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Meditation and Self Hypnosis

By: Dr. Hollister J. Hyatt

Chapter 1: Introduction

Mindfulness-based stress reduction is a recent development in our nation's health care system. The original program was founded in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts. The program was designed to teach patients with chronic medical and mental health problems how to improve their health and the quality of their lives.

Until approximately 1990, the Stress Reduction Clinic offered the nation's only mindfulness-based stress reduction program associated with a health care setting. Then, in 1993, Kabat-Zinn and the Stress Reduction Clinic were featured on the Public Broadcasting Service television series "Healing and the Mind," with Bill Moyers. Many viewers were deeply touched by the series and the segment on the Stress Reduction Clinic, and there was an immediate explosion of interest among health care professionals and consumers in mindfulness-based stress reduction.

There are now more than a hundred health care settings that offer mindfulness-based stress reduction programs modeled on the University of Massachusetts Stress Reduction Clinic. The majority of the programs are in large medical centers, teaching hospitals, and health maintenance organizations. Some are at university health services, pain management clinics, and alternative health centers. A few are offered by physicians and psychotherapists in private practice. These programs are available primarily to middle- and working-class people.

Fetal monitors, ultrasound, continuous lumbar epidural anesthesia, pitocin augmentation, vacuum extraction, cesarean delivery...the list goes on. As medical management of labor and delivery becomes the norm in many US hospitals, the care received by the pregnant woman and her family becomes more impersonal. High-touch is frequently being replaced by high-tech. Women may be well prepared for their birth experience by childbirth educators, only to find that their birth plan and personal control are tossed out at the first sign or pain or a slowed labor. As one obstetric intervention is performed, another often follows. Although modern medicine can be credited with saving lives and easing the pain of many, for the majority of women birth is a natural process which shouldn't require so many interventions. Women need new options to prepare for childbirth so that they can become more active participants in

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