The Canon / Living / Psychology & Science
Living · 1990
Full Catastrophe Living
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (secular clinical mindfulness)Full Catastrophe Living carried meditation from the dharma hall into the hospital, presenting Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction to a wide readership. Its central claim is that disciplined, non-judgmental attention to the present moment can transform a person's relationship to pain, stress, and illness.
The book is built around MBSR, the standardized eight-week program Kabat-Zinn developed combining sitting meditation, the body scan, and gentle yoga. By stripping the practice of its religious framing and defining mindfulness operationally as paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally, he made it a replicable curriculum that could be subjected to randomized controlled trials.
MBSR became the template for a vast research enterprise and seeded later programs such as Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. Its evidence supports benefits for stress, pain, and relapse through attention and the relaxation response, a boundary that keeps it distinct from metaphysical or mind-over-matter claims.
Practices it teaches
Mindfulness of Breathing (Anapanasati)
Mindfulness of breathing is the foundational attention practice of Buddhism and the core of modern secular mindfulness.
The MBSR Body Scan — the 45-minute clinical sweep of attention through the body
The Body Scan is the first formal meditation taught in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and, for many participants, their entry point into mindfulness.
The Raisin Exercise — eating one raisin as the first taste of mindfulness
The Raisin Exercise is the first practice Kabat-Zinn gives in an MBSR course — a short, almost comically simple experiment in which you eat one raisin as if you had never encountered one before, attending to every…
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The author
Jon Kabat-ZinnSecular mindfulness as medicine
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