Mindful Living - with Jon Kabat-Zinn

[Music] [Applause] [Applause] well because these too modest to introduce themselves that was a Lord Richard Laird a member of the house Awards at the end of this you will be hearing from Sir Anthony Sheldon member of the House of Lords who together with other people founded this organization action for happiness and that was Mark Williamson who is running the whole show with of course a lot of collaboration and it's my absolute pleasure to be here in support of action for happiness and do whatever it is that I can to in some sense ignite and enduring not a very transitory passion for this whole emergence of a sense of deep recognition of interconnectedness and then how that can develop into various communities at every conceivable level from right in this neighborhood to around the world and we've never been at a better time to cultivate community around essential issues and at the same time we've never been in a more time in the time where the urgency to do it was so enormous and the potential cost of not doing it so horrific that let's not even go there this evening and that's and so just to say that I'll stay away from the subject of the President of the United States but I you know I was in Europe when the election happened and in France one day giving a talk to about this many people and then in Germany the next day and people were for the most part beside themselves because probably people come to hear me would be prejudiced in that regard and so I found myself saying that if mindfulness were absolutely essential to the well-being of the world and the happiness of the world and the robust health of the world and not just humanity in the species but the planet itself that if mindfulness was absolutely essential on November 8th then it's infinitely even more essential since November 9th and we're seeing that played out everywhere mostly on Twitter and and so this is in some sense a profound occasion for learning how easy it would be for democratic institutions to dissolve and how precious the kind of democracy is and the democracy where we all take responsibility for the whole for society and that's what health means I mean the word health comes from the word whole wh o le in english which means you know and that healing and health and even holy hol I come from this deep root meaning of whole wh om and from that perspective of whether you know it or not whether you think it or not but you probably do because you're a very highly selected audience since you probably know why you came here tonight you're already whole no matter what you're carrying and carrying is meaning of the Latin to suffer and we're all carrying something you don't put this many people in a room without having a huge amount of suffering come in with us some of it visible some of the done visible some of it transitory some of it les transitory but the fact of the matter is and one of the core principles of mindfulness and mindfulness based stress reduction is that whatever it is it's workable as long as you're breathing and as long as you're willing to do a certain kind of work okay so this is non not not so easy and not so trivial in fact the subject of mindfulness since this is the subject this evening it's only the hardest thing in the world for us human beings to string even to moments of mindfulness together because our our energies are so dissipative that even before the invention of the iPhone we were self distracting like wild now off the chart I also want to take and really appreciate the space that we're in look around and just drink in how it actually looks a little bit like the House of Commons in the House of Lords remember except those are designed for argument and this is not designed for argument this is designed for deep listening and the deepest listening that we can do is here are we capable we're not going to be capable of listening and hearing each other unless we're capable of hearing ourselves listening to ourselves and that means dropping underneath all the noise which makes it hard because there's nothing but noise the mind never shuts down constantly running some agenda or other would you note have you noticed and and very often it's like very self-critical anybody relate to that or am I in the wrong country and very other critter - so we recovering both sides of the dualism and mindfulness is really about non-dual wisdom so that means as long as we're making us or them or me when I was great and now me when I'm falling apart it's diluted it's the wrong view looking through the wrong lens but you know it's all as if we've gone to law school and we're master advocates of you know sort of arguing our case for why we are the one person on the planet that is not hold that is dis integrated that is not worthy that if you only knew who I was you'd realize that I'm a total mess and if you take away nothing else tonight it's that like you know that voice is in all of us on some occasions of others sometimes it's not your turn and then you think well why is everybody else so upset about everything but then when it's your turn it's like you lose your mind just as well as anybody else and the messages that that's not true that the thought about how you are and who you are is just that it's an event in the field of awareness that no one understands even the greatest neuroscientists do not understand what one tiny little secreted thought is in the mind and those tiny little secreted thoughts can completely ruin your day or your moment but they don't have to if you're willing to recognize that they're not true they're not like the gospel they are events in the field of awareness and Einstein was fairly famous for