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Mindfulness is the heart of Buddhism. Tradition claims that the Buddha himself spoke the words: ‘Cultivating mindfulness is the highest aim.’
Elements of mindfulness are present in all spiritual teachings: from yoga to Zen, from vipassana to tai chi. Mindfulness focuses on the essence of the Buddhist practice, without the strict rules of traditions and rituals.
The American Jon Kabat-Zinn is the founder of the mindfulness training as it is now being offered in The Netherlands. He worked at the Academic Hospital of the Massachusetts University, where he noticed that patients who suffered from a chronic disease and couldn’t be treated any longer, had no alternatives left. Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist experienced in meditation and yoga, combined Western and Eastern knowledge into a training for chronic patients. His aim was to teach skills that would enable patients to continue to work on their wellbeing. The focus of his approach is to increase the quality of awareness, which helps to reduce tension and accept pain.
Worldwide acknowledgement
Kabat-Zinn's experiment proved very successful. In 1979 he founded the Stress Reduction Clinic, later was called Centre for Mindfulness. The Stress Reduction Program was adopted by many American hospitals. Therapists from over the world came to the centre to be trained to teach mindfulness to their patients. Patients of all kinds, suffering from a wide range of diseases and disorders, proved to benefit from the program. More and more scientific research is performed on the subject. Since 2000, Kabat-Zinn no longer works for the Centre of Mindfulness. He travels, presenting mindfulness via seminars, workshops and presentations. A presentation from March 2007 is available via YouTube: video Jon Kabat-Zinn. MBSR and MBCT
The training of mindfulness is officially called: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. The training teaches the essential skills to develop mindfulness according to a standard program. In later years the psychologist Zindel Segal and his colleagues developed a variant of Kabat-Zinn’s training in which they included elements of the cognitive-behavioral therapy. This variant, called Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), differs only slightly from the original program. In The Netherlands therapists and trainers use the term ‘mindfulness training’ to indicate MBSR as well as MBCT.
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