This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program Jon Kabat-Zinn founded at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979 grew beyond its original clinical setting. He went on to found the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the same institution, building an organizational home for the secular mindfulness format he had adapted from Buddhist meditation practice.
Kabat-Zinn also wrote a series of books built around the program, most prominently Full Catastrophe Living in 1990, which set out the eight week clinical approach and the reasoning behind adapting Buddhist mindfulness into a secular format for patients dealing with chronic pain and stress related illness.
Those books, together with the program and center he had founded, carried Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and the broader term mindfulness into mainstream American medicine, psychology and popular culture well beyond the single hospital program where it began. What started as one molecular biologist's adaptation of his own meditation practice into a clinical trial became, through that combination of institution and published work, a term recognized far outside medicine altogether, recognized today well beyond the hospital corridors where the program first began treating patients.