Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction at the Yale School of Nursing

Abstract

It is 10:00 Friday morning at the Yale School of Nursing in New Haven, Connecticut. I greet students as they arrive for the fifth session of an elective course entitled "The Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program." This eight week program provides intensive training in mindfulness meditation, and introduces meditation as a therapeutic intervention in the health care system. There are 20 students in the class. As I watch them take their seats in the circle, I reflect upon their backgrounds and their reasons for enrolling in this course. Michele, a midwifery student, has lost a brother to AIDS. Susan, a physician associate student, has chronic back pain after multiple surgeries and wears a back brace most of the time. Karl, a doctoral student in public health, is conducting research on HIV-infected women in a nearby prison. Madeline, a divinity student, works parttime at hospice. Amy, a family nurse practitioner student, is balancing full-time studies with a part-time job, and raising two young children. Rebecca, a medical student, is coping with her father's recent diagnosis of brain cancer. Jim, a nursing student, has wanted to learn meditation for many years and saw this course as an opportunity to begin his practice. Everyone in the group comes with a dual purpose: a personal desire to learn meditation, and a professional interest to apply meditation in their clinical work. More than 200 graduate and professional students have completed the course since I first taught it in the fall of 1993. Approximately half are nursing students from a variety of specialties, including family, pediatric, geriatric, and psychiatric nurse practitioner; nursing policy and management; nurse midwifery; graduate entry program in nursing; doctoral studies in nursing; and clinical nurse specialist. The rest of the students are from other graduate and professional programs at Yale, including business, divinity, epidemiology and public health, forestry, medicine, physician associate, neurobiology, neuroscience, and psychology. They are an international group, from Argentina, Canada, China, Germany, Guyana, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Korea, Malaysia, Poland, Spain, the United States, Vietnam and Yugoslavia. With these enthusiastic and motivated students, I share what I have