The Stress Reduction Program, founded by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979, has been featured in the Bill Moyers’ PBS documentary Healing and The Mind, on NBC Dateline, on ABC’s Chronicle and in various national print media and is the subject of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s best selling book, Full Catastrophe Living and Saki Santorelli’s book, Heal Thy Self. Since its inception, more than 17,000 people have completed our eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program and learned how to use their innate resources and abilities to respond more effectively to stress, pain, and illness. The central focus of the Clinic is intensive training in mindfulness meditation and its integration into the challenges/adventures of everyday life.
In 2007, partly as an outgrowth of the success of MBSR, I developed a curriculum for a grant-funded wellness program at my former university. We called that program "Mindfulness-Based Wellness" (MBW), and offered it to students, faculty, and staff in the Fall Semester of 2007. The program was very well-received and effective (participants showed significant improvements on many measures of factors related to wellness). We will be presenting research that arises out of that program at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in May; meanwhile, at this CFM meeting, I am very much looking forward to talking about the MBW program, other new programs, and the successes, challenges, and intriguing ideas that we are encountering, as we bring mindfulness meditation into the mainstream of health care and wellness.
One question that is particularly intriguing is the so-called "dosage" issue. MBSR, and other mindfulness-based interventions, all have the teaching and practice of meditation ("formal mindfulness practice") as a core intervention. Traditionally, in MBSR, participants are assigned homework of around 45 minutes of daily meditation practice. Many MBSR teachers and participants find that this assignment is quite daunting; in some programs, the homework requirement is relaxed in various ways. The idea is to make the programs both accessible AND effective; the challenge is to not "water down" the essential ingredient too much. In the MBW program, for example, rather than presenting homework as a fixed "requirement," we used an approach that was "invitational" in tone. It was more a matter of encouraging, than requiring. Our program participants responded well to this approach, reporting to us that they had, in fact, engaged in almost-daily formal meditation practice (5 or 6 days per week, somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-25 minutes per day). I will be interested in comparing notes with others who are working on this issue. I wrote an earlier post about this question, called "Are There Any Shortcuts?" here.
0 comments:
Post a Comment