Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness

The author explains that meditation is a form of non-doing, since practitioners are not striving to accomplish a certain task or arrive at a particular destination, even mentally or emotionally. In his work Kabat-Zinn emphasizes that non-doing is an antidote to people’s busy lives, in which they are constantly thinking and striving for something.

Participatory medicine is an approach to practicing medicine which, according to Kabat-Zinn, is growing in popularity. Physicians who practice participatory medicine value their patients’ perspectives in how they receive care and recognize the human body’s capacity for transformation and healing. Kabat-Zinn praises this approach, which he feels is more dignified and egalitarian for the patient and empowers the patient by giving them a sense of control and better understanding of how their behaviors affect their health.

The prefrontal cortex is the region of the brain located just behind the forehead. The last section of the brain to evolve, the prefrontal cortex plays a large role in higher thinking and executive functions like memory, controlling impulses and delaying rewards, imagining different perspectives, and planning and making choices. The author points to studies which show changes in meditators’ prefrontal cortexes which suggest that meditation helps people reduce their fear and emotional reactivity and develop more resilience to stress.