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Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) brings together mindfulness meditation and yoga in an eight-week program. The MBSR program is followed by an intensive, five-day meditation retreat to consolidate the lessons learned. The practice of mindfulness is ideal for cultivating greater awareness of the unity of mind and body, as well as of the ways that unconscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can undermine emotional, physical, and spiritual health.

The mind is known to be a factor in stress and stress-related disorders, and meditation has been shown to positively affect a range of autonomic physiological processes, such as lowering blood pressure and reducing overall arousal and emotional reactivity.

In a prison environment, this emotional reactivity is expressed by people acting out or acting in. Behaviors associated with acting in are withdrawal, depression, anxiety, and physical stress/disease/pain. Behaviors associated with acting out are violence, substance abuse, sexual promiscuity, self-mutilation.

Research shows that changing these deeply ingrained habits requires developing awareness of and discontinuing old behaviors, and establishing and repeating new behaviors over a significant period of time. In a prison environment, changing these behaviors results in changing the atmosphere of the classroom, the workplace, the prison environment as a whole, and beyond.

The basis of change rests on each individual’s ability to develop not only the skills but the willingness to work through difficult situations. This translates into a change in the learning ability of a student, the atmosphere of the prison as whole, as well as improved social skills and family relations.

The MBSR program started in the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979 and is now offered in over 200 medical centers, hospitals, and clinics around the world

An MBSR program has been offered at Lowell Correctional Institution (CI) for women since December 2005. It is a collaborative effort of the Gateless Gate Zen Center, Horizon Communities in Prisons, and a group of volunteers from the community.

The success of the program can be measured in part by the attendance at the five-day retreats. This growth has gone from 23 on the first retreat to 78 on the last retreat.

A proposal has been submitted to make MBSR the core programming in six, character-based dorms at Lowell CI. These dorms will be a collaborative project of Horizon Communities in Prisons and the Gateless Gate Zen Center.