ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we describe some of the historical conditions that made possible Kabat-Zinn’s (1990) very successful use of mindfulness in his stress management program and the subsequent extraordinary spread of this practice as it infiltrated psychotherapy in all its forms throughout America and Europe. The ground had been well prepared by the nonjudgemental acceptance of people and symptoms by Humanistic psychotherapists, and by the increasing assimilation of Buddhist ideas into Western psychology and psychotherapy. There was little new in it, and in some ways Kabat-Zinn’s work has been a brilliant exercise in pure entrepreneurship. He started a bandwagon and other therapists, including Albert Ellis, were quick to jump aboard. This was helped by a useful vagueness in the word. “Mindfulness”, as the translation of the Pali sati, came to refer to both the manualised practice that provides the evidence for its efficacy in the hands of Kabat-Zinn and others, and the more complex process of clear comprehension and recollection that is described in his more discursive writings, and which is similar to Ellen Langer’s use of “mindfulness” in her 1989 book of that name.
