This is an interdisciplinary study of relationships between two American movements that both promote meditation for therapeutic purposes: nineteenth-century Mind Cure, and twentieth-century Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). It draws upon primary and secondary sources in American religious history, including feminist and African American studies; histories of medicine and psychology; Buddhist and Hindu studies; and post-colonial theory. At first glance, Mind Cure and MBSR might appear to be unrelated, although both advocate meditation as medicine. Mind Cure, later called New Thought, is typically treated as a religious or quasi-religious movement encouraging “positive thinking.” MBSR is an eight-week program that teaches “mindfulness” meditation and yoga as an adjunct to conventional biomedicine. In recent years, 80 percent of clinical research in meditation has focused on mindfulness. By considering the two movements in parallel, however, it becomes possible to discern both historical and philosophical connections between them, and a number of similar features.

These relationships suggest that MBSR is not just an interesting phenomenon in contemporary medical research, but like New Thought, a species of American metaphysical religion. This study also highlights several “hidden histories”—characteristics and issues that are difficult to discern unless one views Mind Cure and MBSR side-by-side, employing multiple disciplinary perspectives and a hermeneutic of suspicion. These include: the role of New Thought in popularizing therapeutic meditation and yoga long before the 1970s; the roles of particular Asian missionaries in shaping American assumptions about Buddhism, meditation, and yoga; and the roles of women in promoting both movements.

These findings have two sets of implications: one for academic historians, and the other for the ongoing development of Buddhism in the United States. For historians, this study highlights the imperatives of doing interdisciplinary research, including race and gender as categories of analysis, and looking beyond the geographic boundaries of the United States to understand these ostensibly “American” religious/healing movements. For communities on the ground, I argue that individualist, perennialist, and primarily therapeutic approaches to meditation can entail several important losses: historical consciousness, community, a moral framework for practice, and the capacity to analyze suffering systemically.