MBSR has now spread to clinics, medical centers, and hospitals across the country and around the world. The guided meditations in this program are similar in some respects to those my colleagues and I use with our patients in the hospital when they take the MBSR program in the Stress Reduction Clinic.
That doesn’t mean this approach is just for people experiencing disease, chronic pain, or mental distress. Being universal, it is applicable to anybody who is motivated to optimize his or her well-being.
As we’ve seen, mindfulness meditation is really all about awareness: its quality, its stability, its reliability, and its capacity to free us from our own habits of self-diminishment and of ignoring what is most important in our lives. Mindfulness develops bare attention, discernment, clear seeing, and thus wisdom, where “wisdom” means knowing the actuality of things rather than being caught in our misperceptions and misapprehensions of reality. And those misperceptions and misapprehensions tend to be truly legion for all of us, no matter who we are, because it is so easy to be caught up in our own belief systems, ideas, opinions, and prejudices. They form a kind of veil or a cloud that often prevents us from seeing what is right in front of our faces or from acting in ways that truly reflect what we most care about and value. There may be times when our family members try to get through to us — out of love and out of desperation — to point out how much unnecessary suffering we are generating through what we may be refusing to see, or what we are taking so personally that we may be misconstruing it entirely.
But even in such circumstances, it is uncannily hard for anyone to get through to us. Usually we can’t hear it or don’t believe it, so caught up are we in the momentum of our own delusion and habits of self-distraction.