Jon Kabat-Zinn | A Well-Lived Life Is Made in the Present Moment

hey everyone it's rob and thanks for listening in today i greatly appreciate your time i want to start by expressing my deep gratitude for all of your support and gratitude to my friends ashish and jimpa as well as the entire team here at image one for helping to make leading with genuine care a real difference maker in this world if you haven't added your name to our email list please do so at do nothingbook.com and if you're a regular listener you know we have had many important conversations with some really amazing people if you're inspired please share the podcast with your friends co-workers and people in your network i'm so excited for our guest today john cabot zinn i've personally learned so much about life from him over the years through his books speaking and the mindfulness based stress reduction program he created his ability to present mindfulness in a way that the common person like me can understand has been hugely impactful in my life and the life of countless others john is an internationally recognized for his work as a scientist writer and meditation teacher widely credited with bringing mindfulness into mainstream medicine and society he holds a phd in molecular biology from the massachusetts institute of technology and is a professor of medicine emeritus at the university of massachusetts medical school where he founded its world-renowned mindfulness-based stress reduction clinic in 1979 and the center for mindfulness in medicine healthcare and society in 1995 he spent more than 50 years at the forefront of western mindfulness movements he has written seminal scientific papers and 14 books on the subject contributing to the growing popularity of mindfulness in mainstream medicine healthcare and education as well as within corporations the tech world prisons government and professional sports john's vision for the fusion of ancient wisdom and modern scientific thinking gave birth to the entire field around the therapeutic applications of mindfulness and has contributed to the betterment of countless lives around the globe over the span of his career he has received numerous awards and accolades he also served for a number of years on the board of the mind and life institute a group that organizes dialogues between the dalai lama and western scientists and promotes individual societal and planetary flourishing okay please enjoy my chat with john cabot zen john thank you for joining me it's an absolute honor to have you here well it's my pleasure to be with you rob i uh i wanted to start by sharing that on occasion i do a body scan and when i do i i listen to a recording and i'd like to share part of that recording with you if that's okay sure this is side one of the first tape of the stress reduction and relaxation program that you have joined at the university museum piece so yes it is you say tape hey yeah right we'll talk more about where you're at with that these days well if you uh that that um body scan is still out there it's part of an app that i mean yes it is it has a life of its own it's it's almost 40 years old and um and i would guess millions of people have not only listened to it because it says right away the idea is not to listen to it the idea is to actually engage in it as a daily meditation practice for the rest of your life so it's a very big ask and the fact that it has been out there so long and um and you yourself found that it is ceaselessly or never endlessly touching to me that um that it uh serves that kind of um purpose in the world in a way that like i record it once and then it's like got a life of its own right who knows who's listening to it and everybody they are and everybody brings their own life to it in a certain way and like a mirror gets life reflected back to one's own mind and heart and body and um yeah so the past 40 years since that since i made that tape um have really seen uh a remarkable growth of uh not just interest but uh engagement in mindfulness as if really your life depended on it which was the way it was always meant to be offered but you can't force anybody to do anything so in that sense it's it's very rich and thanks for starting out this way i'm curious from the past an app for the fast absolute class from the past um i'm curious in the 40 years who were you then and who are you today yeah the answer is the same i have no idea i mean i could give you 150 different stories depending on what kind of impression i wanted to make as probably everybody's realized whenever we get asked like who are you or to present ourselves uh and part of the sort of adventure of mindfulness is really to ask that question in a way that's not merely conceptual or cognitive uh and then not so much be interested in the answers but in the ongoing listening that comes after throwing out such an inquiry like who am i when all is said and done underneath your name your age your whatever narrative you're going to tell somebody else about where you were born and your parents and your children and all of that stuff all of which is an incredibly rich multiverse but it doesn't necessarily address what you just asked so there's a kind of infinite richness here that is not some kind of weird theoretical game but it's actually um the the their essence of what it means to be human in the lifetime that's ours to live and the only lifetime we have to live it is in each passing moment and once it's gone that moment's gone but what we do in any moment so colors