From Doing to Being: Jon Kabat Zinn speaking at iBme event

hello everyone.welcome so happy to have you all here and really ecstatic to have John here speaking tonight for many many reasons which Doug will share so my name is Jessica Mori and I'm the executive director of inward bound mindfulness education we call it it I be me and our organization leads meditation retreats for teenagers around the country and now also in Canada and and so all of your gifts tonight go to our scholarship fund so we have a policy that no teen is turned away for lack of funds so we're really trying to keep that commitment in that tradition in this summer we gave out over two hundred thousand dollars in scholarships and so every thing that you offered really does go to transform a teens life and potentially change the trajectory of their path Doug will introduce John thank you so much and this all started you know it all started with John like that's that's where it started and it wasn't like he invented it but he made it accessible to millions like around the world and the world is uh you know is such a kinder kind of more generous like aware world just since he's introduced this and made it accessible for everyone so it's like it's like mind-blowing like how would an honor it is to introduce him but John Kevin then well I'm not a news anchor so there's there's no news or actually there's a lot of news and and you know and it's wonderful to see you come out tonight in support of this this fantastic program I be me that that Jessica started and and is really delivering a kind of experience of awe and wonder to people who might not ever experience and as as as Doug so beautifully said you know it's not just outer all and wonder but it's it's coming to know yourself inwardly and then in some sense seeing that there's really no separation between inner and outer and if you want to live a fully authentic life then one needs to cultivate that life just the way you would need to cultivate a field and cultivate the vegetables that were whatever it is that you're growing in the field that things don't just magically happen and when we zone along on autopilot it's almost as if we're losing touch with our life or our lives and then they're in their some peak moments where we feel good about it and then we're always striving to connive or arrange everything so that we have more and more peak moments and because we're here at Middlesex and I have a deep connection to Middlesex I have not driven up this driveway since my daughter Nashawn graduated from here in I think in 1998 or 2000 I can't even remember 98 thank you okay I'm glad so but I used to drive here virtually every day with either will or Nashawn so this is to have that experience of the beauty of this place there's a very very unusual very singular extremely privileged place that's doing something to meet that sense of separation and privilege in a way that I think has enormous authenticity and and I really bow to all of you students and teachers and administrators and everybody else in the Middlesex community is who's nurturing this magnificent unfolding because you know an education is the sort of most magical flowering of all and we can't really understand who we are in relationship to the world and to each other and to the deep knowing that the deep understanding of the way the world works without really being drawn into it and also being drawn forth from it which the word education meaning both draw out so there are a lot of things that we actually already have within us they don't have to be injected into us and when education uses that kind of immunization model of Education where you just inject somebody with a semester of Japanese history and then they'll be immunized and hate it for the rest of their lives or algebra or trigonometry or whatever it is on those signs and co-signs never again you know but that's a kind of immunization model as opposed to a kind of impassioned loving model of like there's nothing more interesting than realizing that this world is like unbelievably incredible every aspect of it including I don't know if you saw the New York Times today but photographs of some planet going around Saturn that seems to be you know have a hidden ocean that's liquid I mean photographs you know because this Cassini spacecraft has been circling around Saturn doing things can you believe people earn a living figuring out how to get to Saturn and then exploring all this stuff and then sending the pictures back to us and figuring out there's water there and maybe life and that's just like today's paper so I am actually a news anchor I didn't realize that it's just that I'm anchoring at different kind of news and I'm sorry that then wasn't able to come because you know he tells the story of like his life and how mindfulness really catapulted him into a new way of being in relationship to it now mindfulness is virtually on everybody's lips you know it's like Time magazine covers and you know and Anderson Cooper and and everything in Anderson by the way it's extremely powerfully affected by the retreat that he did with us that actually it wasn't obvious from the way they cut it all but that I led that retreat with my son will Cole led that retreat with him but it it changed his life and I tell you that only because that's also news that you're not going to read anywhere else so he says it if you go to the CBS website but what I want to do this evening for those of you who are like just heard about it and it just seems like a concept and a lot of news reporters I talk to a lot of news reporters they say oh I've heard about your concept of mindfulness and I go just please shoot me now you know how do I even go from that to and so you have to do a certain kind of linguistic artistic Aikido on the person's mind so that they don't write something that has nothing