Mindfulness is a state of mind that is characterized by the awareness of someone’s physical experiences, feelings and thoughts, without having an automatic reaction and having an opinion right away. To work towards mindfulness you can do training, meditation and other attention exercises. Mindfulness is getting more popular, but how did it actually come into being? You can read more about the history of mindfulness in this article!

Buddhistic origin
Mindfulness is a term that originates from Anglo-Saxon language, whose origins lie in Buddhism. Buddha (560 yr BC) has dedicated his life to investigating the causes of suffering in the world, and especially why suffering persists. He has devised ways to reduce suffering and free people from it. According to him, suffering is caused by ourselves, we are inclined to attach ourselves to pleasant experiences and to turn ourselves against unpleasant experiences. An attitude of friendly attention and attention is the way to suffer no longe and to have peace with ourselves and the situation, even when the situation is uncomfortable.

The founding father Jon
The American Jon Kabat-Zinn was the first to get the concept of mindfulness out of his Buddhist context and developed an eight-week training course, namely mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) training. In Dutch this is also called the attention training. As the name says, the development or improvement of attention is central. Jon worked at the University of Massachusetts academic hospital. It struck him that people who could not be treated anymore because of their terminal illness, had to face an agony. People with a terminal illness were often told that they had to ‘deal’ with their illness, but nobody could tell them how.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is a molecular biologist and he also has a lot of experience with meditation and yoga. With the knowledge of both areas he developed a training with the aim to provide patients with means to improve their quality of life.

Jon takes over
In 1979 Jon Kabat-Zinn opened the ‘Stress Reduction Clinic’ at the hospital of his university, which was later called ‘the Center for Mindfulness’. The training sessions proved to be successful: many patients appeared to benefit from the training and the effectiveness was confirmed by scientific research.

More and more therapists came to Massachusetts for an education. Thousands of people have now followed the training. To this day, Jon is giving seminars, workshops and lectures about mindfulness worldwide.