having said I mean is famous for a lot of things so this is one of the few is the least things that he is famous for but he said that you're lucky if you have one or two good thoughts in a lifetime and Einstein had one or two good ones not only that but just on the subject of Einstein I can't resist because you know in 2015 a hundred years after his theory of general relativity after they had spent 40 billion dollars developing two detectors that they call observatories but they don't measure light they measure distance between mirrors with lasers had events happen billions of light years away and billions of years ago that were detected as ripples in space-time in two observatories 2,000 miles apart at the same moment if you only had one observatories just spent 20 billion dollars and you got a wiggle you wouldn't know where there was an artifact or not you get two Wiggles at the same time Einstein and he did it all with you know in his head and he also understood that nature of the unity of energy and matter and spacing time and he's famous for having said that a human being is a part of a whole called by us universe apart limited in time and space the experiences were she if you want to grab onto this one he experiences himself his thoughts and feelings or something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of consciousness this delusion is a sort of prison for us restricting us to our personal desire and to the few persons nearest to us our task must be to free ourselves from this prison and widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty nobody is able to achieve this completely but the striving for such attainment is part of the liberation I'm Stein not the Dalai Lama it's a part of a liberation and foundation for inner security when I read that like 30 years ago when I was working at the Harvard Medical School I was sitting down having a cup of coffee in a cafe and I literally fell off the chair I mean a yogi the greatest yogi the greatest you know meditator could not have nailed it better and this is the mind who came up with the unification of space and time matter of energy ok so I did a little nod to Einstein and support his assertion that if you have one or two good thoughts in your life your way out of the curve so let's not get too caught up in our thinking and our thinking is hugely caught up in with our emotions and as you all know where you wouldn't have come I mean nobody you know comes to here to John kabat-zinn talk without already knowing what I'm going to say and not needing to come really so why don't you all leave and get other people in off the street who really need to hear this but where we're talking about is in some sense how to find the threads in our own life starting from where we are in the midst of the full catastrophe of the human condition whether it's your turn now or five years from now or five minutes from now to be in wives relationship to the unfolding of life itself in this one time we ever have the only moment we ever have which is this one but if you start to pay attention to where your mind is to them you know any moment for the next you all know that most of the time it's hanging out someplace else and it's favorite places are the past and perseverating about what happened and who's to blame and why my life is just totally failure and whose the blame because of course I did not not to blame so someone's got to be responsible and then the future which is like I don't know if you worry in the UK you know okay so worrying and then planning do you plan you know plan for the future you know what have you heard of Mark Twain famous American character writer journalist he said at one point that my life has been full of tragedy some of it actually happened but we have this phrase in English you know to die a thousand deaths you know we're like our own worst enemy our own minds perseverating chewing over this that the other thing all in the future all in the past and the present moment the only moment where ever alive gets a little bit eclipsed a little bit squeezed to the side a little bit polarized you so welcome this evening it's really nice to see you all here again look around drink drinking in each other if you need to turn around turn around because this is like this is what I would call a sacred space okay because it's designed to hold the beauty of what it means to be human without giving it a particular kind of iconography which then some people could relate to another people don't so it's non divisive it's more unifying and I just feel very very touched to be here and touched by the turnout and touched by you know the affection I feel to inquire what that's all about because I as you know I'm not interested in being a guru and I'm not interested in projections of how great I am and walk on water and blah blah blah blah blah okay because first of all they're toxic to me and they're also wrong because no matter how much gratitude or affection you may have for the way in which you connected to me or the work it's really you that deserve the bow deserves the gratitude and when people as some people did today and I honor it deeply so please don't get me wrong about this but come up to me so you saved my life many many of you said that just in the best hour that I think now I can't tell you what that does for me but but I also feel like taking it and with all due respect that it's not quite true ok and if we're adhering to Einsteins you know truth so to speak what's true is it you saved your life and maybe I collaborated a little bit or maybe even you didn't save your life but the circumstances were such that you your intentions delivered something that liberated you from some