Tension Between Promotion & Description of Mindfulness: Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Attempts to Secularize Mindfulness & The Losses Associated with It

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2024
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Haverford College. Department of Religion
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Thesis
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The Religion Prize
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eng
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Dark Archive until 01/01/2025. Afterwards Tri-college users only
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Abstract
Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the well-studied and popular Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, promotes mindfulness as non-spiritual and only related to Buddhism in origin. This message is reflected in some of what he writes in his bestselling books, Wherever You Go There You Are and Meditation Is Not What You Think. However, close reading of these two texts reveals both the Buddhist and spiritual elements of mindfulness as conceived by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Therefore, a tension exists between mindfulness as Kabat-Zinn promotes it and the picture one comes to have of mindfulness from reading his works. This tension is directly related to his goals of spreading mindfulness to a skeptical American community and his need for credibility within the scientific community. When Kabat-Zinn first wrote Wherever You Go in 1994, it would have been a great danger to his goals of spreading mindfulness to highlight either the Buddhist or spiritual elements. However, while there are still skeptics reluctant to include any mention of religion or spirituality, the scientific community is now more accepting of such topics than it once was. This gradual shift in the scientific community paired with the great popularity of mindfulness practices means that it is now a loss and not a risk for Kabat-Zinn to continue to try to separate mindfulness from Buddhism and spirituality in his representations of mindfulness to secular Americans and the scientific community.
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