Author: Jon Kabat-Zinn

Kabat-Zinn took a doctorate in molecular biology at MIT, then founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts in 1979 and built Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, an eight-week course that deliberately stripped out the Buddhist framing so that hospitals would adopt it. They did, in enormous numbers. Full Catastrophe Living is the manual. The trial evidence is real but more modest than the popular claims, showing useful effects for chronic pain, anxiety and relapse in depression rather than for everything. Buddhist teachers have argued for decades that removing the ethics from the practice removes the point of it.