kind of centrifugal force field that captured you time that's just thought or emotion and a lot of the kind of pain Frank physical pain in the body that doesn't even easily dealt with and then a lot of time it's like losing various capacities greeting or not capacities people I know I can tell you that science is a work scientists are working very hard on the senescence issue especially the older ones the older they are the more motivated they are to solve the dying problem and get it over with before they die seriously I've been to meetings where they talk about it you know there's a certain degree of attachment to getting the results so that you know you can immortalize yourself work before you do that maybe download yourself to a disk so that you know at some point I can put you into some supercomputer and voila I'm back but in another way you know what's most important and I think you already know this or you wouldn't have come tonight this is it and the issue isn't really dying that's not the big concern have you heard of who Oprah Winfrey Winfrey is you know who will be so I was interviewing I was interviewing with her under the trees that her ranch in California one day and she was supposed to be interviewing me about the book mindfulness for beginners okay and she had old listed things that she was doing and so she's going along and asking me questions and so on and she said John what do you think about life after death my book what do you think about life after death and I leaned in and he said Oprah this is being filmed by about five cameras you know under this amazing live oak tree in Santa Barbara Oprah I'm not that interested in life after death what interests me is the question of whether there's life before death that's what mindfulness is about is there life before death because if yous are not along on autopilot for your whole life as our famous philosopher Henry David Thoreau realized he said he went he everybody probably knows the story but he went off for two years or almost two years to live by Walden Pond and he built the house and he kept track of his moments and he would stand in the pond up to his nose and see the life activity expressed in the government you know and he'd watch the Sun go from one side of the sky to the other in his doorway and be delighted that he hadn't done a bloody thing all day and he wrote about it you know rhapsodize about it the whole book Walden is a Rhapsody about mindfulness in the present moment what he said early on the book I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately the front meaning confront to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not when they came to die discover that I hadn't lived okay so dying is not the real problem living with things as they are big problem or at least big challenge doesn't have to be a problem if we're willing to put the Welcome out out for what is and then realize that's the curriculum he didn't ask for it but sometimes things arise Zorba the Greek called that the whole catastrophe you know that chasm sockets is great character and what would he do with the full catastrophe he get up and in the face of his own stupidity failure and catastrophe of being a father and than than evidence again so the human condition is as the human condition is but we haven't written the last chapter of what human beings are possible we haven't gotten anyway close and I think that's what actions are happiness in some senses invited you that look as well you know if it's P she said what might be possible if we really took care of and investigated looked into who we are with with in the context of exactly what's happening with us and then those of you who feel like mindfulness save your life or the practice of mindfulness in some sense open up a world was allowed you to deal with things that before you just thought were calamitous and often are calamitous but how to be in wise relationship today while you have the chance and there's only one time that you have the chance that's now everything else is the fiction the past is over future hasn't happened so here's a little suggestion if you want the if you want the future to be different where's the one Archimedes the focal point where you could actor the fulcrum where you could actually make the future different well it's this moment let's say you show up fully in your body in this moment and gain awareness and you learn how to inhabit the field of awareness so that you're at home in the present moment in your body no matter what's wrong with your body well different because you've shown up in this one you'll see feel hear smell taste touch know things that you would not know say if you are an auto pilot or really caught in anger or contraction or not one thing or force in okay so that's how you change the futures by inhabiting the present fully mind fully because that what we didn't have it the full dimensionality of life and in all Asian languages word for by the way I'm sorry that it I'll try them then all these other people but I know that a few of you can see me just listen what I'm saying it's more important than my profile you you some threads to the step when you lose one you know there always others to pick up on what was I saying oh yes Asian languages thank you just the prompt I needed in all Asian languages as many of you know far better than I the words of mind in word for heart is the same word so when you hear the word mindfulness if you're not also hearing the word heartfulness you're not actually understanding it it's not some cold clinical conceptual lands or stance that you bring to reality it's it's putting out the welcome mat for the full dimensionality of life and speaking of