People suffered, but doctors were unable to help them. They sought new methods of alleviating pain, but in fact, such methods already existed. Everyone carries these methods inside themselves, says Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist who officially introduced meditation techniques to Western medicine and psychology nearly half a century ago.
This story could start with a place. It was just a simple basement, since nothing better could be found in the entire hospital. The university clinic was located in Worcester, Mass., a working-class city that had been in decline for a long time. It was 1979: the factories were going bankrupt and residents were leaving. Impoverished and with no prospects, people who hadn’t managed to leave were suffering from stress. The recently opened hospital was supposed to attract new talent to the city (which it did in the 1990s) and provide better healthcare for those who stayed.
Jon Kabat-Zinn had already been working there for almost three years and had just managed to convince hospital authorities to let him implement a new, experimental program. It didn’t matter to him that his patients were to be treated in the basement. What mattered was that he could start the program! The nearly forty-year-old scientist had high hopes for his idea. He was confident it would prove to be a success.
His future patients didn’t have much to lose anyway. Symptoms such as chronic back pain, prolonged migraines, anxiety disorders, and insomnia already made their lives so miserable that they were unable to function normally. The newly opened Stress Reduction Clinic promised to offer some relief. While the methods of treatment were unusual, to put it mildly, and included listening carefully to signals coming from the body, observing one’s thoughts, and focusing on the breath, at least they didn’t include taking any new medication that wouldn’t improve the condition of patients. There was no harm in trying. The worst that could happen was that after eight weeks, it would turn out they had been right not to hope for too much.
Mindfulness That Heals
This story could also begin in an entirely different way: with a tennis ball, for example. Standing in front of thousands of listeners, Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn lifts the ball high and then lets it fall straight into his other hand. This is how he illustrates the way one of his favorite metaphors works: he explains that our attention should be directed straight into each activity. He has been teaching it for the last forty-five years now. Mindfulness, as he clarifies, is an ability to fully focus on what we are doing and feeling in any particular moment. Significantly, it’s a non-judgmental kind of attention, since such labels as “good” or “bad” impose limits on our consciousness and easily distract us. Mindfulness is a very pleasant state of awareness, presence, and calm. And, as a young and passionate biologist from the Worcester hospital predicted half a century ago, it’s a state that can heal and that can be achieved through learning.
Kabat-Zinn’s eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, which started as a micro-experiment run in the basement, is now a globally recognized phenomenon. Today, mindfulness-based training is prescribed by doctors of various specialties: neurologists, dermatologists, psychiatrists, and even oncologists, who consider it one of the complementary therapies for cancer treatment (research on this subject was published in the 2019 issue of the renowned journal Cureus, among other venues). Mindfulness has been extensively researched. Studies have confirmed its effectiveness in alleviating chronic pain, depression, anxiety disorder, and even psoriasis, a chronic autoimmune disease. It turns out that focusing on the here and now works well for both the mind and the body: the skin, metabolism, and immune system.
Open Mind
Jon Kabat-Zinn was born into a generation of “flower children,” who entered adulthood with a bang: they were challenging the status quo and searching for new ways to live well. John (still called Kabat then; he added the second part after he married Myla Zinn), was not a hippie, though. He protested against the Vietnam War and was even one of the main demonstration organizers at his university (a few years before he recounted in his interview for The Guardian how he had been brutally beaten by the police during the 1970s demonstrations), but instead of flowers in his hair, he carried a book. The son of a renowned immunologist and chemist, Kabat-Zinn studied molecular biology at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where his supervisor was Nobel Prize winner, virologist Salvador Luria. He didn’t want to disappoint Luria, so, instead of finishing his education with a master’s degree, he moved on to do a PhD.
Still, he didn’t want to make a career as a cell researcher. Back then, he was already claiming that working with people was his karmic task. He used this phrase for a reason. While still a student, he came across Buddhism, which was a common experience for his generation—the 1960s and 70s were the times of a spiritual revolution in the US in which young people would often travel to the East and come back with new ideas. At the same time, Eastern culture was spreading thanks to the Tibetans, who fled to the US from their China-occupied country. Kabat-Zinn not only familiarized himself with Buddhist ideas but—to his own surprise—also began to practice them. As he states in his book Mindfulness for All, “For someone who grew up on the streets of New York, in Washington Heights, it felt like a quite unusual thing to be getting into. Almost no one I knew meditated. There were very few good books about meditation in English, […], and virtually nothing about it in the media. I never thought of meditation as a ‘counterculturish’ thing to do, in part because the term hadn’t quite been invented yet.”
