Kabat-Zinn, Jon 1944–

views updated

Kabat-Zinn, Jon 1944–

PERSONAL: Born June 5, 1944, in New York, NY; married; wife's name Myla (a childbirth educator); children: three. Education: Graduate of Haverford College; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of Preventive and Behavioral Medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, 55 Lake Ave. N., Worcester, MA 01655-0214. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Worked as a science teacher; Department of Preventive and Behavioral Medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Worcester, MA, researcher, professor, and founder of Stress Reduction Clinic, 1979–, conductor of workshops on healing, pain management, and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).

WRITINGS:

Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1990, Delta (New York, NY), 2005.

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, Hyperion (New York, NY), 1994.

(With wife, Myla Kabat-Zinn) Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, Hyperion (New York, NY), 1997.

Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, Hyperion (New York, NY), 2005.

Also author, with Andrew Weil, of audio program Meditation for Optimum Health: How to Use Mindfulness and Breathing to Heal Your Body and Refresh Your Mind, read by Kabat-Zinn and Weil, Sounds True, 2001; contributor to books on the subject of meditation; contributor to periodicals; columnist for Health magazine.

SIDELIGHTS: Jon Kabat-Zinn is a biologist who gained attention as the founder and first director of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center's Stress Reduction Clinic. He began his career as a science teacher, then turned to researching molecular biology, and eventually became interested in mind activation as a means of maintaining health and realizing greater personal stability. In 1979 he founded the Stress Reduction Clinic, which provides instruction in meditation and yoga to people suffering a broad range of illnesses.

The Stress Reduction Clinic has been acclaimed for its achievements in helping individuals manage stress and pain. The clinic treats patients with ailments such as cancer, AIDS, anxiety, and hypertension. Kabat-Zinn attributes the success of the clinic to principles derived from long-lived religions and practices that remain relevant today, including those grounded in Buddhism, Taoism, and yoga. There is a reported fifty percent reduction in chronic pain experienced by participants, as well as increased function and improved outlook.

In 1990 Kabat-Zinn published Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. He defines "full catastrophe" as the full spectrum of stresses that we experience throughout life. He took the book's title from a line in Zorba the Greek, in which the lead character comments on the stresses of married life: "Wife, house, kids, everything … the full catastrophe." Kabat-Zinn is a proponent of "practiced mindfulness," which draws on various types of meditation, including conscious breathing and yoga, and advises users on how to begin by setting up a schedule. He writes of the eight-week program at the clinic that focuses on these methods and also includes mutual support. Atlantic contributor James S. Gordon noted that Kabat-Zinn "recognizes that meditation is primarily a way of being, rather than a means to an end. Its therapeutic efficacy is thus a byproduct rather than a goal."

Kabat-Zinn followed with Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. "Presented, like a 12-step reader, in little chapterbursts, this is a guide to pure meditation," wrote Ray Olson in Booklist. Throughout the book, Kabat-Zinn advises readers on how to employ practiced mindfulness as they go through their daily routine.

Kabat-Zinn and his wife, Myla, cowrote Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, in which they propose that mindfulness—which they define as "moment-to-moment, nonjudgmental awareness"—be practiced by parents. They note that children naturally live in the present. A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that through the authors' "own mindful teachings, readers may learn to appreciate the innate goodness and beauty of children."

In Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, Kabat-Zinn writes that "for any of us, perhaps our greatest potential regret may be that of not seizing the moment and honoring it for what it is when it is there." This lesson was made all the more poignant when Kabat-Zinn's father, an immunologist, lost his own moments because of Alzheimer's disease. In this volume, Kabat-Zinn draws not only on Buddhism but also on the wisdom of great thinkers, including Albert Einstein, who once said that "a human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe.'" A Publishers Weekly contributor called the book "a passionate tour de force that blends personal experience with cutting-edge science," and "poetry and insights culled from many traditions…. It is a treasure trove of contemporary wisdom."

Tracy Cochran interviewed Kabat-Zinn for Publishers Weekly and wrote that he "insists that Coming to Our Senses is not meant to be prescriptive." Cochran further noted that "the politics, he maintains, has to do with becoming aware of the effect that our views and our sense of entitlement is having on the rest of planet. The dangerous land that Americans really should be occupying for the sake of their own security and future happiness, in his view, lies between our own ears. 'We have to see the fear and the anger and the hatred or live with the consequences. If we're not willing to face things as they are then chances are that we're on a trajectory that's going to give rise to something truly catastrophic.'"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Atlantic, May, 1991, James S. Gordon, review of Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, p. 115.

Booklist, January 1, 1994, Ray Olson, review of Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, p. 789.

CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal, August 16, 2005, Tom A. Hutchinson, "Coming Home to Mindfulness in Medicine," p. 391.

Publishers Weekly, May 18, 1990, Molly McQuade, review of Full Catastrophe Living, p. 81; November 15, 1993, review of Wherever You Go, There You Are, p. 61; May 26, 1997, review of Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, p. 76; December 6, 2004, Tracy Cochran, "Mindful Writing: Jon Kabat-Zinn Asks Us to Come to Our Senses," p. 23; December 20, 2004, review of Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, p. 50.