Einstein and the dimensions of space-time because he was the one that taught us that like there's not space and time there's a four-dimensional space-time well that's that's not the end of it that's like old hat now I mean they're like the universe is said to be at least 11 dimensional in string theory and that 7 of those dimensions didn't unfurl adequately during the Big Bang but they have to be there and the math says that but there are lots of other dimensions to our own experience there are hidden dimensions and they're all over the place for instance it's not true for this audience because I how many of you would say that you have a regular ongoing meditation practice look around look across the room it's like virtually everybody if we had done this they talk like 50 years ago how many people do you think would have been in the room in the first place none although Gandhi's spoken from this stage I think and you know I don't know who else if you have a regular meditation practice then you know that the present moment is the door into life itself MBSR was designed you mentioned as a course it's a clinic in the form of a course now have you ever heard of a clinic in the form of a course especially in medicine is not psychiatry if the catch people the whole idea in 1979 catch people falling through the cracks of the healthcare system in 1979 the United States there were cracks in the health care system in 2017 its Grand Canyon's but people falling through the with heart disease with cancer with chronic pain living with HIV with every conceivable thing no matter how many wonderful advances they were in medicine the way medicine is practiced very often a lot of people don't benefit or you learn through a rude awakening that the one thing you have medicine doesn't know anything about then it's like ah what do I do now and so this was kind of like the idea of the course was to catch people falling through the cracks at alkis it's been referred originally by their doctors although now they refer themselves and in a week-long course designed to teach people how to take better care of themselves starting from exactly where they are using relatively intensive Buddhist meditative practices without the Buddhism and the compound insult and injury mindful hatha yoga and out of that so imagine 1979 from the point of view of academic medicine that was the equivalent of the visigoths SAR at the Citadel at the gates of the Citadel of Western civilization about to destroy it completely we're bringing meditation into medicine can't happen and I you know but it did somehow it happened because there were a few people that said these people are suffering we don't know what to do with them why not give it a chance and of course if you know anything about the Dharma it's all about suffering not that life is suffering that's not a translation of the forth of the first noble truth is that there is the actuality of suffering it's part of the human condition but the good news is we can find new ways to be in wise relationship to it and they are liberabit if they are freeing so that we can actually address not only our suffering our discomfort our being out of joint but we can also address the root causes of that and that was what the course was about and we would say to people with every conceivable form of cancer heart disease chronic pain everything else including people you know with the you know cervical spinal injuries paralyzed from the neck down or from the waist down so everybody who was motivated to come into the room you're in the room and at the room just like this is a room it's a container and I think part of what action happiness is trying to do is to promote containers where we can actually drill down the essence of our humanity which is never me a monad unrelated to everything else but a we and to recognize that you can't be healthy in a society that's not helping even the air the water the food but but you know a lot of our diet is just the news we just towers full of human being burning down when the human being said 30 years that these powers of this powers going to burn down after the fact fantastic compassion before the fact zero wisdom this is something wrong with this picture is it's like are human beings incapable if we can measure infinitesimally small I didn't finish the story about the gravitational waves but the distance between the lasers in the mirrored lasers is like five kilometers the the vibration in space-time the the sensitivity of the measurement 100 the width of an electron we human beings are capable of that technologically phenomenal why can't we take care of people why can't we realize what the cause of the suffering might be before we create the catastrophes and address it there is enough money in the world unless uh everything in society's driven not by homeostatic well issue you know sort of dynamics for well-being and health not just of the body but of the body politic in the human you know society and planetary society but it would require going beyond localized greed hatred and total delusion creating delusion so that's often market motivator and let's before we start pointing fingers at the bankers or anybody else who's your favorite the pointer finger at how about recognizing the greed that runs in you hmm the one thing the grasping the clinging how about recognizing the anger the not wanting the aversion that runs in you how about recognizing how easily we can fall into total delusion and believe all those thoughts and I had none of which are true or if they're true they're not true enough you get my drift that's the practice of mindfulness that's the practice of heartfulness and we don't need to talk about compassion