Abstract
Objective: A historical study of the background, needs, and evolution of Mindfulness.
Background: Understanding evolution is important to understand the real meaning of mindfulness. Confusion exists about what this is and what is the link to a religion, resulting in aversion to the methods.
Design/Methods: An extensive modern literature search including English translations of the Pali cannon of Buddhist scripts.
Results: Buddha preached mindfulness in India about 25 centuries ago to monks and nuns. The purpose was to lessen suffering by mastering the causes of suffering. The four foundations were body-awareness, sensation-awareness, feeling-awareness and thought awareness. For the first component, a constant awareness of breathing activities was stressed as an essential step. In 1960s, exiled or immigrated Buddhist monks from Tibet and Vietnam, such as Suzuki, Thich Nhat hanh, chogyam Trungpa and Dalai Lama brought mindfulness to America. It was still a religious method.
Jon Kabat-Zinn can be regarded as the pioneer for teaching MBSR, without the tinge of religion to students in the University of Massachusetts. Several branches of such training established in various parts of the US owe to the Boston club.
MBCT was the creation of three clinical psychologists, Teasdale (Cambridge), Williams (Oxford) and Segal (Canada) based on neuro-scientific theories of Barnard and Teasdale from Cambridge. The methods, well popularized, are now finding their use in patients with chronic pain, depression, anxiety, ALS, Epilepsy and neuromuscular diseases.
Mindfulness is in focus for its role in mastering thoughts, improving Emotional Intelligence, improving a sense of well-being and inter-professional relationship, decreasing conflicts. It goes a long way in dwarfing de-personalization which if unabated, paves the road to blocking critical thinking and leading to Burnout.
Conclusions: Mindfulness has been delinked with any particular religion. The modern concept is a western one, and is being used with increasing interest by psychologists and neurologists of the day.
Study Supported by: None.
Disclosure: Dr. Bandyopadhyay has nothing to disclose.
Letters: Rapid online correspondence
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