Workable, as long as you’re Willing to do the Work

"So, in a sense, it’s about getting past “Buddhism?”
"I don’t know that it’s about getting past it so much as it is about going back to the beginning. If it’s really all about mindfulness and suffering and the potential to relieve suffering and even the full cessation of suffering—liberation and deep understanding of the nature of mind—then if the “Buddhism” piece of it, which is very highly culturally-conditioned, gets in the way, that doesn’t serve the purposes of the Four Noble Truths. So the pathway I chose was to bring the essence or the heart of Buddhist meditation to mainstream of medicine in a way that would be so commonsensical that people would say, “Well, of course! Why didn’t I know this fifty years ago?” It was meant as a skillful means, not the complete Abhidharma or the complete essence of everything—because that essence is beyond words, and flowers in its own way in every single individual. From that point of view, we see our patients as Buddhas to begin with. It’s a question of them allowing the obscurations to fall away and becoming more familiar with their original nature, so to speak...
Actually, many Buddhist teachers who come observe what we do in MBSR say, “My God…these people are better students in some ways because they don’t know anything. They don’t have the baggage of everything they know about and want from Buddhism. They just come with suffering, and the purity of that.” They’re just in pain and suffering, and paying attention to where we most don’t want to look: where it hurts. Then they ask deep questions like, “Who’s aware of this hurt? Who’s aware of this suffering? Who’s thinking?” This opens up those hidden dimensions of experience, and they realize, “Hey, my pain isn’t exactly me. A lot of it is thought-based and emotionally reactive. What if I uncouple the sensory experience of discomfort from all of the talk about how it’s killing me and ruining my life—all the affect and emotion about it?” We’ve had thirty-one years of experience now doing this and it has spread around the world. So when I talk at the benefit, it’s really aimed at offering these kinds of practices within the context of modern medicine and healthcare and psychology because this is something that you can do for yourself that is supremely important when you’re faced with your life taking a turn that you never, ever imagined or wished on anybody.
“How do I work with this?” you might ask. Our message is: it is workable, as long as you’re willing to do the work."
-- Danny Fisher interviews Jon Kabat-Zinn, 2010