Day 3
S.N. Goenka, the teacher of this technique, offers only the meditation technique of “the body scan.” A copper-skinned bullfrog of a man with a sonorous baritone voice, he instructs us to scan from our feet to “the top of de head” over and over. The amount of sensations that reveal themselves is staggering—numbness, density, tingling, lightness. The amount of variation possible in the same body part over an hour is shocking, as well as the way some sensations don’t change. Who knew that all this was present all the time? Also, how many different ways can my legs hurt?
How Meditation Entered American Psychotherapy
The journey of meditation from ancient spiritual practice to mainstream therapeutic intervention is a story of cultural translation, scientific validation and, depending on your perspective, potentially cultural appropriation and misunderstanding.
The 1960s Cultural Revolution
The first wave came with the counterculture movement of the 1960s, when young Americans began exploring “Eastern” spirituality as an alternative to conventional “Western” religion and psychology. Beat poets, hippies, and spiritual seekers brought back meditation practices from trips to India and encounters with Eastern teachers. This initial introduction was largely experiential and spiritual, with little scientific framework. Psychologists like Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary promoted psychedelics as a way of radically transforming the mind and society. Alpert later became a serious, serious devotee of meditation and Hinduism, changed his name to “Ram Dass” and became a meditation teacher.
(There’s a great book, Zig Zag Zen that explores the connections between psychedelic use and the birth of American Buddhism for those curious. Spoiler alert, the psychedelics were kind of a big part of the picture. When early psychonauts would trip balls and try to describe the experience, no one knew what the heck they were talking about. No one except meditation teachers, who had inherited a lineage of consciousness mapping and exploration and could offer context to these unusual adventures, and had experienced similar things in intensive meditation.)
Jon Kabat-Zinn and the Medical Revolution
While this wave introduced meditation to the American mainstream, it remained a relatively “fringe” practice associated withCalifornian hippies, oddballs, and n’er-do-wells from the purview of the scientific establishment and culture at large. (Of course, it also existed in immigrant communities who brought their religious and cultural frameworks to America, but this also didn’t register.)
The synthesis came in 1979 when Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist trained in Zen meditation, founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.¹ Kabat-Zinn developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an eight-week program that extracted meditation techniques and philosophy from their Buddhist context and presented them in secular, medical terms. Interestingly, he recruited for the study by telling the medical community “Give me everyone you’re not able to help.” This was comprised of folks who suffered from chronic pain that wasn’t well managed by medication, folks with chronic illnesses that Western Medicine wasn’t particularly adept at healing, and people with complex medical presentations along with psychological suffering.
The initial studies made waves because meditation worked, and it worked in concrete, measurable ways. MBSR was revolutionary because it made meditation acceptable to mainstream medicine by finding ways to concretely manage symptom reduction (blood pressure decreasing, for example) and synthesizing it with people’s subjective experience of improvement. Kabat-Zinn carefully avoided religious language, focusing instead on practical stress reduction and pain management. This “stealth Buddhism,” as some called it, allowed meditation to enter hospitals, medical schools, and eventually therapy offices without triggering resistance from secular institutions.
And, again, it helped that the program actually worked in ways science could understand. It showed measurable results: reduced chronic pain, lowered anxiety, improved immune function, lower blood pressure, and better quality of life. For the first time, meditation had rigorous scientific backing. Although, interestingly, the research revealed another interesting tidbit: If the person teaching the class was not themselves a serious meditator the outcomes were dramatically hamstrung. So it became a requirement for people teaching the course to have a serious, sustained practice.
I’ve taught these classes and I’ve seen firsthand how extraordinary the results can be. It’s dangerous in my line of work to offer guarantees. People are just too complex and varied, life too weird and unpredictable, to be able to promise specific outcomes. That said, I will tell people that if they participate in an eight-week MBSR course, which includes meditating an hour per day six days per week for the duration, I’m almost willing to bet my psychology license that something will shift for them.
If you’re interested in learning more, Kabat-Zinn wrote a spectacular, if long, book called “Full Catastrophe Living” that integrates the treatment protocol, the results of the study, anecdotes from teaching, and “stealth Buddhism.”² (The name is a quote from the movie Zorba the Greek. Zorba, a complex, exuberant, but deeply vital man befriends Basil, an uptight, restricted intellectual, and helps him rediscover his zest for life. And start a mining company. At some point, Basil asks Zorba, “Are you married?” Zorba responds in his characteristic bellicose and full-bodied way “Am I not a man? And is not a man stupid? I’m a man, so I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe.” The title of the book implies that to live well, we don’t restrict our lives but embrace the fullness of it, catastrophes and all.)