to do with what mindfulness is it's not a concept it's not a catechism it's not a you know a philosophy it's a way of being and the more I've practiced that and I've practiced that improbable ly for somebody who grew up as a street kid in New York City okay for me to be a meditator is like really improbable so that says to me that ago if I can do it pretty much anybody could be a meditator because like the chances of me slowing down dropping in moving from doing to being infinitesimal and I've been doing it now for you know close to fifty years and you know it is you pick up things they're big fads and in five years later you're into something else and that didn't happen to me five years ten years fifteen years so it's a way of being and if I have to say it in one word it's a way of the word is relationality it's a way of being in relationship to everything everything your body for instance have you noticed everybody here is in a body I mean we have funny way of speaking about new English like because we talk about my body but nobody knows who the my is that's claiming that it's that entity's body you know my body but we we don't examine the my throw again because this is middle section because it is said that Thoreau really was enamored of Estabrook woods is that correct so I have to you know quote from Walden many of you will drive by it tonight or have he said I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what they had to teach and not when I came to die discover that I hadn't lived when we're zoning and that was before the digital age that was before the road didn't this is this is inconceivable to the room I know the people who designed this by the way and the meditators Thoreau you know even in the 1830s or saying if you're not careful and almost every line of Walden is a Rhapsody a mindfulness although he did not use the word but his whole engagement was to actually pay attention to what was speaking to him as he would sit in his doorway or stand up to his nose in the Walden Pond and observed the life-forms plant an animal the Sun going across the sky and the thoughts going across his mind and he said it was like the greatest work in the world far better than any work of the hands that he could have done while meanwhile his neighbors are all plowing fields and he's like a good-for-nothing you know just sitting there and he's never been forgotten because he's really touched something very very profound in and it's a thread of American beauty it's a thread of sort of American culture that a lot of us don't really understand but are starving for or yearning for and the faster things go the more we in some sense need to not put on the brakes but understand that that domain or this domain of infinite self distraction 15 years ago Linda stone who worked at Microsoft at that time described it is a continuous partial attention these things this was before the iPhone it just the lab computers you know sort of generated a state of continuous partial attention because you well now it's like forget about that can you know partial no attention the self distraction is at epidemic levels and the younger you are the more you are susceptible to that and if you don't believe me just read sherry turkle's studies about teenagers and young children exposed to nothing but the digital age because they were they weren't born during the analog age they might even prefer simulated trees - trees I don't know but sherry Turkle from MIT you know has been studying this in great detail and and it's just we need to in some sense modulate our relationship with that so again I told you I could talk about this forever but let's not do that because of the time frame but let's actually just how many of you would say that you have a regular if not daily meditation practice that's it is important to you as brushing your teeth you know that you would no sooner not do it okay so that Wow hold your heads up for a minute just to hold them up so that's about half the audience and I want to really acknowledge that if we'd asked that question fifteen or twenty years ago well first of all I'd be speaking to it completely empty or at or you know we do have to be aware of our surroundings and make make serious choices about what we're going to do so so this is for all of you not just the ones who didn't raise your hands this is something that is so simple it's easy for the thinking mind to Commedia trivialize it and said it's a lot of nonsense there are many many places out there doing mindfulness and putting it out there on the web in beautiful ways and I'm not locking the web I mean we're just living in a different world and we need to learn how to be in wise relationship with that world and with this analog body and mind of ours that can be so easily diverted which is one of the meanings of entertainment it's a diversion you know but diversion from what if you divert yourself from your whole life you know even your education may wind up not being useful because you forgot you forgot what Middlesex was trying to teach you and you kind of went off someplace and then maybe you wake up before you die if you're lucky but why not by now get it over with especially for you young ones and then you got the rest of your life ahead of you because okay if you're dead you don't need to worry about anything anymore so let's just see what this is all about whether it's the surface of some planet going around Saturn Euler it's the surface of this planet which in fact our little old human beings have been giving our own planet a fever which is having major consequences that you and your children are going to have to deal with because we haven't been aware enough but now that we know about it that's part of the domain of mindfulness is not just like oh it's about the breath hmm or it's about feeling great like oh yes I need a little I'm so