it is compassion compassionate and kind birthright pack heads we don't need to you know sort of acquire this function we let's call it the awareness function ok mindfulness means awareness were awareness okay you have it I think you have to get it or take a navy course and you know and pump iron to get a bump up your awareness I'm really ripped with awareness but why isn't so hard it's so hard because we're self distracting virtually all the time and so the awareness is here but we don't have access to it all the time because we've been exercising another muscle the muscle of mindlessness the muscle of automaticity the muscle of falling into narrative about our favorite subject if you put people in an fMRI scanner and you say don't do anything it turns out there's a region of the brain that just goes crazy lights up lots of activity and so it said not to do anything with all this energy in the medial prefrontal cortex frontal cortex and the answer is it's called the default mode because we default to it and when you ask people what are you doing in there since we said don't do anything in there what they're doing is they're falling into narrative and guess what the narrative is about it's always about the same thing my favorite subject me know who what else would it be about me and my unhappiness me and my body me and my vis me and my dad me and my future my future not your future that takes a lot of energy eight weeks of MBSR that attenuates the study was done at the University of Toronto and published in 2007 and other regions light up lateral regions so they call this the the narrative Network because of all like the narration of me and my future in my past and my success of my failure and here it's just I'm just you're breathing in breathing out wakeful underneath thought it's not the thoughts aren't happening we can't shut off thoughts idle just give you a big headache like trying to shut off the English Channel no way if some English Channel the bummer I'm just going to cover with Plexiglas might be more fun than taking the tunnel it doesn't work you can't stop the waves it was in the nature of water to wave it's in the nature to mind to think and wave and get turbulent and everything and caught up in the story of me but if you drop down if you learn how to drop down say here or into a stillness it turns out that it's like dropping 30 or 40 meters below the way it's the flow old gentle undulations quiet present awake all the time so it's not like you have to shut anything off or shut anything out we're following my drift okay it's applicable to your meditation practice on a daily basis good I also so we say to falling through these cracks in the healthcare system with MBSR we take to them listen no matter what your diagnosis no matter what's wrong with you from our perspective as long as you're breathing there's more right with you than one with you and during this course during this eight weeks we're going to pour energy in the form of attention and awareness into what's right with you let the whole rest of the hospital and health care system take care of what's wrong and see what happens eight weeks later are you up for this everybody's up for it why first of all because when you go to a hospital in the United States you know we don't have the same kind of National Health Service that you do and so the whole economy of health care that's bankrupting the country and so every time you go to the hospital a charge is generated and it's generated now electronically it used to be done by paper but the way it's generated is there's an encounter form so there's always an encounter form then you get built or your insurance gets billed but there's so there's always an encounter form but there's very few encounters because everybody if even the doctors or the staff and so forth zoning along on auto-pilot trying to get people through the system and losing in some sense much too often our common humanity and making a diagnosis didn't show up a person shows up hmm it's not a liver in room 305 but when you're in that community it can be volved to that if you're not mindful and then you lose not just there's a matter of the you lose you know you hear what I'm saying and if you were mindful you'd see the tendency to do that because of course you're stressed out of your mind and you've got too many people to see in too short a period of time and you realize that I have wait a minute when I was in medical school when I graduated I swore an oath I took an oath called the Hippocratic oath and the quite elaborate but the first part of the Hippocratic oath is first do no harm premium no no sir so I asked you just think about your own life how would you know if you're even doing harm unless you're awake unless you're mindful unless you're heartful have you ever had the experience in your own family say with your own children or parents or somebody where like you said something and you realize after you said it that you wanted to grab it and pull it back but it was already out there and then you saw the spear go into somebody that you love and right into their heart very hard to take that back but if you're aware of the energy rising in you and the anger or the whatever you might catch it before it gets out Emma or if you even sort of more minor slights you know that you don't even think a slight and then you see a flashing movement on a child's face or a person's face of disregard of having perceived disregard that's probably the thing that us humans suffer from the most is not being seen by others what do we want more than anything else we want to be met we want to be seen want to be fixed because we know we can't always be fixed we know we are going