Understand what the MBSR program is and what practice commitment it requires, and get to know the attention triangle: the observation tool you'll use throughout every week of the course.
Welcome. You are about to begin an eight-week program — not an introductory course or a collection of stand-alone videos. MBSR stands for Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. His proposal, novel at the time, was to take mindfulness practices and present them in a completely secular way, with no religious or spiritual framework, so they could be integrated into a medical setting and studied with the same rigor as any other clinical intervention.
More than four decades later, MBSR is probably the most researched mindfulness program in the world. It has been studied in the context of chronic pain, anxiety, relapse prevention for depression, and stress reduction in the general population. That body of evidence is also the reason the program lasts eight weeks rather than two or three: changes in attention patterns and in reactivity to stress require sustained repetition. The brain changes through repeated practice — what neuroscience calls neuroplasticity — and that change takes time, not an intensive weekend.
The program combines two types of practice that support each other. Formal practice is the time you set aside each day to sit, lie down, or move with the sole intention of training attention: the body scan, sitting meditation, mindful yoga. Informal practice is bringing that same quality of attention to the ordinary moments of the day — showering, walking, eating — without adding any extra time to your schedule. Both are equally important, and you will work with them starting this first week.
Before starting the first formal practice, in the next lesson, this first class introduces the tool that runs through the whole course: the attention triangle.