Those early student experiences were merely a prelude to a much deeper immersion in meditation. The breakthrough occurred when he met the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, a famous activist for peace and the author of a book on Buddhism, The Miracle of Meditation (1975). Kabat-Zin often participated in his workshops, learning from him Buddhist techniques of meditation and experiencing for himself (through both his body and mind) how complex and soothing the effects of meditation were.
Buddhism without Buddhism
He finally discovered his own purpose: to transfer meditation to the Western world. He made the first attempt at it while working as a university lecturer. In his class on genetics and biology, he encouraged students to meditate and use it as an opportunity to observe biological changes in themselves. Their example demonstrated, however, that even the word “meditation” was met with suspicion, since it was strongly associated with exotic Asian rituals. To a secular and largely conservative society, Eastern philosophy seemed, if not suspicious, then culturally incomprehensible.
Kabat-Zinn didn’t share this approach. For him, Buddhism was an inexhaustible source of inspiration and reflection. The idea behind his stress reduction program, that humans can self-heal and grow stronger, is a truly Buddhist one. At the same time, he has never called himself a Buddhist (or any other -ist since, as he explains, “People don’t need any more identifications than they already have”). He has also never agreed that meditation is a part of any (Eastern or other) spirituality or philosophy. If it’s supposed to be an exclusively Buddhist phenomenon, then the theory of gravity is exclusively British, since it was described by the Englishman Isaac Newton. He exposed the absurdity of this way of thinking. The potential benefits of mindfulness can be experienced by anyone around the world, regardless of what values they follow. However, as he noted, it was no coincidence that mindfulness became a core part of Buddhism, since the overarching goal is to relieve suffering.
Still, the cultural barrier was too great. After thirteen years of practicing meditation, Kabat-Zinn eventually realized (he still defines this moment as a ten-second flash of inspiration), that, if he wanted to popularize meditation in the Western world, he needed to present it differently, pointing to its more practical benefits. Mindfulness as a form of stress reduction not only sounded more familiar but also started to function as a medical term. When recalling the beginnings, he says, “Since I held a Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT and, additionally, I worked in the lab run by a Nobel Prize winner, the hospital authorities thought that ‘he knew what he was doing.’ Thankfully, they let me try. Nobody had the faintest idea how much ignorance was in all that.”
Even today, some people accuse him of stripping meditation of its spiritual dimension. He responds to those accusations by saying that, thanks to his approach, the beneficial, healing effects of meditation can be also experienced by people who would never go to yoga or the Zen center. Thousands of people have passed through the Stress Reduction Clinic, which he established in the basement of the Worcester hospital (and which still exists there now, but above ground). And many of them are convinced that, thanks to mindfulness, not only their health but also their whole lives have improved. Similar clinics also exist in other hospitals in America, Europe, and even (ironically) China. When, during the workshops run in China, Kabat-Zinn asked who knew the works of semi-legendary philosopher Laozi, considered Buddha’s student, not a single person among the four hundred participants raised their hand.
Stress and Its consequences
When Kabat-Zinn started his first mindfulness-based program, the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder didn’t exist yet (it was coined a few months later, in 1980), but stress itself and its destructive influence on health was being discussed more often. It was still approached as a medical novelty, though: until the 1940s the concept of “stress” functioned solely in technical terms, denoting the interaction between a force and resistance. The first person to use this term in a medical sense was Hungarian physician, Hans Selye. He started his research when he observed that hospital patients who had different diseases experienced identical symptoms. This contradicted a principle formulated in the nineteenth century by German pathologist Rudolf Virchow, who said each disease had a set of specific symptoms that were unique to that disease only. Selye discovered that this principle only worked because doctors had overlooked more universal symptoms such as lack of appetite, insomnia, psychological tension, and fatigue. Did they make a mistake by overlooking them, though? If we assume that Virchow was right and they didn’t constitute symptoms of any specific disease, what were they, then? Selye, followed by the entire medical world, decided that they constitute the system’s response to a challenging stimulus (stressor): in a hospital setting that would be a disease, but it could be also a too-heavy workload, the death of someone close, or the pace of life.
