Jon Kabat-Zinn
Secularized meditation into mainstream medicine.
Founder of MBSR, an eight-week secular mindfulness program for stress, pain and illness that seeded the modern mindfulness movement.
terms
techniques
You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
Who they were
Jon Kabat-Zinn is an American professor emeritus of medicine who earned a PhD in molecular biology from MIT. In 1979 he founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, adapting Zen, Vipassana and yoga into the secular eight-week MBSR program. His book Full Catastrophe Living made him internationally influential, and MBSR underpins much of the clinical mindfulness research that followed.
Terms they cared about
Ideas worth knowing
Their techniques
How the work was done
Their big idea
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Theory
Bringing nonjudgmental awareness to stress, pain and emotion changes how we suffer them.
The approach they founded
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
Uses meditation and body awareness to change your relationship to stress, pain, and difficult feeling.
Questions in their spirit
What they’d ask you
Sit with one. Answer online, or in the app.
Carry the idea forward
Kabat-Zinn — What they’d ask you
Psipas asks you one small, honest question at a time — and builds the picture from your answers.