Jikan wrote:hired his own personal Buddhist monk to teach him how to properly meditate.
just when did Buddhist teachers become health care professionals?
First of all this is old news about Bill, the story cited can be traced back to a gossip web site early last year. Whether Clinton is "embracing Buddhism" or whether it was really a Buddhist monk who taught him to meditate is open to question.
That being said, at least here in California, Mindfulness meditation ala Jon Kabat Zinn has gone mainstream in the U.S. and is profoundly improving countless people's well-being and health for the better. It has been and is being extensively studied as a medical intervention--and there are even posters on the walls of my Health Maintenance Organization (a common way folks get healthcare now in the U.S.) advocating meditation, along with eating right and exercising.
Although to us, these programs that take shamatha meditation and divorce them from Buddhism, may seem light weight--and for me utterly uninteresting--we really should not ignore them. For example, there are 1400 people signed up for the upcoming Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco. I went to a pre-party to meet some of them this week. The people I met there were mostly tech industry people who unplug themselves from their devices for some period each day and do some kind of practice, and mindfulness is the most popular practice in my informal pole. One person I met actually works for a company in SF with a one hour PAID meditation time each morning before the they start work. This guy had learned to meditate for his job! The main thing that struck me about these people was that they looked really happy--and there was no alcohol served.
It seems to me that, having calmed their minds, a percent of these people are really ripe for the Dharma.