stressed I need to just kind of to calm myself down I'm not knocking that that's all fine well and good but this is actually about befriending yourself even when you know the proverbial stuff is hitting the preferably fan especially when the proverbial stuff is in proverbial pen or when you're in pain or suffering emotional suffering physical suffering whatever it is that's not a time to turn away or to contract but that's our natural instinct so this is a kind of antidote of sorts it's saying if you care to you can actually drop into a domain that's yours that you were born with it's not something you have to acquire that is available to you 24/7 that can transform your relationship with the good that's unfolding in your life so that it's like you really tuned into it and don't like the next minute self distract the bad the difficulty unwanted the terrible that's part of the human condition and the neutral what you don't even notice because it's not about you you know so like how many people drive through a toll booth you know and they with a person there and they just treat the person like a machine because it's like doesn't concern me I don't know that person could be gone the second boat so in a sense we dehumanize ourselves all the time because we get really wrapped up in our own personal pronouns the the grammar and the geometry of me what could be more interesting you know we're all in some sense continually caught in a narrative about me and they've been brain studies that if we had more time I would tell you about that there's a whole what's called default mode Network where you know when you default it like they just say just sit in this fMRI skin and don't do anything and you can't bring in Time magazine or something like that you go into this default mode Network and most of it is like mind wandering and where does it wander wanders to like what's going to happen to me what's good what's bad what's this mat so a lot of that time the mind is not even here it's lost in thought we say you know that person's out to lunch it's true and most of the time if you start to pay attention to what's on your mind you will find and it's quite staggering so slightly embarrassing that most of the time your mind is not here in this moment even though this is the only moment you will ever be alive in so for instance one favorite place it loves to hang out is the future I'm sure that's not true at Middlesex but everywhere else people worry a lot you know people worried about the future Mark Twain is famous as you know if having said you know there's a huge amount of tragedy in my life and some of it actually happened but most of it didn't happen because you know we we're not smart enough to think about what's actually we're not good prognosticators so we worry about stuff that's never going to happen it's like driving your car with the brake on if you learn this young if you learned that you don't have to believe all your thoughts you are in your you're in so much better shape then somebody who doesn't know that because if you start believing your thoughts well that's actually how you fall into what's called depressive rumination you know and that's like you know 50% of the society at some point or other in life will experience serious major depression okay but if you know the antidote to it it's like don't believe everything you think I mean I'm my bumper sticker it says don't believe anything you think and just hold it in awareness see it's not this nyah nyah list ache it's saying we have this other capacity this thinking over here and then this and you're taught that up the wazoo here at Middlesex and everywhere else starting from early on but one thing you're not taught is how to be in relationship to your thinking hmm and they don't even teach you that except at Middlesex and places that are now that actually there's this whole other capacity you're born with that's native to you that could be your default mode because it's more powerful than thinking and you know what it's called it's called awareness it's called awareness it's like doesn't have much sexiness to it you know there's a link awareness sad oh he's talking about like cares about that I'm aware that I'm uncomfortable that it's late I want to eat you know that's not awareness awareness is when you don't have an agenda and you just fall awake now we are super good at falling asleep but it turns out falling awake is just about the hardest thing in the world for us human beings to do so again learn it young a oh really searching good stay a lot of that time as I said reminds in the future the rest of the time where is it the older you get the more you know this is in the past and the present moment which is the only one in which we can feel anything see anything smell anything touch anything learn anything love express love express wonder express all present moment starts to get a little bit you know eradicated imploded because it's all thought most of it past future and all about me and what I want what I don't want so always trying to get what I want pushing away what I want that's a prescription for suffering for stress and then for blaming it all on outside forces so that I don't have any responsibility for if my own life were only different there'd be no stress and I'd be fine but it's all these other people that are driving me and saying you know do you know what I'm talking about a little bit and I'm talking fast not because meditators talk fast but because I don't have that much time and I want to sort of give you some element of it so I'm going to stop talking now and invite you to actually move into a domain that's yours from the beginning which is wakefulness or and I mean fully awake attentive my working definition of mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention we can all do that and teachers would love it if