Coming to Our Senses

Excerpt from Coming To Our Senses
by Jon Kabat-Zinn (Hyperion, New York 2005)
(From the Chapter “Meditation Is Everywhere”)

“Picture this: Medical patients meditating and doing yoga in hospitals and medical centers around the country and around the world at the urging of their doctors. Sometimes it is even the doctors who are doing the teaching. Sometimes, doctors are taking the program and meditating shoulder to shoulder alongside the patients. . .

Mindfulness meditation has come to be taught in law firms and is currently offered to law students at Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Missouri, and elsewhere. An entire symposium on mindfulness and the law and alternative dispute resolution took place at Harvard Law School in 2002. . .

What is going on?

Business leaders attend rigorous five-day retreats offered by the Center for Mindfulness – that start at six o’clock each morning – because they want to train in mindfulness, reduce their stress, and bring greater awareness to, as we put it, the life of business and the business of life. Some pioneering schools, public and private alike, are instituting mindfulness programs at the elementary, middle school, and high school levels. During Phil Jackson’s era as coach of the Chicago Bulls, the team trained in and practiced mindfulness under the guidance of George Mumford, who headed our prison project and cofounded our inner-city MBSR clinic. When Jackson moved to Los Angeles to coach the Lakers, they too practiced mindfulness. Both teams were NBA champions, the Bulls four times (with George), and the Lakers three times. . . Prisons offer programs in meditation to inmates and staff alike, not only in this country, but also in places like the UK and India.

One summer I had the occasion to co-lead, with the Alaskan fisherman and meditation teacher Kurt Hoelting of Inside Passages, a meditation retreat for environmental activists that included, in addition to sitting meditation, yoga, and mindful walking, a good deal of mindful kayaking. The retreat took place on isolated outer islands in the vast Tebenkof Bay Wilderness Area in southeast Alaska, reached by float plane. When we got back to town after eight days in the wilderness, the cover story of Time magazine (August 4, 2003) was on meditation. The very fact that it was a cover story featuring detailed descriptions of the effects of meditation on the brain and on health was a bellwether of how meditation has entered and has been embraced by the mainstream of our culture. It is no longer a marginal engagement on the part of the very few or the easily dismissed as crazy.

Indeed, meditation centers are increasingly and surprisingly everywhere, offering retreats and classes and workshops, and more and more people are coming to them to learn and to practice together. .

What on earth is going on? You might say that we are in the early stages of waking up as a culture to the potential of interiority, to the power of cultivating awareness and an intimacy with stillness and silence. We are beginning to realize the power of the present moment to bring us greater clarity and insight, greater emotional stability, and wisdom. In a word, meditation is no longer something foreign and exotic to our culture. It is now as American as anything else. It has arrived. And none too soon either, given the state of the world and the huge forces impinging on our lives.”