Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., is familiar to viewers of the Bill Moyers' PBS series, "Healing and the Mind," from the early 1990s. He brought "mindfulness" or "mindfulness meditation" to the attention of the U.S. public through that series, focusing on his work at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. He's also the author of a number of books, including "Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness," from which the following two quotes are taken.
And here's what he has to say about healing:"Healing is a coming to terms with things as they are, rather than struggling to force them to be as they once were, or as we would like them to be, to feel secure or to have what we sometimes think of as our own way." -- Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.
And here's what he has to say about the power of meditation, which is part of how we are able to reach that equanimity:
"More than anything else I have come to see meditation as a radical act of love, an inward gesture of benevolence and kindness toward ourselves and toward others, a gesture of the heart that recognizes our perfection even in our obvious imperfection, with all our shortcomings, our wounds, our attachments, our vexations, and our persistent habits of unawareness." -- Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.Editor's note: Kabat-Zinn founded the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, an outgrowth of the famed Stress Reduction Clinic, "the oldest and largest academic medical center-based stress reduction program in the world." About that clinic: "Since 1979 more than 18,000 people have completed our eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program, an intensive training that asks participants to draw on their inner resources and natural capacity to actively engage in caring for themselves and finding greater balance, ease, and peace of mind."
The Center also has an outstanding bibliography of material about mindfulness-based approaches to various medical conditions, linked here. If you'd like to search their directory for a mindfulness-based stress reduction practitioner in your geographical area, click here.