Stress in small doses is beneficial: it stimulates us and boosts creativity. The only state in which we are entirely stress-free is death, as Selye noted. But when stress overpowers us, it becomes a deadly enemy. It lowers immunity and leads to mental and physical disorders, affecting the cardiovascular and digestive systems, for instance. It also exacerbates preexisting conditions, which it could have caused earlier; when we are stressed, we are often trapped in a vicious circle. Research on the impact stress has on cancer has been conducted for years, and, while scientists approach this subject cautiously, there is strong evidence that such a causal effect (at least an indirect one) does exist.
Already in his first book, Full Catastrophe Living, which largely contributed to the immense popularity of mindfulness, Kabat-Zinn claimed that we’re living in an era of overwhelming stress. Significantly, he wrote the book in 1990—a challenging historical moment, but still, it was before smartphones with internet connection, social media, the pandemic, and major economic and ecological crises. Today, it is not only doctors who sound the alarm but also sociologists and psychologists: stress has become a serious social issue for which there is no systemic solution. Thankfully, even though it feels like the world is speeding up each year, the old methods for slowing down our emotions and thoughts are still working. “The whole point of mindfulness-based stress reduction—and for that matter health promotion in its largest sense—is to challenge and encourage people to become their own authorities, to take more responsibility for their own lives, their own bodies, their own health.” This quote comes from his second book, Wherever You Go, There You Are, published in 1994.
Raisins and the Universe
Mindfulness-based training run by Kabat-Zinn typically starts with eating three raisins. Before eating, participants are asked to look at them closely, feel their texture, and name their color. Are they weird or silly? That’s what participants are often thinking. Mindfulness teachers ask us to try and capture these thoughts, like all thoughts that cross our mind, when we look at the first raisin. It is a good idea to observe one’s reaction: why does looking at a dried grape seem pointless to us, while watching the lives of TV characters (and just a reminder: they don’t exist) doesn’t? Why are we so quick to judge? Does it make us feel smarter and better?
The next stage is to attentively observe how the body reacts to a raisin: perhaps it has already made our mouth water? Chewing and swallowing should be also slow and very attentive. The same process takes place the second and the third time. Some participants have later admitted that, for the first time in their lives, they felt what raisins taste like—sometimes they realize they don’t feel like eating the third one and sometimes they want to swallow all of them at once.
The raisin-eating meditation is one of the methods that Kabat-Zinn learned from his master, Thich Nhat Hanh. The Buddhist teacher argued that it was worth eating a tangerine for eight minutes and a raisin for two. He claimed that only then could a person recognize in it the entire universe: the soil it grew from, the water it drank, the man who cultivated it when it was still a grape. In Kabat-Zinn’s program, participants don’t strive for a Buddhist sense of oneness with the world, they focus on the awareness of what they are feeling and thinking. And it’s already a lot.
Even though few people start mindfulness training because they are overweight or have an eating disorder, it turns out that, after completing the course, the majority of participants change their eating habits. They begin to eat less and more slowly, and report that they find eating more pleasurable. As Kabat-Zinn explains in Full Catastrope Living, “Since many of us use food for emotional comfort, especially when we feel anxious or depressed or even just bored, this little exercise in slowing things down and paying careful attention to what we are doing illustrates how powerful, uncontrolled, and unhelpful many of our impulses are when it comes to food, and how simple and satisfying it can be and how much more in control we can feel when we bring awareness to what we are actually doing while we are doing it.”
The Act of Reason
Another basic mindfulness exercise is body scanning. Participants lie on their backs and calmly focus on each part of their bodies: from the feet to the head. At the same time, they try to imagine how the breath is flowing through the body. What are the benefits of such a practice? Of course, like with all mindfulness exercises, a participant’s ability to concentrate is strengthened, and most importantly, they have an opportunity (sometimes for the first time in their lives, as in the case of eating raisins) to attentively observe sensations coming from the body or simply to realize they are embodied beings.