The Integration into Psychotherapy
Therapists tend to be a rather experimental lot, so many had been meditating since it made its way over to the states. But the MBSR studies gave the practice legitimacy and caught the attention of both medicine and academia. Building on MBSR’s success, psychologists began incorporating mindfulness into established therapeutic approaches more openly and with more rigor, and with the back and blessing of Academia:
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), developed by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, and Zindel Segal in the 1990s, combined MBSR techniques with cognitive therapy to prevent depression relapse.³ MBCT teaches people to observe their thoughts without getting caught up in them—a radical departure from traditional cognitive therapy’s focus on changing thought content.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), created by Marsha Linehan, integrated Zen mindfulness practices with cognitive-behavioral techniques to treat borderline personality disorder (BPD). Linehan, herself a Zen practitioner, made mindfulness one of DBT’s four core skill modules. Though its focus was originally on BPD, most people find its techniques and approach helpful.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), developed by Steven Hayes, uses mindfulness and acceptance strategies to help people develop psychological flexibility—the ability to stay present with difficult experiences rather than avoiding them. Personally, I have the most experience with ACT, having spent a full year in graduate school immersing myself in its techniques and approach, and working at a clinic that focused on its application. In fact, it was when I began using ACT as a therapist, and teaching patients how to meditate, that I felt I needed to get serious about my own meditation practice. After all, if I was going to be recommending this, I should really know it. It’s vignettes from this first retreat that appear at the beginning of these articles.
At the risk of getting too insider baseball, these are known as “third-wave behavioral theories.” They marked a fundamental shift in psychology’s approach to difficult emotions and thoughts. The first wave of behavioral theory, a reaction to the obtuse and arcane excesses of psychoanalysis, completely eschewed humans’ internal world and focused only on measurable behavior. Second wave behavioral therapy, the famous Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) returned to people’s internal world and focused on the reciprocal way thoughts, feelings, and behaviors all influenced each other. The goal of therapy was to work on changing one of those, which would generalize to the other two. Third wave behavioral therapy came about as research and experience returned with an inconvenient truth – we aren’t any good at changing our thoughts and, in fact, trying to change them or to stop certain thoughts often makes people worse! Incorporating mindfulness allowed people to accept, rather than change, their thoughts. Rather than trying to eliminate symptoms, they taught acceptance and awareness as pathways to psychological health.
The Transformation and Its Costs
Depending on your perspective or seat in the house, this integration and shift represented either triumph, loss, or both. Meditation gained scientific credibility and, having adapted to cultural hegemony of scientific consensus, became legitimized in mainstream society. As a result, it became available to millions of people, many of whom were profoundly helped.
However, the ethical framework (Sila) and community support (Sangha) that traditionally accompanied meditation practice were largely stripped away. What remained was technique without context—mindfulness as a skill rather than a way of life.
Some critics argue this “McMindfulness” approach commodifies and trivializes practices that were meant to transform consciousness, not just reduce stress. Others counter that this secular adaptation has made life-changing techniques accessible to people who would never have encountered them otherwise and protects us from aspects of practice that aren’t as central to its benefits, or even helps limit dangerous and superstitious dogma.
Critics say that this adaptation, at its worst, turned meditation into a commodity as it was sucked up and widget-ified in the great, rapacious engine of capitalism. What impact does it have on the techniques and teachings when they’re a product one pays for as opposed to a practice one finds and learns from ascetics who eschew money and ownership and work only for dana (donations)? How does it change the practice when one expects and pays for results as opposed to a practice in which one sits in order to know oneself more deeply and to become more alive, or to seek enlightenment and to go beyond suffering?
Additionally, meditation was offered in a direct relationship with a teacher. I underestimated the importance of this early on in my own practice and suffered as a result. If you begin to sit long enough and regularly enough, the stress reduction aspect of meditation takes more of back seat and other things begin to arise – neuroses, weird physical sensations, experiences out of step with daily life. And it can be boring. So, so, so boring. Or you could catch some psychic tailwind and ride some really groovy experiences into the peaks of the psyche – visions, ecstasies, powerful transcendence. A teacher can help you sort through all that, can help you see your own limits, can talk to you about the paths they’ve walked. An app just cannot. As one of my favorite authors, Brad Warner, a zen priest and punk rocker, pointed out, everyone who meditates long enough has a moment where they think they’re the next Jesus. A good teacher will hit you on the head and tell you to shut up and just wait for that to go away. A future post will cover these risks in much more detail.
And, as such things often are, the actual landscape is complex and nuanced. Capitalism and commercialism propelled meditation in the mainstream “like whoa.” There are many people who started a meditation practice to simply reduce stress who have had insights that led them into a more intensive spiritual practice and community. Monasticism and teaching meditation through the avenues of a religion had its own limitations and challenges, its own bureaucratic and cultural baggage. There are others who are enchanted by the excitement of a spiritual quest who find meditation to be unfulfilling, or they have the misfortune of winding up as part of a profoundly unhealthy, exploitative spiritual group.
Real life tends to defy easy answers, but rather presents itself as an unfolding mandala of positive and negative, success and failure, triumphs and catastrophes.
Next week: What Does Science Actually Say About Meditation?
References – Post 3
- Kabat-Zinn, J. (1982). An outpatient program in behavioral medicine for chronic pain patients based on the practice of mindfulness meditation: Theoretical considerations and preliminary results. General Hospital Psychiatry, 4, 33–47.
- Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full catastrophe living: How to cope with stress, pain and illness using mindfulness meditation. New York: Bantam Dell.
- Segal, Z. V., Williams, J. M. G., & Teasdale, J. D. (2002). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression: A new approach to preventing relapse. Guilford Press.
