History
The history of mindbody relaxation goes back two and a half thousand years to the origins of yoga. But the modern history of mindbody relaxation begins with Dr. Edmund Jacobson of the University of Chicago. In the 1920s he developed a technique called progressive relaxation, in which patients were taught to progressively relax their muscles. Dr. Jacobson explicitly stated that by relaxing the muscles of the body an individual would feel more relaxed in general.
In the 1960s Dr. Hans Selye, an endocrinologist at the University of Montreal, was the first to document the physical consequences of stress on the immune system. Dr. Selye coined the word stressor, which has become part of the vocabulary.
Also in the 1960s Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at Harvard, began to study the medical benefits of relaxation. Dr. Benson conclusively proved the mindbody connection by showing that simple relaxation techniques could lower people's blood pressure, slow their heart rate, and calm their brain waves. He called that effect "the relaxation response". In 1975 Dr. Benson wrote a popular book called The Relaxation Response.
Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist at the University of Massachusetts, took these ideas and is largely responsible for the adoption of meditation by hospitals and health care.
Read more about this topic: Mindbody Relaxation
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“Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It’s an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.”
—Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)