to die but what we want as I think all of us ultimately we want to live but we're too busy to do it now so can we just accumulate whatever we need so that we can live later like on the weekend if I could just get to the weekend then I'll be happy so in terms of action for happiness if you really want to be happy [Music] there's only one moment if you happen if you're going to wait for the president see of the United States to change or for the entire House of Lords and House of Commons to meditate long enough so that wisdom will then spontaneously arise and the entire body politic will somehow become like unbelievably healthy you can have a long wait so the question is but if you drop in right now and I brought this you may be wondering what the tennis ball is about I won't tell you the whole story of the tennis ball but you probably never forget that you know you always have the opportunity to just drop because you're all waiting for me to miss it but to drop in any moment right in it's not like then you're supposed to feel good know the invitation not to feel good it to be awake to the actuality of what is and then here's of something you can take home with you be aware of how personally we sometimes take things that are dead or personal and then generate that narrative of me and by the way the narrative of me doesn't just happen when we put people in scanners and tell them not to do anything it's like the default mode of how we walk around all the time we're on autopilot and what mindfulness is is like wake up it's not like become the world's greatest meditator and pretend you're the Dalai Lama mother Teresa or whoever your favorite character of the moment is favorite Saint no you are it in Buddhism I mean the the Buddhist message and it's the same as the Dalai Lama and he famous for saying over and over again I'm just a simple Buddhist monk nobody believed him of course but you know apocryphally people used to come up to the Buddha and and I've seen it happen with the Dalai Lama because you know it's a a stadium with a hundred thousand people so you're not necessarily getting that close to him people start crying just before they get into the stadium they don't even have visual but they start crying because they're projecting certain attributes onto him and with good reason to a certain degree but he would say hey don't project it onto me it's like the so the apocryphally the buddha had a lot of those kinds of qualities where you know certain women it's body you know just deep peacefulness and kindness of compassion radiating Laughton have you ever been around anybody like that you know that you just want to spend more time with that person it's kind of like you don't even know what it is but like I like to spend more time to flip that take have you ever been around anybody like I like to spend less time with that person you know think I don't know what it is but every time I'm around that person it's like a bummer well they're reasons for that and a lot of it is how self-centered the person is how much their record in the story of me where of course you know we're all called the story of me and this old guess what you're all big players in my movie but the end and of course I'm a big player in your movie so the beauty of this is that is it possible for us to just come to our senses wake up get real while we have the chance you think well you know meditating for 20 years you'll be a better person you'll just be twenty years older seriously this is it this is it summer and what if we could practice that way and in fact what by the way we've been practicing the whole evening already if you don't think this is meditation if you think I'm just giving a talk I'm not just giving a talk the real meditation practice is life a time how we live it in every single moment how long how are you in your body right now don't move how aware are you of your body sitting be aware of how you're sitting without moving to adjust your posture and be a good meditator that's it okay it's not the body and whatever position is the awareness so you're inhabiting it and your when are you inhabiting is now and what an interesting qualities now timeless have you ever heard yourself say or think I don't have any time I've heard myself say it to my little kids hurry up I don't have any time get dressed for God's sake how many dresses do you need to try on I don't have any time I'm here to come out of my mouth and I realized what am i teaching me sweetie I got any take as many dresses as you want and I got nothing but time I have to get to work that's not true either that's a lie I don't have to get to work no-one's going to dock my pay if I don't go to work but we tell ourselves these little falsehoods and their little forms of violence in a certain way you know anything not big deal but filled in it and where would the love be well the love would be in the recognition the love is in the awareness and then catching yourself when you go on autopilot about fifty billion times a day and then you come back mind goes off bring back mind goes off bring back line goes off I like where it's gone you know it's like a nice fantasy of one kind or another you don't want to bring it back bring it back anyway working with the resistance like and it does grow like a muscle and sometimes call it the mite muscle of mindfulness but we already have it it the access is that the development of it in sanskrit the word for meditation is Bhavana Bhavana means development the cultivation like an agricultural term you have to plant seeds water the seeds you protect the seeds for the shoots so that they don't get trampled by the cow that's what a meditation practice is like drop in right now