How I Helped Bring Mindfulness to The Western World

In this series, professionals discuss their experiences accomplishing something for the first time. Read their stories here, then write your own using #IWasTheFirst in the body of the post. 

There is a long history of Western interest in Eastern ideas about the self and meditation. This goes back at least to the Greeks, who had their own “mystery schools” within their philosophic tradition. Alexander the great, a student of Aristotle, met yogis in what is now Pakistan, and brought one along with him. The American Transcendalists like Emerson and Thoreau were enthralled by some of the earliest translations into English of Buddhist texts. The Beats of the 1960s, like Alan Ginsberg, embraced Buddhism in the form of Zen (and for Ginsberg, later, Tibetan versions). Another stream that brought mindfulness to the West was from the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and the various Zen teachers.

A latecomer to this party was the version of mindfulness that has come to the West from Asia, which has its roots in vipassana practices of Burma and Thailand. It is this stream of mindfulness that I was an early advocate for, along with other forms of meditation. This, I argued in a variety of ways, was an upgrade for the mind with tremendous value for handling stress.

In the fall of 1970, in India on a Harvard pre-doctoral traveling fellowship, I found myself at a ten-day course in mindfulness. We learned to scan the sensations throughout our body, and let go of whatever thoughts or feelings arose. This non-judgmental, hovering inner awareness changed our relationship to our own minds, freeing us from the grip of emotional reactivity.

Excited by this new method for working with the mind, on my return to Harvard I told my professors I wanted to do my doctoral research on how meditations like mindfulness could help people recover more quickly from stress. They thought I was nuts. Despite the pushback, I did my research on meditation as a way to recover from stress – and got encouraging results which have since been validated by research showing this method eases stress, anxiety, and depression.

In the mid-1970s, I began teaching mindfulness meditation in New York City, first to small private groups, and then larger classes at the 63d St. Y. At about that time I also made instructional audios for meditation - in those days they were cassettes. At the time there was nowhere near the interest nor enthusiasm for mindfulness that there is today.

My Colleagues, and Personal Contribution

There have been two parallel tracks that were the early roots of the current enthusiasm for mindfulness. One, as embodied at vipassana centers like Spirit Rock in California and Insight Meditation Society, has been led by Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg (IMS), and Jack Kornfield (Spirit Rock). The other is via Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and is best-known as the spokesperson for mindfulness as it has spread.

Let me clarify my own role, which is little known, as an early helper in this movement to bring mindfulness to the West. In 1970, I met Joseph Goldstein who was then studying vipassana in Bodh Gaya. I took a series of courses with one of his early teachers, S.N. Goenka, as well as instruction from his main teacher Anagarika Munindra. Sharon Salzberg joined us there.

At about this time, I started writing a series of articles in psychology journals advocating the importance of this version of mindfulness as a model of the mind and practical method for transformation that revised modern psychology’s view of human potential. I expanded on those articles in a 1976 book, The Meditative Mind.

Meanwhile, on returning from India to finish my dissertation at Harvard, my study looked at meditation as an intervention in stress recovery, hoping to show that these methods could be potent psychological tools. My best friend there, Richard Davidson, also studied how such practices could sharpen attention. At the time we did this research, the number of published academic articles on the benefits of mindfulness was zero – hard to believe given that today there are hundreds every year.

When we went to the University of Massachusetts to give a talk in 1972 on this, nobody showed up. People were far more interested in psychedelics in those days. On the other hand, I also gave a talk to a psychology society, where I met Jack Kornfield – formerly a monk, but then a grad student in psychology. I encouraged him to teach meditation.

And one friend from Cambridge who was interested was Jon Kabat-Zinn. Jonny, as we know him, had been studying with a Zen teacher, as well as being a student of yoga. He went to one of the first vipassana courses, given by a Westerner, Robert Hover, and had an epiphany: he envisioned what has become MBSR, mindfulness-based stress reduction. He began his program at the University of Massachusetts in 1979 – and in his early writings cited my research and Davidson’s as evidence that his method could have psychological benefit.

In those days, there were just a handful of us who saw the potential benefits for the modern world of methods like mindfulness – and we all did our parts in fulfilling that promise.

Impact on My Work

In some ways, I’ve had an invisible hand in the spread of mindfulness. My insights into the power of mindfulness informed my thinking about emotional intelligence, especially the power of self-awareness, one of twelve competencies in managing ourselves and our relationships effectively. Self-Awareness means being able to recognize your feelings and how they affect you and your performance at work and in everything you do. Mindfulness meditation is a highly effective tool for developing awareness of our emotions.

In addition, self-awareness offers a basis for managing ourselves well – another emotional intelligence competency, Emotional Self-Control, or what I call Emotional Balance. In fact, research has shown that being self-aware is key to being able to develop all other aspects of emotional intelligence.

Some years back, I gave a talk at Google that sparked a course at Google U. on mindfulness and emotional intelligence. Meng, the Googler who had invited me, took that course to scale with his book Search Inside Yourself.

More visibly, to hasten mindfulness going to scale – and keep it there for generations to come – my last book, FOCUS: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, detailed the benefits of a concentrated, mindful awareness – and proposed we teach these skills to our children. In a Harvard Business Review article, I argued that executives need a mindful awareness of themselves, of others, and of the systems they operate in. That won the McKinsey Award for best HBR article of 2014.

New Insights and Current Applications

By now, of course, mindfulness has become commonplace in many arenas because the research has caught up. That’s one reason emergency room doctors are learning mindfulness, why top executives use it as a tool for keeping their clarity while dealing with pressures at the top, and why children growing up in dire circumstances are being taught mindfulness in school. That’s why troops who face war zones where they may be traumatized are being taught mindfulness.

With Richard Davidson, now a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, I have been scouring what are now thousands of academic studies of meditation, to find the strongest ones. It’s a way of coming full circle for me. We will deliver our findings in a book, to be published in September, 2017.

In 1970, when I first tried to spark interest about mindfulness and other kinds of meditation among psychologists, I never could have imagined that it would be as widely embraced as it is today. I couldn’t foresee that someday there would be a deluge of studies on its impact. But I knew how powerful it was for my own life and I held on to that conviction. Being a pioneer isn’t always easy; it takes time for other people to come around to new ideas. But if you stick with your convictions, you may be surprised at how popular your idea may become.  

Want to Learn More?

Curious about mindfulness meditation and how it impacts stress? I created a series of audio exercises that provide a taste of the benefits of mindfulness. Interested in learning more about emotional intelligence?

My new video series, Crucial Competence: Building Emotional and Social Leadership, offers an introduction to the 12 emotional intelligence competencies used by high-performing leaders.