what's gonna happen in the next moment that we can wind up missing not just years but decades of our life or living in some kind of narrative that's not really exactly true to who you really really really are and that could be a source of tremendous pain and discomfort especially the older you get so i don't want to just wax on about this but there's a lot to say because you're asking the most profound and fundamental questions and i guess it might be appropriate to just quote thoreau in that instance you know where he said in walden when when he was talking about why he even went to walden and built a house there a tiny little house and then lived there for two years on and off uh but he said i would i went to the woods because i wish 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 discovered that i hadn't lived and if you're zoning along on autopilot most of your life you might discover and and it would be a rude awakening talk about the word awakening a rude awakening to realize that maybe i got the whole thing wrong that you know i didn't really understand what was gifted to me by virtue of being able to breathe you know by having a life by having been gifted a life by other humans and so i don't want this to sound too abstract because um this is about as relevant to one's quality of life and uh health and well-being as an individual human being and in relationship whether it's you know the love relationships or just society it's the kind of most fundamental dimensions of uh what the human species might be capable of if it were to wake up or or wake up even to the name that uh it gave itself you know a couple hundred years ago when linnaeus was you know sort of uh categorizing species and he gave the name homo sapiens sapiens to humans and it really means from the latin superior which means to taste or to know that we're the species that knows through direct tasting through direct experience and then a double dose that we not only know it but we know that we know it so that kind of knowing that kind of non-conceptual bigger than thinking but not exclusive of thinking a capacity that we're born with it's not like you have to get it you won't learn this in school but we're born with it but if you ignore it your whole life then what thoreau was pointing to could easily happen you did it whoops got the i got that karmic assignment all wrong because i believed my own self-centered narrative too too much so i know you know that we're having this conversation in part because uh uh of this uh you know master class offering that i decided to you know engage in and so i i would you know think it's uh important to say that the reason i even took that on was because i really feel from my experience over virtually my entire life or adult life how much pain and suffering there is in the world that we can actually do something about just by how we understand who we are and then a lot of the pain and suffering in the world is not just my pain but it's like the pain that we create by not realizing the full dimensionality of who we are so the benefits are vast because it's not only you yourself but potentially your family your business life your work life whatever it is and then the world and at a key moment in the world a key inflection point you might say in the sense that you know what with covid but even without you know a global pandemic that's killed you know so many people and we're not over with yet and it won't be the last pandemic either so there are lessons that need to be learned here but also you know all the other things that are obviously facing the planet that we've woken up to and therefore are mindful of like where the glaciers go where's the water going to come from for you know gigantic swaths of asia and uh you know and other continents when the snow melt that in the higher elevations is just no longer there and it's only happened it's happened in my lifetime and you can see the photographs of it so that's got to be part of mindfulness too it's not just like my own little meditation practice or body scan in my own little quiet space to tune my instrument for the day important as that is not just important but essential but then there's like okay but what about the air i'm breathing the water i'm drinking the children i'm raising or grandchildren so the scope of this is humongous i also know that you wrote a book called uh do nothing you know uh and i i read in it uh extensively because i knew we were going to be having this conversation and i think it's kind of uh diagnostic if you will or emblematical of the fact that kinds of things that you would have been laughed off the face of the earth for maybe even 15 or 20 years ago in the business world now have penetrated into the business world in ways that i hope are non-trivial and not just more donald duck and mickey mouse stuff and that's probably an insult to donald duck and mickey mouse who i have enormous reference for so so the uh the challenges are just huge and um and you can see that i mean i don't think you've even asked the second question yet and we're already you've answered all my questions but the point is you start in any one place and you have everything in almost no time that's where the meditation practice comes in that if you can learn to inhabit this almost no time that we call now everything changes and you don't have to fix anything so part of the reason that mindfulness is moved into the business world for instance is that we've had 40 years of research on its effects in clinical