Week 12 · modern

Jon Kabat-Zinn

In 1979, an MIT-trained molecular biologist walked into a hospital basement and started teaching chronic pain patients to meditate. His colleagues thought he was nuts. The patients had tried everything. Jon Kabat-Zinn gave them an eight-week program called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and the results were so dramatic that hospitals couldn't ignore them. He'd built a bridge between Buddhism and Western medicine that nobody thought was possible.

“"You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf." He wrote that for patients who'd been told their pain was permanent. It was the first thing that actually helped.”