I Have Taught Meditation and Stress Reduction to Thousands of People

So eventually I left the monastery and married Jan. I still wanted to do meditation. Eventually I got a job at the Cabrillo College Stroke Center and began teaching meditation there. I was hired as a counselor.

The next month a friend sent me John Kabat-Zinn’s Book “Full Catastrophe Living.” I read that book and I said to myself: “oh my gosh! This is what I want to be doing!”

I had already been teaching meditation. One of the parts of my job at the Stroke Center was teaching meditation and relaxation practices. I was teaching people with strokes and Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis how to meditate as a way of working with the challenges of living with their illnesses. Their feedback to me was very, very positive.

So I read John’s book and wrote him a letter saying: “I can’t believe you wrote this book; this is unbelievable!” I described to him how I had been working at the stroke center. He called me back a couple of weeks later. This was in 1990 before he became famous. He told me that if I ever came to Massachusetts to come and visit him. He told me he wrote this book for people like me. He was really excited about my interest and invited me to please come and visit him.

About two months later I went to Boston to see my parents and I went to the U Mass medical center and I met John and his assistant. We recognized one another like old dharma buddies. They gave me their blessing and told me to go for it.

So I returned to Santa Cruz and began my first program in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in 1991 at the Stroke Center. At this point I have probably worked with well over 10,000 people. I’ve worked with people at Dominican hospital, Santa Cruz medical foundation, El Camino hospital plus all of these workshops. I’ve worked with thousands of people.

I have two sons. Ben is fifteen and Bodie is ten. I met Jan while she was a hospice nurse. She is also very interested in spirituality. She has a master’s degree in spirituality. When the Hospice Care Project became Medicare certified one of their requirements was that their interdisciplinary team include a social worker, a home health aide, a volunteer visitor, a nurse and also someone who provides spiritual care. She was offered the job to be the first spiritual care coordinator. She transferred from being a nurse although she still keeps her license. Now she mainly does chaplaincy work. She studied a lot of chaplaincy at UCSF and sentences go general hospital. It’s called CPE, or clinical pastoral education.

Jan really loves this work. To be involved with nursing is a lot of technical stuff. It’s grown into more and more case management. What she liked most about being a nurse was sitting and talking with people. As a chaplain you have to write your notes and do some charting but you don’t have the type of case management that the nurse does. She gets to hang out with people and talk with them about spiritual issues. About living and dying. This is like a dream job for her.