Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jon Kabat-Zinn developed mindfulness-based stress reduction in the late 1970s at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He founded the Stress Reduction Clinic there in 1979, where the program was first taught and refined.
An MBSR program is an eight-week course consisting of weekly group meetings of two and a half to three hours each, plus an all-day silent retreat between weeks six and seven lasting approximately six to seven and a half hours. Participants also complete daily home practice of forty-five to sixty minutes, six days per week, using three primary techniques: mindfulness meditation, body scanning, and simple yoga postures.
Full Catastrophe Living, written by Jon Kabat-Zinn and first published in 1990, describes the MBSR program in detail. The book became a bestseller and was reissued in a revised edition in 2013.
The MBSR curriculum founded at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center has produced nearly 1,000 certified instructors operating in nearly every state in the United States and more than 30 countries. By 2015, nearly 80 percent of medical schools offered some element of mindfulness training.
Meta-analytic evidence supports MBSR's effectiveness for anxiety and depression. However, MBSR was not found to be more effective than traditional cognitive behavioral therapy and showed only moderate efficacy compared to other active treatments.
MBSR has shown improvements in fatigue, loneliness, anxiety, depression, and overall quality of life for cancer patients. For breast cancer patients specifically, it reduced anxiety and depression both at the end of the eight-week intervention and at six months, though no significant effects were found two years after the intervention.