the children did that the students did that paying attention on purpose so intentionally in even when you don't feel like it in the present moment because that's the only moment that's Thoreau knew and then here's the hooker kicker non-judgmentally and you start to pay attention to your mind and you begin to see you have judgments about virtually everything so non-judgmental it doesn't mean without judgment it means don't judge the judging just suspend it as best you can okay and then the other thing that I'm assuming you're going to be all so inspired by this evening with the three of us that you're going to do this for the rest of your lives that I will also give you the most fundamental point arrived I've come to in many many decades of teaching and that is it's never about the objects that you're paying attention to okay so a lot of people think I'm meditating oh yeah that's about breathing and breath is very important in meditation as an object to which you could anchor your attention because it's in the present moment and so it's very convenient and it's also changing so it's not fixed that allows you to be fluid and flexible but it's never about the breathing or the sensations in the body another beautiful object of attention is to sit with awareness of your body sitting here breathing so you can do that now you don't need to wait for me to ring a bell or say go you know you're sitting here breathing what's more you're such a genius that you can actually decode the the vibrations in the air that are coming because of my taking oxygen air from my lungs passing it over my vocal cords wagging my tongue in my lips in such a way that it puts out vibrations in the atmosphere that are coming to your tympanic membrane and and your eardrum and creating electrical signals that you can follow in your auditory cortex and link with your prefrontal cortex and everything else in the hippocampus and if you know emotional evaluation and this long sentence is actually completely grammatical and you are the genius that can decode it and you didn't learn that at middlesex or anywhere else that's native to you okay so let's actually now experience that awareness in silence so pick an object if you want to just the sense of the body sitting your breathing but awareness is so big that it could hold anything in a way this I could hold the whole room of all of us sitting here in breathing okay it doesn't matter it's the same awareness no matter what the object and so just drop in and see if you can actually inhabit the space the field of knowing that awareness is not cognitive conceptual knowing but like a deeper knowing so silence yes and also awake and also no agenda you're not trying to get anywhere to some special state the state you're in is plenty special if you're here for it eyes closed is fine I was open to sign sitting in a dignified posture is what we usually tell people when we're training them in this kind of thing but that's your own assessment if you really awake any postures dignifying and just resting in awareness moment by moment by timeless moment in other words in in the now letting go of the past letting go the future just this moment just this breath just this wakefulness underneath thinking in-between thinking befriending your own life unfolding exactly what Thoreau was talking about in the only moment you ever ever will have in order to be in relationship to it and there's one more thing if you have not had kind of this kind of instructions before and this is brand-new to you that you need to know in that nobody can do this it's impossible practically so as long as you're doing something you've missed what I've been pointing to okay this is not about shutting off your thoughts or you know so you'll notice that like your thoughts are shameless still just come in even though you hey give me a break I'm trying to just have a moment of silence no your thoughts are going to salt you and your emotions and your memories and your worries and your planning and so you're sitting here trying to have a nice meditative moment and all that is stuff is happening that's the curriculum that's not a problem that's what it means to be human so it's not a problem unless you make it into a problem so then you don't have to fight to get rid of it make yourself into some better like you're really sage no thoughts anymore if you had no thoughts they'd lock you up in some institution you wouldn't know how to put your pants on the morning or write a check who writes checks anymore but so when the mind wanders when you notice that you get carried away in a thought stream and this is inevitable it's not like Oh failed meditation 101 it's inevitable your mind is going to get caught by something there's the knowing faculty that can at some point appreciate and perceive that the mind is no longer here it's no longer aware of breath or sitting here or hearing my voice or anything it's like you're having dinner with somebody in LA or your mind is now on that planet I don't even remember the name of it Alton Saturn or Pluto for that matter which we just visited a short while before and here's the extra instruction when you notice your mind is not on the object of attention that noticing is already the attention that's the awareness it's already back and so you don't need to beat yourself up and say you know will force yourself to get on back to the breath come on be a good meditator back to the breath you go nunna because that's judging and remember I said non-judgmental so you don't give yourself a hard time you just very gently recognize where the mind is and that recognition that's the core awareness so in a sense that's why it's never been about the breath the breasts which is a clever way because as with the American Express credit card you know how they say you can't leave home without it same with the breath so it's