and carve out some time by the clock to practice every day my recommendation how many of you wake up early and it's the first thing you do anybody practice that way the wonderful way but some people you can't wake up that early because you already wake up too early so then you know so what I'm talking about formal meditation practice can do it line down body scan how many of you practise body scanning lying down patience fabulous okay I recommend that don't get out of bed stay in bed you know meditate in bed but do whatever is required to fine tune the instrument before you take it out on the road orchestras do that not no self-respecting virtuoso says like I'm a virtuoso I play for the London Philharmonic I've got a Stradivarius whatever like that you know it don't just come and say like that we have these like Olympic athlete musicians and it's Mozart let's go no they tuned for an hour they tuned to themselves they tuned to each other then Midway a lot of the kids to come to school in the morning then I ready to learn insurgent in certain societies or certain neighborhoods they haven't even had breakfast they may have experienced violence that morning or just dissipated forces in the family or in the neighborhood and income to school and theirs as opposed to learn and then what the teachers do very often not none of the teachers that in this room but the temptation is to yell at the kids to pay attention and what about teaching the novel attention is non-trivial you you all know like we don't pay attention we're on autopilot virtually all the time the first thing you discover when you start practicing mindfulness is how mind looks you are but then that's not that's not a life sentence that's not condemnation that's not a problem because the you that knows that your mindless is being mindful of how mindless you are that's it so there so this is really incredibly forgiving meditation practice and I'm talking about formal practice where you lie down on the floor in bed and just give yourself over to the present moment yeah you can do a body scan you can do all sorts of things but don't forget that meditation is not a doing it's being it's resting in awareness the space of awareness and it turns out the space of awareness is much bigger than the body in fact you can experiment for yourself you probably have because of all meditators how where is the center of your awareness where is the periphery of the circumference of your awareness you it's boundless that's the property of awareness that's why it's not taught in school it's too hard we taught thinking thinking thinking thinking but nobody teaches us to be aware of even the body so a lot of the time we kind of get entrained by the time we're 8 or 10 and what if it could just be in the head and then everyone smile you'll visit the body and sometimes would be fantastic and other does it be forget about this body and then you die so why not die now get it over with that's like seriously I mean let me act this out ok how many of you do yoga so what's this called shavasana and how does that translate into English is everybody listening quartz quartz and this posture you've seen enough your pictures of yoga postures - no it's like endless ways to put your body into pretzel like contortions that aren't humanly possible and it's said that of all 84,000 postures and 10 variants of each one so that's about 840,000 yoga postures it's said that their corpse pose most difficult and people like we're doing the body scan and people that may be administrators or funders of research or whatever if they happen into the room which we don't let them but if they did and if they can't happen into the room they have to be in the room the whole time and take the course not just come visit one class but there might several people aren't doing anything it just line it look like they're dead or asleep and I say oh well you're mistaken then you're doing the hardest work in the world they're doing the work of falling awake so to get them to come back to the buddha remember the luminous buddha people used to come up to him apocryphally i wasn't there and they say and remember he's very attractive you want to be near him because she's that kind of person we're all like that when we were our best self as a lot of time we're a little bit not and here we go up two minutes a are you a god in his response no I'm awake I'm awake okay so what's the basic message of that because it's the same as the Dalai Lama's I'm just a simple monk it's like if I'm awake that's a property of being human that means that you are a Buddha your essential nature or true nature is that you too can be awake in the only moment you will ever have the chance to be awake this one not tomorrow when you write yourself a New Year's resolution that yes I'm going to be a good meditator or taking MBSR course not that I don't recommend all those things but that's not what it's about that's just thinking this right now can drop right in do you have a body are you breathing anybody in this room who is not breathing I want you to come up especially in see me after the talk [Music] so in English I love that I don't have to be translated by the way you know they're like plenty countries where I go where I have to speak in half sentences it's such a drag I mean I've gotten good at it but you know you start a half sentence they translate by then you don't know where the sentence was going you know that's a slide over you but you you help me with that one where was I going I lost the pastor oh yeah what was it in English say it again oh I'm happy not to be translated yes because not so much because I lose my train of thought because I can do that in English perfectly