Mindfulness – Many Approaches

Mindfulness By Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.

Watch and read our exclusive interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn

There are mindfulness based stress reduction clinics all around the world now.  In hospitals, in standalone, clinics and so forth.  Many therapists are bringing it into their practice.  So it’s very available. There’s mindfulness based cognitive therapy, which is based on really wonderful randomized clinical trials demonstrating that people with major depressive disorder, who’ve had three or more episodes of chronic depression, usually to the point where they need to be hospitalized and it lasts for, you know, six months or greater.  That if you take people like that and train them in eight weeks of mindfulness based cognitive therapy, after they have, when they’re not depressed because they’ve gotten better with antidepressants or cognitive therapy, then you have the rate of relapse.  And for people who have had three or more episodes of major depressive disorder, the relapse rate is over 90%.

It’s a gigantic problem in this society and causes society huge amounts of money.  And here it’s shown that training in mindfulness based cognitive therapy can halve the relapse rate.  That’s really quite extraordinary.  And it all has to do with learning how to be in wiser relationship to these tendencies to fall into depressive rumination where you get caught in your thoughts.  So there’s mindfulness based cognitive therapy, there’s mindfulness based relapse prevention for binge drinking in alcohol, there’s mindfulness based eating awareness training, there’s mindfulness-based childbirth and parenting. It’s now going on and on and there’s also mindfulness based psychotherapy.

There’s mindfulness informed psychotherapy where the psychotherapist isn’t actually teaching mindfulness, but they’re practicing it themselves and there are studies that are showing that when the therapist practices mindfulness, the outcomes of the therapy are much improved. Because you become the instrument for resonating or for attuning with the other.  And if you are actually recommending people be more mindful and more present and so forth, meanwhile, you’re out to lunch and you’re not practicing with your own mind coming and going and your own body doing this, that and the other, then, really, it’s going to be inauthentic and in, some sense, two dimensional.

Order the Full DVD Interview:

Mindfulness for Life: An Interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn

In this DVD, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as a way of “connecting to your life.” He discusses the “hard work” of living in the present moment, the personal and psychological impacts of developing a practice of mindfulness, and the benefits of utilizing mindfulness in therapy. He also touches upon mindfulness in parenting. Drawing upon his years of experience and research in the field of mindfulness, Dr. Kabat-Zinn offers an inspiring and instructive approach for mental health professionals and curious individuals alike.

About the Author

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. JON KABAT-ZINN, PH.D., is founding Executive Director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is also the founding director of its renowned Stress Reduction Clinic and Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He teaches mindfulness and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in various venues around the world.  He received his Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT in 1971 in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate, Salvador Luria. He is the author of numerous scientific papers on the clinical applications of mindfulness in medicine and health care, and of a number of books for the lay public:  Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness (Delta, 1991); Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life (Hyperion, 1994); Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness (Hyperion, 2005); and Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness (Hyperion, 2007).  He is also co-author, with his wife Myla, of Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting (Hyperion, 1997); and with Williams, Teasdale, and Segal, of The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness (Guilford, 2007).  Overall, his books have been translated into over 30 languages.

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