always available and especially down here in the belly of far as ways you can get from your thinking mind it's helpful to just come feel it every once in a while not control the breath but just feel it but it's not about the breath it's then it's that you can feel it that feeling is a form of awareness you are hearing me as a form of awareness tasting touching smelling seeing so the five senses and then there are more into reception proprioception again as I said I can go on for hours about this stuff but the most important thing is this resting and awareness and you don't have to understand it you don't have to know anything because that's all conceptual and it's limited I'm not knocking conceptual awareness but concepts like any thought for instance this is why awareness is more powerful than thinking you can have any thought no matter how brilliant or how deranged and if you're aware of it you'll know whether it's actually brilliant or deranged but without that you may go with the 99% deranged ones and miss the brilliant one okay so there are awful lot of reasons why this is incredibly compelling and actually the fundamental core of education especially for teenagers and kids in high school or in elementary school especially in the inner-city you know where this is now teachers of bringing mindfulness into the classroom coming up through the floorboards not waiting for the principal to give them permission or teach them how to do it why because they're going out of their minds they can't teach so does the last thing I'll say you could think of mindfulness is kind of like exercising a muscle or tuning an instrument the instrument of attention is at the core of learning okay without paying a certain or offering certain kind of attention the world doesn't speak to you because you've missed it and that attention sometimes requires in enduring not knowing gazing at a fish or a triangle and drinking it in underneath all your thoughts about fish or triangles or how boring it is to look at anything for more than a fraction of a second and then the world in some sense is apprehended completely differently and understood completely different so the real meditation practice is not this or standing on your head or doing some artificial carving out of time to practice what we just have the slightest little taste it's essential it's absolutely necessary it's important to do it every day for an extended period of time like tuning the instrument you teach this children in school they start to learn how to be still and how to listen and pay attention and then you can teach them to recognize connections the brain does that by itself when it's prepared when it's tuned but the real meditation practice isn't this is more and what's more is that the real meditation practice is how we live our lives moment by moment okay so that's just in some sense the tuning but then there's the plane and the playing is everything if you're a parent and it's never been a better environment for cultivating mindfulness seeing how mindless you are than being a parent so your children are like live in Buddha's live in meditation masters and they are so good at this they can push their will push every single one of your buttons and then you can contract and get into this me you I'm the one with the power or whatever it is or you can hold it in a larger awareness and see the interrelationships the relationality and I see with eyes of kindness with eyes of compassion understanding that you know there's a huge amount of suffering a huge amount of stress and growing up in finding out who you are and that's if you're lucky if you're not lucky like most of us would make die just the way Thoreau said without ever in some sense having lived and and so I I want to invite a Jason and Doug to come up on the stage and we're going to now like have a larger dialogue conversation with you folks we may run a little bit over time I'm afraid but so what time is just another thought and if you have to go you should go but but I will say that there's something about mindfulness that's really timeless I mentioned it in the guide of meditation but it's like if we live our lives in this moment moment by moment by moment the weakened life becomes available to us in ways that are virtually unimaginable and so I don't want you to take my word for it but it has it relates to virtually every aspect of life so I'll just end this comment with a very brief poem okay because this is an academic institution and you should know those of you are young that poetry is not stupid and it's not opaque and it's not like impossible to understand it's it's like the poets are just like they're meditating and so they don't necessarily think in sentences they don't they think in implication they are implying things that they need you to complete by resonating with same with painters this is different so you know so there's a whole neuroscience about this which I won't go into but here's the poem and it's by a Derek Wolcott who's a Nobel laureate from the island of st. Lucia so afro-caribbean poet and maybe some of you know it maybe it's even studied here but it's called love after love the time will come when with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door and each will smile at the others welcome and say sit here eat you will love again the stranger who was yourself give wine give bread get back your heart to yourself to the stranger who has loved you all your life who you have ignored for another who knows you by heart take down the love letters from the bookshelf the photographs the desperate notes peel your own image from the mirror sit feast on your life you

Channel: Inward Bound Mindfulness

Views: 172,201

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Id: q-2QoTYujNg

Length: 38min 5sec (2285 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2016