medicine of people falling through the cracks of the health care system with all sorts of chronic illnesses and chronic pain conditions and everything else that medicine does not have cures for and a lot of the fixes are not much better than the the conditions themselves and we were able to show that this mindfulness-based stress reduction program in eight weeks can take people who will often self-describe as not having had any you know uh changes in eight years to their chronic conditions and discover that in eight weeks they can have an entirely different relationship to their condition and that it amplifies and improves their quality of life their health and well-being their sense of what might be possible even in the face of deficits of one kind or another or ultimate mortality so there's a huge field of science and growing exponentially about what happens in the body in the brain and the mind and the genome in the you know in every aspect of our biology when we do something as weird as stop and drop into the present moment and not do anything so it's a non-doing that's where the title of your book do nothing my vocabulary is slightly different i call it non-doing you know and non-doing it's not the same as doing nothing because it's a whole universe of potential adventure and ultimately a love affair with the nature of what is possible when you wake up when you're real and then imagine a community of people who wake up like a business who are not simply driven by the bottom line or greed or understand more what the vast relationship is with what the business is even because you know it's like the business is not just the four walls of the work environment but it's like you know the supply chain the customers the satisfaction the environment needs to be part of this so it's a gigantic potential opportunity to understand what the real business of business is in a way that would be maximally uh wholesome and and helpful and minimally harmful including to the environment and future generations that requires consciousness that requires mindfulness i'll stop talking and let you talk well there's so much there you know that one of the first things that was coming to my mind was the path that we're all on and sometimes one might say we're ready for something and sometimes we're not ready for it or it doesn't seems we're ready for it and i think about that a little bit with meditation or maybe other contemplative practices and i'd love to get your thoughts on that you know sometimes we make our through our way through lives down these different paths and conventional manners because it's really all we know and it's all we're exposed to and so how do how do we bring this idea uh that you're sharing and when is the right time for a person well it's a profound question and it's one of the reasons that i said yes to master class of course i don't think of myself as a master and i think it's a big mistake to think that meditation is something that you can master so um and i say right up front in the trailer that you know welcome to my non-master class because uh if you're trying to get someplace better to mastery whatever your mind conceives of that of being you are uh getting off on the wrong foot to begin with because we're starting from a place where the cardinal assumption is that you're already good enough you're already whole w-h-o-l-e which is the root meaning of the word health and uh healing and holy h-o-l-y for that matter so and we don't learn this in school which nowadays you can learn this stuff in kindergarten but you know not for the last couple of thousand years so um it's not about striving to get someplace else but learning to inhabit the full dimensionality of who and where you are right now including the maybe you you don't know who you are so that original question of like who are you uh who am i uh and this requires a certain kind of discipline so it's not kidding around it's not like um you know just a band-aid that you put on to make yourself feel a little bit more relaxed or you know feel like okay now i'm part of the meditation club or everybody's talking about mindfulness and now i'm gonna know what they're talking about no this is like it's not kidding around this is like your life and what i hope to do in these 20 master classes you know episodes within the master class is offer a kind of doorway into oneself that if you took it on in a way that was serious but not too serious as a discipline and did it whether you engaged in it let's say i don't say do it but engage in it whether you felt like it or not on any given day or for that matter in any given moment uh that's really this that's what the uh that's why i said yes to it that's why i did it because uh the production values are so terrific because they that's what they do that it's essential that it's it's basically um it was an opportunity for me to try to reach out to um you know i don't know what elements of the universe might be and also to make it available so that it's not some kind of privileged thing that only people with resources can subscribe to but they are very very strong about uh giving this away to uh vast uh you know sort of groups and numbers of people who uh would not necessarily come to it by um subscribing to masterclass and and so i really feel like it's it's a big experiment in whether people will take it seriously because if it's if it's if you want to say it's a course or a class then you got to do the work i mean there's no substitute for that and that's the