Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness is a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, first published in 1990, revised in 2013, which describes the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center's Stress Reduction Clinic. In addition to describing the content and background of MBSR, Kabat-Zinn describes scientific research showing the medical benefits of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs), and lays out an approach to mind-body medicine emphasizing the depth of the interconnections between physical and mental health. The book has been called "one of the great classics of mind/body medicine", and has been seen as a landmark in the development of the secular mindfulness movement in the United States and internationally.
Background
Full Catastrophe Living grew out of the work of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center's Stress Reduction Clinic, founded in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn. The purpose of the Clinic was to "serve as a referral service for physicians and other health providers, to which they could send medical patients with a wide range of diagnoses and conditions who were not responding completely to more traditional treatments, or who were 'falling through the cracks' in the health care system altogether and not feeling satisfied with their medical treatments and outcomes." The Clinic's Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program, later renamed mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), aimed to help patients by providing a relatively intensive training in mindfulness meditation and mindful hatha yoga. This was done through an eight-week course, which, in the words of Kabat-Zinn,
was meant to serve as an educational (in the sense of inviting what is already present to come forth) vehicle through which people could assume a degree of responsibility for their own well-being and participate more fully in their own unique movement towards greater levels of health by cultivating and refining our innate capacity for paying attention and for a deep, penetrative seeing/sensing of the interconnectedness of apparently separate aspects of experience, many of which tend to hover beneath our ordinary level of awareness regarding both inner and outer experience. Kabat-Zinn composed Full Catastrophe Living with aim of capturing "the essence and spirit of the MBSR curriculum as it unfolds for our patients", while at the same time articulating "the dharma that underlies the curriculum, but without ever using the word 'Dharma' or invoking Buddhist thought or authority, since for obvious reasons, we do not teach MBSR in that way." Kabat-Zinn recalls his desire for the book to "embody ... the dharma essence of the Buddha's teachings" in a way that was "accessible to mainstream Americans", and to avoid "as much as possible the risk of it being seen as Buddhist, 'New Age,' 'Eastern Mysticism' or just plain 'flakey.'" In this connection, Kabat-Zinn experienced internal conflict over whether to include a letter of endorsement from Thich Nhat Hanh in the book's first edition, which was published in 1990. Kabat-Zinn felt that the letter "spoke deeply and directly to the essence of the original vision and intention of MBSR", but was also mindful that it "used the very foreign word dharma not once, but four times". Nhat Hanh's letter read as follows:
This very readable and practical book will be helpful in many ways. I believe many people will profit from it. Reading it, you will see that meditation is something that deals with our daily life. The book can be described as a door opening both on the dharma (from the side of the world) and on the world (from the side of the dharma). When the dharma is really taking care of the problems of life, it is true dharma. And this is what I appreciate most about the book. I thank the author for having written it. Eventually, Kabat-Zinn decided to include the letter in his book as a preface, judging that by 1990 "there was no longer as big a risk of our work being identified with a 'lunatic fringe'", due to the scientific evidence that had already emerged for MBSR's efficacy, as well as the accelerating interpenetration of the so-called "counter-culture" with America's mainstream culture.
Publication Full Catastrophe Living was first published in 1990 and went through numerous reprintings, before eventually being reissued in a revised second edition in 2013. The second edition refines the meditation instructions and descriptions of mindfulness-based approaches found in the first edition, and also reflects the "exponential" growth of scientific research into mindfulness and its clinical applications in the two decades after the book was first published.
Title The title Full Catastrophe Living is derived from the film Zorba the Greek, in which the title character says, in response to being asked whether he has ever married, "Am I not a man? Of course I've been married. Wife, house, kids ... the full catastrophe". According to Kabat-Zinn:
Zorba's response embodies a supreme appreciation for the richness of life and the inevitability of all its dilemmas, sorrows, traumas, tragedies, and ironies. His way is to "dance" in the gale of the full catastrophe, to celebrate life, to laugh with it and at himself, even in the face of personal failure and defeat. In doing so, he is never weighed down for long, never ultimately defeated either by the world or by his own considerable folly. Kabat-Zinn has written that his editor for the first edition of the book was concerned that including the word "catastrophe" in the title might "repel potential readers right from the start." However, Kabat-Zinn found that the phrase Full Catastrophe Living "just kept coming back", as it seemed to touch on "something very special that lies within us, our capacity for embracing the actuality of things, often when it seems utterly impossible, in ways that are healing and transforming, even in the face of the full catastrophe of the human condition."
Summary
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