfulness, on the other hand, wasn’t really a word in common usage until Kabat-Zinn put it in people’s ears and did much to define it for our times. And while it might not have been his intention to cash in, mindfulness has certainly proven a more marketable term than relaxation response.

MBSR is taught in eight-week workshops, consisting of one two-hour meeting per week, with a six-hour meditation retreat between classes six and seven. In addition, there is a minimum home practice of 45 minutes of meditation, six days a week.

Related: What Is Transcendental Meditation—and What Makes It So Special?

How is mindfulness taught?

Three basic techniques are taught: mindfulness meditation, body scanning and some simple yoga postures. Body scanning is basically the same thing as the savasana practice that happens at the end of most yoga classes. It just doesn’t have a strange, foreign-sounding name. You lie on your back and focus your attention on each part of your body in succession, from your toes up to your head, thoroughly relaxing each part before moving on to the next. By any name it’s called, it is a restful practice and a form of meditation in its own right.

Kabat-Zinn is also the founder of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In addition to teaching MBSR, the center trains and certifies people to become teachers of MBSR. Teacher training is a four-phase process involving coursework, intensive meditation retreats and supervised teaching experiences (practica). Those who participate in the program can teach MBSR on their own after completing the first two phases. Full MBSR teacher certification requires successful completion of all four phases.

There are nearly 1,000 certified MBSR teachers across the U.S. and in some 30 other countries. More than 24,000 people have completed MBSR training, according to the Center for Mindfulness. But many more have explored MBSR through Kabat-Zinn’s many books and instructional DVDs. There is also an online MBSR instruction course offered through the Center for Mindfulness.

In 1991, Kabat-Zinn came out with his first book, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness. At more than 500 pages, it was a substantial tome, and it became a bestseller after Kabat-Zinn was featured in the Bill Moyers PBS television series Healing and the Mind. Kabat-Zinn became a celebrity of the burgeoning mindfulness movement.

Many more books followed, the most recent being The Mind’s Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation, co-authored with Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D. Kabat-Zinn is a board member of the Mind and Life Institute, the organization that sponsors public dialogues between the Dalai Lama and leading scientists. He is also Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the Massachusetts Medical School.

“Our research over the past 36 years, and now research in many different labs and medical centers and hospitals, demonstrates that this practice—even in small doses, if taught effectively—can have profound effects on people, from the elderly to kids in middle school and even in preschool,” Kabat-Zinn has said.

A legion of mindfulness experts—some worthy of the term, others less so—have sprung up in the wake of Kabat-Zinn’s work. And this has produced an inevitable backlash. The term McMindfulness has been coined to describe what happens when these ancient practices and principles become too far distanced from their original contexts and watered down to the point where they no longer have any meaning at all. In the 2013 Huffington Post blog “Beyond McMindfulness,” academics and Buddhist teachers Ron Purser and David Loy decried the effort to “commodify mindfulness into a marketable technique.”

Kabat-Zinn argues that MBSR is not McMindfulness. The eight-week course requires a fairly serious commitment on the part of the student, and is meant to be the starting point of a lifelong practice. It isn’t intended to be the kind of quick fix or easy cure that consumer culture tends to favor. There’s very little that’s instant about it. McMindfulness, Kabat-Zinn says, “can really throw a wrench in this whole movement towards waking up as a society to the root causes of suffering and disease.”

A study at Stanford University has shown MBSR to be effective in treating conditions such as social anxiety disorder (SAD), reducing negative emotions and chilling out the brain’s panic-prone amygdala region, thereby diminishing some of the major causes of stress. What MBSR offers is a completely secular structure for a lifetime of mindfulness practice. And that’s the most important thing in all of this—sticking with it.

It’s one thing to take a class or read a book—you get inspired for a while, but then the inspiration wears off. It’s another thing to integrate mindfulness into the fabric of your life, day after day, year after year. Spiritual traditions from Buddhism to Sikhism to Shamanism provide a support structure for this kind of sustained mindfulness practice. Kabat-Zinn has made a pioneering effort to offer a version of that geared more to the mainstream mindset of the 21st century West.

“Ultimately I see mindfulness as a love affair with life, with reality and imagination, with the beauty of your own being, with your heart and body and mind, and with the world,” Kabat-Zinn writes in his book Mindfulness for Beginners. “If that sounds like a lot to take in, it is. And that is why it can be so valuable to experiment systematically with cultivating mindfulness in your life, and why your intuition to enter into this way of being in relationship with your experience is so healthy.”

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