West Meets East - 0 views
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The new centers often were staffed by Western teachers,
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many of whom had first encountered meditation in the Peace Corps and later trained in monastic settings in the East
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Creating a new wisdom tradition
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None of us wanted ou
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supervisors or clinical teammates to think of us as having unresolved infantile longings to return to a state of oceanic oneness
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how radically meditation practices could transform the mind. Therapists of the day typically viewed meditation as either a fading hippie pursuit or a useful means of relaxation, but of little additional valu
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mindfulness meditation was making inroads into the medical community.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn, who, beginning in 1979, had adapted ancient Buddhist and yogic practices to create Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester.
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MBSR was used primarily to augment the treatment of stress-related medical disorders, and was of particular interest to clinicians working in behavioral medicine.
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The first use of mindfulness in psychotherapy to capture widespread attention among clinicians was Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), introduced in the early 1990s to treat suicidal individuals with complex disorders for which little else seemed to work.
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he central dialectic in DBT is the tension between acceptance and change.
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In searching for a means of helping therapists and their clients to experience what she called “radical acceptance”—fully embracing helplessness, terror, losses, and other painful facts of life
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Because she empirically demonstrated that DBT could help challenging and volatile patients, the method rapidly became popular
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he next big development came from Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale, cognitive psychologists in the tradition of Aaron Beck, who were working on treatments for depression in the 1990s
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They came across mindfulness practice through Jon Kabat-Zinn and MBSR
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Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which combined elements of an 8-week MBSR course with cognitive therapy interventions designed to help patients gain perspective on their thinking and not identify with their depressive thou
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ghts.
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This standardized, 8-week course couched meditation practices in Western, scientific terms
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“the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, and nonjudgmentally, to the unfolding of experience moment to moment
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Steven Hayes and his colleagues had
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radical philosophical orientation that they called “relational frame theory.”
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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which they describe as a psy
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chological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility
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ACT doesn’t teach many formal meditation practices, but uses imagery, metaphor, and brief exercises to cultivate awareness of the present, loosen identification with thought, and increase openness to the experience of moment-to-moment change
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ACT encourages clients to identify and pursue activities that give life meaning.
