When Every Medical Treatment Failed, This Helped

Modern medicine works wonders for some conditions and is impotent for others. For ailments like chronic pain, asthma, fibromyalgia, hypertension, or gastrointestinal disorders, there are no clear solutions. Treatments, if they work, often have dangerous side effects that may outweigh their benefits.

Jon Kabat-Zinn made these elusive illnesses his target. His weapon was meditation.

In 1979, when he opened the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, few medical professionals acknowledged the effect of the mind on the body. Treating illness with a mental intervention wasn’t in their arsenal. In fact, it was considered a fringe idea.

The idea for a clinic that treated patients with meditation might have been dismissed completely, except for one thing. Kabat-Zinn had the credentials that made some people take him seriously.

Kabat-Zinn discovered meditation in graduate school. He found it so helpful that he determined to make it his life’s work. With a Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT and a position as a medical professor, he hoped to validate the effects while demystifying meditation.

In 1979 Kabat -Zinn established the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. To fill the clinic, Kabat-Zinn asked doctors to refer patients for mindfulness “treatment.” Even today, this is an innovative idea, but at the time it was considered irrational.

So who did the first referring doctors at the hospital send to the clinic? The patients they had given up on. They referred patients whose best solution may have been a harmful medication or who continued to suffer after they used medication.

After every possible medical intervention had failed or when the side effects of treatments were worse than the benefits, meditation was the last resort.

The treatment was an 8-week course with an awkward start

On the first day of the meditation clinic, patients sat in a circle. A few who were in so much pain that they couldn’t sit laid down. Each person was given a box of raisins and was asked to take out only one. Spending as much time as possible, they tried to experience the raisin slowly, with all their senses.

This exercise was a door into the practice of mindfulness, where you observe something else familiar — your breath — in a new way. Meditation uses the breath as an anchor. When your mind drifts, you bring your focus back to it.

This seemingly ordinary practice teaches you to focus on what’s right in front of you. You train your mind like you would train a muscle. Like exercising, meditation requires consistent practice to yield results. The practice may be simple but the results can be extraordinary.

How Changing The Mind Changed The Body

After eight weeks of mindfulness meditation training, and ongoing practice, many of Kabat-Zinn’s “hopeless” cases were better. They were better in unexpected ways. Their quality of life improved.

Patients who experienced unremitting pain learned to experience that pain differently. Terminally ill patients living moment-to-moment with dread and terror of the approaching end of their lives were able to experience the days left without constant fear. They were able to enjoy the time they had left with their loved ones.

Mindfulness is not what you think

Many people think mindfulness is about clearing your mind. It’s not. But you do discover what’s going on in your mind. And, you would be surprised. It is stunning to learn how much thinking and feeling is going on without your knowledge.

Imagine that your thoughts were coming from someone else walking next to you all day. That person would be poking you, pushing you, calling you names, telling you things about yourself and the people around you, freaking you out about what might happen tomorrow, and showing you films of your worst moments in the past. At the end of the day, you would feel frightened, upset, and tense, but you wouldn’t know why.

To find out what’s on your mind, instead of checking Instagram, reading emails, watching Netflix, and organizing your closet, you need to be quiet and observe those thoughts. Even though we do everything possible to avoid knowing our thoughts, they are much less fearsome and harmful when shown the light of day.

Meditation also teaches you to be aware of what’s happening right in front of you, right now outside of your mind. This can affect your decision-making and your relationships.

I’ve practiced mindfulness meditation on and off for twenty years. It was the story of Kabat-Zinn’s clinic that convinced me.

Mindfulness is a tool for life. You don’t have to be sick to use it.

You don't have to suffer from painful, debilitating diseases to benefit. Life offers plenty of painful, debilitating experiences.

Mindfulness doesn’t fix problems, any more than it cures diseases. But since there is no cure for life’s obstacles, it can help. I’ve found that a regular meditation practice helps face the inevitable difficulties with more composure. It makes them less frightening. For those benefits, it beats the alternatives that most people use to feel better when times are tough.