challenge and since so many people now in the past let's say 40 years have taken this on in ways that nobody would have believed possible 40 years ago and there's millions and multiple millions of dollars spent by the nih and then even more by private foundations every year to study what is going on on a lot of different levels with this practice that looks so much like nothing and turns out to be just about everything um that uh you know i i i'm really looking forward to seeing what comes of this because it's just one of a number of different ways that while i still have breath moving in and out of my own body i'm just trying to um gift something that is priceless and that we don't have to get it's kind of we just need to wake up to who we already are and there are an infinite number of ways to do it so it's not like john kabatoon's method or anything like that or i'm better than anybody else no absolutely not uh and neither is anybody else that we're all in some sense doing our best to try to um connect with what's deepest and best in ourselves while we have the chance and we all know that uh time is a limiting factor and now it's a limiting factor maybe in terms of humanity i mean no just you know so how we pay attention and how we cultivate awareness and compassion and clarity and well-being and regulate uh motivations uh recognize say motivations that are so self-centered that they wind up causing lots of harm to oneself and other people on a lot of different levels and what the options are for liberating oneself from that and what might be possible in terms of truly healing contributions in the world or illuminating contributions in the world that's a distributive function that every single human being on the planet has that you know the buddhists would call it intrinsic buddha nature and it's not about being buddhist it's like it's about being awake that's what the word buddha means awakening so we're at a very interesting point you know whether we're talking about business or whether we're talking about medicine or whether we're talking about sports performance or or whether we're talking about geopolitics or economics where we need to you could say i mean bring our best game to every day or every moment and this is a way to do it without being attached to an outcome because if you're attached to an outcome you can't practice this because you'll get in your own way and you'll be striving to get someplace else when the whole point is to actually realize in every sense of that word where you where you already are what is this making any sense to you as we speak almost all of it um and i joke i joke no it is making sense and i appreciate it and i'm thinking a bit about um how we are so much closer to each other than any other time in history as a global society and despite so you and i are in the united states and despite the fact that we are here and this is our place that we live we are interconnected with these seven billion human beings around the world yeah but in some senses we we lose sight of that and we get laser focused on our own issues our own problems and forget about the fact that we need to come together and make decisions in many ways together for the gr for the betterment of our world and i'm curious having been through many ups and downs in societies and seeing things with your wisdom what are your thoughts on where we're at today and where we're going i don't know about wisdom or a privileged position of any kind but uh you're asking a very um salient and and essential question for the moment um and i've been you know i brought up linnaeus and the name we gave ourselves as a species the species that is aware and is aware that we're aware but of course we need to live our way into it we haven't gotten there yet um we haven't realized it in the sense of making it real and um one metaphor that i've found to be quite useful is that we're all cells of the one body politic whether you want to talk about the usa which is just an abstraction it's a fiction i mean if you read uh yuval noah harari for instance i mean he's fantastic you know this great historian absolutely fantastic about how you know we live and die over fictions and it's not like they're not important fictions because when you have a pandemic you really want the people who are in charge of this particular fiction to understand the molecular biology of covet 19 right and how you develop vaccine and then how you distribute it so there's like you know and if you're not paying attention or you're being driven by you know personal gain as opposed to global good you we're seeing you know how that results in infinite numbers of deaths that don't need to happen so we're not kidding around here but for me you know one metaphor that's valuable is supposing your your liver and your heart uh decided to go to war with each other because the the liv the the heart muscles just thought the liver looked ridiculous was the wrong color um jesus didn't didn't have any of the kind of elegance that the contractive muscle of the you know cardiac tissue had if your heart and your your liver or your lungs or any other tissues go to war with each other that's an autoimmune disease and the end result of that is death and in this sort of so in a similar way you could say like up to this point humanity's managed to get away with because maybe there haven't been that many billions of people but now there are so many billions and facebook hasn't helped because like almost half of them are on facebook and creating