Wherever You Go, There You Are
Worcester, Massachusetts (UMass Medical School) · 1994
J
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kabat-Zinn
1944 CE · Modern · New York City
b. June 5, 1944 (living)
Jon Kabat-Zinn (b. 1944) is an American scientist who created Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), a secular clinical program he founded at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979. Drawing on mindfulness practices he had learned in Buddhist settings, he deliberately removed religious framing and presented the practice in a medical and scientific context for use in hospitals and clinics. He is best understood not as a teacher within a Buddhist lineage but as the originator of a secular, clinical adaptation of mindfulness; his work has been hugely influential in healthcare and psychology. He continues to write and teach.
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Stop 1 of 2Born
New York CityUnited States
What they did here
Born in 1944; earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT and practiced meditation with teachers including Philip Kapleau and (later, in spirit) Thich Nhat Hanh.
About New York City
New York City, in the US state of New York, began as the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam in the 1620s, was renamed by the English in 1664, and took its present five-borough form in 1898. Its universities, Columbia among them (founded 1754), made it a major centre of science and scholarship; B. R. Ambedkar earned his doctorate in economics at Columbia. Union Theological Seminary, founded in 1836, counted Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich among its faculty and hosted Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a fellow in 1930, and the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky also worked in the city. In 1930 Sokei-an founded what became the First Zen Institute of America there, an early landmark of Buddhism in the United States.
In New York City at the same time
Sokei-an (Shigetsu Sasaki), B. R. Ambedkar, Pema Chödrön, Robert Thurman, Sharon Salzberg
Across the traditions, in New York City at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Across the traditions
In the same tradition
Sokei-an (Shigetsu Sasaki), B. R. Ambedkar, Pema Chödrön, Robert Thurman, Sharon Salzberg
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works(2)
Full Catastrophe Living
Worcester, Massachusetts (UMass Medical School) · 1990