In 1976, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzburg founded the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts. By the 1970s, three main sources of meditation-focused teaching appeared “that would become the most important wellsprings of the American mindfulness movement,” wrote Wilson (2014, 31). Some of these students traveled to South Asia to study Buddhism or discovered meditation as part of the Peace Corp. Courses on Buddhism at the university level soon followed, offerings that were popular among students seeking counterculture alternatives to Western paradigms. Yet despite this interest, meditation did not emerge as a focus in the United States and Europe until the 1960s.ĭuring this decade, reforms in immigration policy enabled hundreds of thousands of Asians to emigrate to the United States, including several prominent Tibetan and Zen missionaries who founded Buddhist centers and toured college campuses. During the mid-nineteenth century, as trade with Asia increased, Westerners began to take an interest in Buddhist teaching by way of pamphlets, books, and journals. For the ordained seeking the path to enlightenment, meditation was an instrument to facilitate asceticism, detachment, and renunciation, wrote Wilson (2014). Historically, in Asian Buddhist cultures, monks and nuns practiced meditation, not the broader population. All three strands of Buddhism influence approaches to mindfulness today.
But as the University of British Columbia’s Jeff Wilson (2014) detailed in his book-length study of America’s mindfulness movement, similar breath-attention techniques are found in Tibetan Buddhism and in the Japanese Zen meditation practice of zazen. The concept of “mindfulness” traces to the Pali words sati, which in the Indian Buddhist tradition implies awareness, attention, or alertness, and vipassana, which means insight cultivated by meditation. This article appeared in the May/June 2017 issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. Meditation is similarly taught in schools and colleges as a way to help students (and teachers) better regulate their emotions, to improve concentration, and to manage stress and anxiety (Harrington and Dunne 2015).
Mindful movement meditation professional#
Professional athletes use meditation to improve their performance, as do CEOs and Silicon Valley programmers. With its roots in Buddhism, meditation is used widely by health professionals to treat depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, pain, insomnia, eating disorders, relationship problems, and other conditions. The story of the movement’s origins, the process by which it has gained scientific legitimacy, and its rise to popularity among well-educated, affluent Americans is fascinating and revealing. Inspired by my own experience, I began to read widely on the history, philosophy, and science of mindfulness. I felt happier, more content, and more at ease. I was quicker and more adept at recognizing how unrealistic expectations or unfounded worries were causing unnecessary stress. Meditation seemed to slow time down, enabling me to live and work in the present rather than worry about the future. 2007).Īfter several months of daily meditation, I noticed significant benefits. I learned, as psychologists describe, that the contents of my conscientiousness could be observed, and that the accompanying emotional reactions to them were seldom grounded in reality (Brown et al. For example, if a thought about the need to finish a column for this magazine popped into my head, I would silently label the thought “worry,” before returning to focus on my breath. The practice was not about making my mind empty or blank but simply letting my mind be at rest.Īs thoughts or feelings inevitably arose, I would observe them without judging them. Sitting in a quiet room, outside at a park, or on the train to work, I would assume an upright relaxed position and focus on my breath. A few years ago, I took up the regular practice of meditation.
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