Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn--The Father of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

The person who, arguably, has done more than any single other person to bring mindfulness into the mainstream in the U.S. and other Western countries is Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn.

While earning his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology in the 1970's, Jon also immersed himself in meditative practice, including mindfulness. This led him to the vision of introducing mindfulness to chronic pain patients in a mainstream medical setting as a means of coping with unrelenting pain. He called it the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program.

When I first heard of this project, I couldn't imagine that he would be successful in bringing such an alien approach to ordinary people who had absolutely no familiarity or interest in meditative mumbo-jumbo.

As it turned out I--along with a lot of other doubting Thomases--were proved to be dead wrong. Through Jon's passion and unrelenting dedication, this program gradually grew and became phenomenally successful.

It got a huge boost when it was featured in Bill Moyer's watershed PBS TV series, Healing and The Mind in 1993.

Since then, it has been cloned redundantly and has proliferated in hundreds of medical settings throughout North America and in other parts of the world as well. It's effectiveness as a means of coping not only with chronic pain, but with a myriad of other forms of physical/mental/emotional suffering, has now been strongly documented through a large body of research studies.

This video by Dr. Kabat-Zinn provides a wonderful overview of mindfulness and MBSR.