The history of mindfulness-based stress reduction
Mindfulness meditation entered public awareness through the pioneering work of Jon Kabat-Zinn (2007). In the late 1970s, he extracted a few basic meditation practices from their Buddhist framework to introduce them as universally applicable – non-spiritual – exercises. His endeavours were epitomised by developing the “Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction” programme, arguably the single most important step in establishing meditation as a secular, largely psychological and therapeutic practice.
Working at the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts, Medical Center, Kabat-Zinn initially administered his newly developed programme as a 10-week programme called “Stress Reduction & Relaxation Program” (Kabat-Zinn, 1982). Within a few years, this programme came to be known as “Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction“, or MBSR. A clinical-therapeutic approach was created, tailored to people with chronic pain for whom all other therapeutic approaches, medical and psychological, had not been successful. Soon after, the use of MBSR for other chronic psychological conditions, such as stress and anxiety, were trialled (Kabat-Zinn, Chapman, & Salmon, 1997; Kabat-Zinn, et al., 1992; Kabat-Zinn, et al., 1998; Miller, Fletcher, & Kabat-Zinn, 1995).
It is difficult to pinpoint when exactly the name transition from “Stress Reduction & Relaxation Program” to “Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction” came about. By 1992, Kabat-Zinn had shortened the SR&RP programme to 8 weeks and in some instances referred to it as ‘meditation-based stress reduction program’, and ‘mindfulness meditation-based stress reduction program’.