a lot of mischief a lot of it but what if we really began to see ourselves as all cells of the one body politic not just of the usa but of the planet okay and then we realized that like yeah and every cell type looks different because yes the heart muscle has a very essential job but if the lungs don't do their job the heart's not gonna give much use and if the liver doesn't do its job in purifying you know the the blood and you know it's you know generating you know hundreds of uh enzymes that you know metabolize everything possible in the body you'll be dead so and the bones and every other organ system is like playing its role what if we thought the same for ourselves that no matter what country you were in that you're in some sense you're part of this lo your whole yourself so you have your real life and the but we are so interdependent of course we need each other and then we need each other globally uh including you know what china does is relevant to us and and and what russia does and what every country does and i'm talking about environmentally and in terms of social justice issues racial justice issues i mean it's all part of the the equation of like suffering or well-being planetary suffering or planetary well-being ocean you know sort of um um you know sea level rise whatever you want to point to the degree to which the human mind knows itself and what its industrial uh genius has produced you know and i i say that in quotes because it's both amazing but it's also its own auto immune disease because if we kill ourselves over our industriousness how great is that so this is a moment where we should live our way into it and everybody can take responsibility for being one cell in the larger thing now is that practical i don't know i mean is that gonna sort of change you know the the dynamics that have led to the kind of um implosions that we're seeing within the body politic of the united states and the potential for healing and change but how many different uh realities there are that are kind of non-intersecting and where people are so angry that they're willing to be violent to the point of like even within families hating each other detesting each other not being able to talk to each other so this is a real disease and if we address the dis-ease of just not being able to sit with yourself for 20 minutes without feeling so uncomfortable you got to get up and you know go on twitter or facebook or instagram it's like look at what's happened to our attention in the attention economy which is a kind of vast epidemic pandemic of its own right and where truth is the first casualty and self-interest is like you know people don't even know who they are but the self-interest so you know it's like these are german transformational and essential challenges and i think in my experience over the past 40 years working with all sorts of different kinds of people and constituents and in different universes of business and everything else medicine uh i think we can do this one i think we can pull it off but we can't pull it off unless we wake up and it's no joke and so let's do what it takes to optimize a well-being and minimize harmed by omission as well as commission and that's where racial justice comes into it it's like if you're blind to racial injustice and you know that some people might call that white privilege if you haven't have the white skinned so you're privileged to not even know what you don't know you need other people to point it out because otherwise it's just like the glaciers they're gone you don't know how it happened and your own freedom is absolutely integral to everybody's freedom and so ignorance is is not really a viable option anymore turning away and be give whether they call it uh yielding a blind eye or giving a blind eye it's no longer an appropriate life path and just say well i'm going to live in my own little hermetically sealed environment so that's why i said yes to talking with you because you know i i feel like the more uh podcasts or you know things of this kind where we can have these kinds of deep conversations where it's not about i me and mine but exactly an inquiry into how blinding our eye me and mine are when we're attached to them then we can like really investigate what would a a true we look like instead of it just me look like and especially with those people who you don't want to talk to you're angry at you think are like sub-human or whatever it is those that's where your heart needs to open and this is like major work it's no it's no kidding around it's not just a little relaxation exercise or feel good or new age gobbledygook that's why mindfulness is so powerful but and i'm hoping that with this this um you know master class that it will just be a doorway for more people to actually do the and i'll say it hard work uh beyond the first week or two where you make a new year's resolution yeah i'm going to become a meditator my view is like i want you to be a meditator if you want to be 50 years from now you know 50 years from now and not and not some caricature of it so you have to define that for yourself i'm not going to define what that would mean to be a a mindful person or a meditator anybody who claims to be a mindful person by definition is not because mindfulness is the hardest thing in the world to even string two moments of mindfulness together so uh it's very important to you know bring a huge sense of humor and um and and also sense of uh um sense of just like not building one more romantic narrative