Moreover, as Kabat-Zinn recounted in a 2015 interview for HuffPost, even those people who took part in the very first stress-reduction courses (those run in the hospital basements) reported after a few weeks that it was easier for them to deal with chronic pain, which hadn’t been alleviated before by pharmacotherapy or even surgery. When a person is more connected to their body, it’s easier for them to identify physical symptoms caused by stress and effectively deal with them. We can feel that, if our jaw is clenched while our shoulders are raised and tense, we are constantly stressed. But when we don’t even know that we are under constant stress, there is nothing we can do about it.
Mindfulness practice demonstrates that we have control over the level of stress we experience. We often cannot change our circumstances, but it’s definitely up to us how we react to them. Are we going to mindlessly devour what happens to us or attentively observe it from different angles? Even though everything may not prove as sweet as a raisin, it’s good to know its taste and learn what kind of thoughts and emotions it triggers.
Kabat-Zinn argues that taking a pause is not only an expression of love for life but also a reasonable thing to do. Our attention easily changes its trajectory (throw the ball at the wall and ceiling and observe what happens next). In addition, we typically don’t even realize that we’ve started daydreaming. It’s easy to imagine the possible consequences of getting distracted (for instance, when driving). But it’s harder to understand what happens to us when we live without paying attention, unaware of what we feel or think.
The purpose of mediation is not self-improvement or even stress reduction. Both occur, but they are rather side effects, so to speak. What is of prime importance in meditation is to fully immerse yourself in it, without expectations or judgments. It is relaxing to observe one’s breath or scan one’s body, but we should remember these techniques not only when we
need to rest or calm our nerves. Let’s implement them as a way to simply spend time with ourselves. After all, this is what we do when we care about someone.
How to Begin
Mindfulness practice is recommended especially to those who experience physical and psychosomatic symptoms but can be beneficial to anyone, just like healthy food. However, just like changing one’s diet, developing new habits takes time and patience. It also initially requires some goodwill. If our initial mindset is “I’m going to try even though I know it won’t work,” likely, it won’t, as Kabat-Zinn explains. We will give up once we experience discomfort (and learning how to stay focused is hard) or if we don’t see the positive effects as soon as we hoped to.
Paradoxically, however, the zealousness of a neophyte doesn’t help either. As Kabat-Zinn explains in Full Catastrophe Living, “If you come as a true believer, certain that this is the right path for you, that mindfulness is ‘the answer,’ the chances are you will soon become disappointed too. As soon as you find that you are the same person you always were and that this work requires effort and consistency and not just a romantic belief in the value of meditation, relaxation, or mindfulness, you may find yourself with considerably less enthusiasm than before.” Based on his experience at the Stress Reduction Clinic, he also claims that, statistically speaking, slightly skeptical yet strongly motivated people are most likely to learn mindfulness.
Learning how to meditate doesn’t necessarily have to be successful the first time we try it: “You have to come to it at the right time in your life, at a point where you are ready to listen carefully to your own voice, to your own heart, to your own breathing […]. This is hard work,” as Kabat-Zinn states in Wherever You Go, There You Are. It’s good to join a group and have a teacher, but for some people, it’s enough to read a book and do the course on their own. It’s worth remembering, however, that learning how to meditate—how to breathe consciously, focus on body sensations, and non-judgmentally observe one’s thoughts—is only the beginning.
“The real meditation practice is the twenty-four hours itself—it’s life itself,” Kabat-Zinn told National Public Radio. “It’s not sitting on a cushion in the cross-legged posture or lying in a yoga pose called the corpse pose or anything like that. That’s all fabulous. But we’re cultivating that so that we get more comfortable with living out all our moments as if they really mattered and therefore being there for them—the good ones, the bad ones, the ugly ones, the stressful ones, the difficult ones, the painful ones.” Mediation is simply about life. And just as this text could have opened with a hospital basement, tennis ball, raisin, or breath, the same works for a conscious, better life—any beginning is a good one.
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