Jon Kabat-Zinn's Ability To Become Mindful?

All individuals have the capacity to become mindful, and as a result, mindfulness is often referred to as a practice. As mindfulness has become part of the mainstream, it’s definition as expanded. Depending on who is talking about mindfulness, it might be described as a mental state to be achieved, or, as a set of skills to be learned.

Jon Kabat-Zinn was introduced to meditation while he was a molecular biology Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studied meditation under Buddhist teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh and Seung Sahn, and integrated their teachings with his science background. In 1979, he founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he adapted Buddhist teachings to develop an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. Over the years, Kabat-Zinn has become internationally recognized as one of the foremost mindfulness teachers. He has written countless books on the topic, and his MBSR program has been adopted in clinics across the country. MBSR is also available as an online, …show more content…
He has spoken of mindfulness as a path to healing; as coming to terms with things as they are, so that individuals can optimize their potential. Kabat-Zinn has commented on the human tendency to want to distract oneself from the present moment, often so that unpleasant moments do not have to be experienced. Mindfulness encourages people to simply notice and observe what is happening, both internally and externally. It is not about changing an experience, getting to a better mental space, or trying to alter one’s feelings. It is simply about being where you are, in that particular moment in time. Over time, unpleasant experiences become more tolerable, and pleasant experiences that have perhaps gone unnoticed, become more fully integrated into