For Stress Reduction, Meditate! | Psychology Today

For Stress Reduction, Meditate! | Psychology Today: "For Stress Reduction, Meditate!
An expert explains why meditation can help reduce stress.
By Bill Moyers, published on July 01, 1993 - last reviewed on August 20, 2007
Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., and director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, is internationally known for his work using meditation to help medical patients find relief from chronic pain and stress-related disorders. More important, perhaps, he brings to the arena of mind/body science a touch of the poet as well as the pragmatist, giving us the hows and whys of meditation in a language we don't often associate with the subject.

In this interview with Bill Moyers, Kabat-Zinn describes meditation as a way of being, a reservoir of stability and insight.

How do your patients react when you begin to talk with them about meditation?

One of the questions we had to answer right from the beginning was: Would this be so weird that nobody would be interested in doing it? People might say, 'What are you talking about? Meditation? Yoga? Give me a break!' Meditation had never been tried before in a medical center, so we had no idea whether mainstream Americans would accept a clinic whose foundation was intensive training in meditative discipline."