about mindfulness or meditation but just living your life as if it really really really really mattered and my challenges or my assertion is it does more than you think and more than you possibly can think because thinking no matter how powerful it is is only one of our multiple human intelligences and the awareness which is what mindfulness really is it's pure awareness we're born with it it's another form of human intelligence and it's bigger than any thought any business thought any thought of physics physics or the multi-year multiverse or the nature of reality anything because you can hold any thought and awareness and so it's de facto bigger and it's a form of intelligence that we haven't really explored in any depth in mainstream culture at all of course the buddhists have been exploring it for that for thousands of years and now for various kinds of reasons that are hard to understand karma of the buddhism itself and zen and you know theravadan buddhism and the vajrayana tradition that's better as well as yoga and a lot of other meditative practices body anchored and everything else this is just spilling out into the world for reasons that it's very hard to you know point to and say oh it's because of that it's like who knows how this emerged but it is an emergent phenomenon and i think uh it's just in time in a certain way for those that feel safer seeing the world in maybe a more black and white manner what can what can you say to them about what the truth really is i'm not sure i think i'd rather listen than say anything i mean really listen i mean that would be another definition of mindfulness true listening deep listening ultimately listening to silence listening to the space between your own thoughts and emotions and underneath even your own thinking i mean so awareness in some sense is synonymous with spaciousness and with silence and with wakefulness so i think deep listening is really called for and let's focus on the suffering okay the people who uh you know are very very angry if you dig down in my experience investigate anger i don't think it takes long no matter who you are to discover that underneath your anger is fear and might it be worth investigating what the ultimate fear is and who is afraid so it comes back to that original question who's meditating who's doing a body scan who's speaking who's breathing even and the questioning is so much more important than the answers because it actually gives you back your your core humanity or reveals it it gives it makes makes access to it immediate in a certain way and as long as you don't build a story about that then the next moment growth happens learning happens the more we learn the more we grow including grow into like not knowing who we are maybe as opposed to i hate these people and i love these people and let's go to war over that just like the lungs and the heart or the liver and i think having a deep inquiry into the nature of our suffering what pains us what is unfulfilled and how our rhetoric of say our own nation and then the nationalism the disease that can grow out of that when you believe all the stuff about exceptionalism you know and um triumphalism which is the way american history is usually taught is that like we're the best on the planet that can't be true we're wonderful but so are all the other people in countries in the world but if we tell ourselves no there's something special about us well i get it but then we better live our way into it in a way that we haven't really been i mean even in terms of covet we've lost more people and with all our great science and you know the national institutes of health and everything else we've had more debts in the united states per capita than any other country on the planet it's like so you can be so smart you're stupid if you don't wake up and and i we need all the cells of the body so that would mean the ones you don't to come back to your question to to actually start listening much more to what what would make you happy what do you want what would really you know and when you start to investigate in that way even you know uh beyond a certain point i mean people we're one of the wealthiest countries in the world even the people who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic status is a hell of a lot wealthier in a certain way and more secure than in many many countries in the world but what would it take if we actually took care of everybody in a way that strengthen the health of the body politic and then ultimately of the planet and there's no one way to do it the same was with the meditation practice so so that means that everybody's voice counts everybody's experience counts and mindfulness is really in some sense primed to embrace suffering and investigate the deep nature of suffering and its relationship to self and then it is liberative that's the only reason worth engaging in it is that it frees us from a kind of suffering that we actually generate for ourselves whether it's on an emotional level whether it's on a thought level whether it's on a social level and and ultimately it comes down to the original questions like who am i and what are we capable of if we didn't believe all of our you know very limited thoughts early on in the pandemic i watched you do a youtube meditation i think it was on a daily basis yeah um maybe through wisdom the wisdom group yeah wisdom 2.0 yes sauron and i collaborated on that i mean there were thousands of people on that so much uncertainty and anxiety and stress which is still continuing today and i'm wondering if you could talk just a little bit about anxiety and what's happening when we have this feeling of anxiety and how sometimes we don't even know why we feel anxious yeah well it's it's a profound question here's where a lot of the socioeconomics comes into play i mean people there are people who are privileged enough to you know not have to actually go into environments where they risk their health every single day and the health of their family to earn enough money to put food on the table and to keep the heat on and stuff like that you know because we're seeing like even in a place like texas the society doesn't necessarily make decisions that you know and sometimes it can't even to protect you from you know whatever's coming out of the arctic or or whatever or the the caribbean you know so i don't want to give people the impression that there are facile answers to like uh anxiety and how to kind of come to terms with it which is to say in passing that's my working definition of what it means to heal is to come to terms with things as they are not to fix but to actually embrace so when we are teaching mindfulness and and we're inviting anxious feelings to arise because they do we actually do something that seems a little bit weird or paradoxical which is to say recognize them as anxious feelings what how does that appear in the body what kinds of thoughts are associated with that kind of a feeling you can what kinds of emotions and how are they expressed in the body and then you can even investigate is my awareness of my anxiety anxious and you may discover in fact i think you safe to say you're bound to discover that if you can embrace it in awareness much like a mother holding a child who's you know falling down and then hurt himself and is crying excuse me if you can embrace your own uh anxiety in the body in the heart in the mind and its consequences in the world you may find that in that moment you'll have a deeper appreciation for where it's coming from how valid it is because sometimes it's really anxiety can save your life fear is important and it saves your life we all all of us humans are wired up that way but sometimes it's completely debilitating because it becomes our default mode and we're just stuck in endless panic and endless view well i mean we've done studies and published papers that show that eight weeks of mindfulness-based stress reduction can really help people with medical diagnosis of uh of panic attack and generalized anxiety disorder decades of this to actually in eight weeks have a new way of being in relationship to those feelings that is transformative that is levered not making them go away it's finding a new way to actually learn from them listen to them appreciate them welcome them and understand that they're like waves on the surface of the ocean or storms in the mind then not the truth of anything and that that energy could actually be used for healing or for uh coming to terms with the actuality of things in ways that provide new openings and there's no one way to do it so it's not prescriptive in the sense of like now here are john kevitzen's 20 ways to liberate yourself from anxiety i mean that would be an insult in a certain way and say no this is your work to do and your own body mind and heart and social relationships will collaborate in showing you and gifting you everything you need to actually befriend what you most want to run away from and that's a love affair that is transformative and that's really also what mindfulness is so it's like some boring meditation practice no this is like you know where the rubber meets the road in terms of like hey before you die are you are you actually alive or are you completely at the mercy of your own reactive thoughts and emotions and body sensations and fears and no one can do that work for you a therapist could support you in it but ultimately it's the kind of work that you have to do yourself but it's not work isn't that comes back to the doing non-doing thing we're really talking about a non-doing kind of work like in chinese the tao of work you know that like and this is relevant of course for business too like and you've probably seen people like this there's some people who are leaders that are so skillful that they don't seem to do anything their time is not eaten up by all this busy doing doing doing even including meetings and reports and everything else but somehow the way they hold the organization nothing important is left undone and everybody in the organization is energized to contribute what they can contribute and actually bring a hundred percent of themselves to work rather than fifty percent or twenty percent so again a lot of this has to do with the details of what your life is like where you are in relationship to covet and to working online or not or you know uh being on the front lines of healthcare or uh all the other frontline workers that have been so exposed and decimated by the pandemic and terrified by it and we're nowhere near finished with it so this is a the the the teaching that you were referring to where you're right for 13 straight weeks from the end of march through june i was um either one hour or two hours a week from monday to friday every week just uh guiding meditations and having dialogues with these tens of thousands of people ultimately who were showing up every single day it was like a kind of instant uh sango or global community and it was truly every time zone it was on the planet and um and it really was an example so to speak of the body politic you know that we're all cells of it and we're all taking responsibility for our own little piece in a certain kind of way which seems trivial but it turns out is excuse me not at all trivial and um so i did that for 13 straight weeks and was encouraging people to look at the unfolding of the pandemic to whatever degree possible as a retreat as a meditation retreat where no one asked for this but here we are locked down a lot of the time stuck of course anxiety is going to come up of course fear i mean and then of course death i mean our relatives are dying our friends are dying our you know people we know are dying and nobody seems to be consumed to be in control for a very long time or approaching it so it was a total nightmare and um and yet all this has happened many times in the past that humanity has been decimated by plagues of one kind or another by pandemics and we're no exception and it's showing us that we need to wake up wake up and and the beauty of this work is that nobody can tell you how to do it ultimately each one of us needs to contribute our own genius and we always related to the medical patients who were referred by their doctors to the mindfulness-based stress reduction clinic in the hospital now they're the mbsr is like global phenomenon in hospitals around the world uh but we used to say to people look from our experience as long as you're breathing uh there's more right with you than wrong with you and we're gonna pour energy into what's right with you let the rest of the health care system and your doctors and surgeons take care of what's wrong and see what happens and ultimately we were treating every single person as a kind of miraculous being as a genius and so there's no one right way to practice mindfulness you have to find your own way and what any teacher or guided meditation whether it's a body scan or sitting meditation or mindful yoga or anything else what that basically is is a glide path into your own heart and your own genius and then the adventure of well how's that going to unfold in the nitty-gritty horror injustice everything that's going on in the world in a way that is promotes learning growing healing and ultimately transformation on every level including the society and the and the world fun always always some levity right well yeah i like to say you know i think i say this at some point or other in that program it's far too serious to take too seriously yes and then i say i'm serious about that damn serious um i i have to say at the end of each of my meditations every day i thank my teachers and uh you are on that list so every day twice a day i express my gratitude to you for teaching me and to help me to make my way through life just a little bit better and i just want to say it's an honor to be able to thank you in person or at least over these internet waves or whatever they're called um and uh and the impact you've had on my life it's it means the world and and a countless others you say that countless others as well john i'm very very touched to hear you say that and it's it's actually proof that like we don't know each other i've never even heard of you i as i said most people have your book and i've seen what you've been doing and this is exactly what i'm pointing to is that like we're all cells of this one adventure the body part of politics so to speak of the world and uh and we're all figuring out what our karmic assignments are and they change over the decades too or even over the years or moments so i want to thank you for the opportunity to uh to have connected in this way with your you know your audiences and uh and also to say that you know i before i said yes i checked you out and uh noticed that you had done uh programs with two of my friends shantam seth and and uh and roshi joan halifax and you know i just want to underscore that this is a kind of truly distributive function this adventure in mindfulness and so um it really is a wonderful um uh privilege to have met you and to you know feel some of the kind of ways in which i can feel how your own being has got to be influencing the world in all of the domains that you function in and i bow to you for that i mean it's like i just i just love this that you know i guess i'll leave i'll stop with this you know which i was saying during the early days of the pandemic i mean i i had the good fortune of crossing paths several times with buckminster fuller uh way back when and he used to talk about the planet as spaceship earth and i think we've reached a point where we need all hands on deck on spaceship earth and that means you whoever the hell you are whoever the hell is listening to this that yeah it means you i love it i love it thank you john i i will end with this in the first chapter of your book full catastrophe living you share a part of a poem from nadine strain she said quote oh i've had my moments and if i had to do it over again i'd have more of them in fact i try to have nothing else just moments one after another instead of living so many years ahead of each day each day unquote thank you again john i greatly appreciate your time and to all the loyal listeners i greatly appreciate you spending time with us today and i wish you all much love and gratitude [Music]

Channel: Leading with Genuine Care

Views: 32,214

Keywords: meditation, mindfulness, MBSR, jon kabat-zinn, interview

Id: BbouAowMk6s

Length: 59min 20sec (3560 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021