well as you see that's because but because I can sort of speak in a way that goes beyond words the words are pointers and they are invitations to actually wake up and breathe so here's the thread thank you how many of you would say your breathing if you'll pardon my french that's horseshit if it were up to you to be breathing you would have died a long time ago hmm you know like we have a thought get distracted just like what happened to me and look dead you know I didn't die I just lost my train of thought see what I'm saying but if I was like my job was to breathe because it's my breath I'm the breather I'm the one that's breathing then you would have seen me just die and then I could answer Oprah's questions by direct examination so to complete to say that I'm breathing near the biology of breathing we're not reliable enough never mind the heart never mind the liver never my name is Vale and yet we use those personal pronouns with my body my breath my life why not start inquiring who is claiming this is my life my breath who is that my pain my suffering that might be really a libera tough experience to realize that we may be working overtime to make something happen that's already happening it's like driving your car with a brake on so paying attention to personal pronouns puts you back into the awareness of the default mode Network the story of me and all of a sudden you can drop remind yourself REE body yourself in this moment and here we are again good so let's actually practice okay not that what we've been doing right up to this moment has not been practiced but let's actually take some time by the clock to drop it so look what everybody's doing because we all good meditators so you're establishing yourself I'll just name what's happening you're establishing yourself in a posture that embodies wakefulness and dignity I might add nobody's trying to get low you know pity sitting up straight attentive ready open and awake here and so one things that will be noticed is that there is breathing going on we won't claim that we're breathing but certainly the breath is moving in and out as I said if it's not come and see me after can we ride on the waves of our own breathing with full awareness full awareness of the breath coming in to the body full awareness of the breath leaving the body and it's not about the breath although I'll ask you to pay attention to where you're instinctively drawn to feel the breath in your body some people will be down the belly some people might be up at the nostrils simply there might be the full debt but one place or another this body is breathing you're not doing it but can you be aware of it the sensations of the breath coming in and going up without pushing or pulling the breath or improving on it doesn't lead you to improve it Oh being with the knowing of these breath sensations not thinking about breathing but just direct feeling knowing sensing so full awareness of this breath coming into the body full awareness if this breastfeeding you know and then noticing a playing with as we continue sitting here expanding the field of awareness around the breath wherever you're feeling it in the body to include that sense of the body as a whole sitting here breathing and noticing how readily how easily the awareness can do that doesn't have any problem event this field bulb of breathing including the skin and whatever you're experiencing that's the curriculum so it's not like I'm not sure I'm doing it right I wonder how what I'm supposed to be feeling whatever your feeling is what you're supposed to be feeling and if there's nothing there's dullness or you know no feeling whatsoever then the knowing of no feeling just as good as sensation the mom conceptual knowing that awareness order to use that at the place home and then allowing the few - to expand to include any thoughts that might be putting through your mind or any emotions that you might have here and just almost as if the mind was like the sky and boundless just allowing it to be boundless and resting here not trying to search out the breath sensations or body sensations but just whatever is arising in predominating arise and pass away in the field of your awareness and you're simply resting here residing taking up residency in the boundless spaciousness of your own awareness moment by moment by timeless moment that's incision you you if discomfort comes up the noticing discomfort if impatience comes up or boredom comes up it's all the curriculum why because it's come up and awareness just doesn't care I mean it's all like a mirror whatever comes in from the mirror that's what's reflected well awareness is a multi-dimensional field that just holds whatever it is and understands knows in some profound way without or underneath thinking standing under you investing here with the unfolding of life itself and its net and held and known in this capacity that you were born with to just be awake now of course that's easier said than done because the thoughts are so powerful that sooner or later a thought will pull you away and produce another thought and pretty soon you will be downstream somewhere in the thought stream having dinner with a friend in Paris or whatever when you notice that they're already back notice what's on your mind so that you're cultivating intimacy with the habits of mind and just coming back to the open spaciousness or if that's too vague come back to your belly into your breathing and then opening up the field of awareness so whatever the objects of attention are that's not what it's about it you get tending itself and that drops you into wakefulness into awareness and whether it's oriented towards objects like breath sensations or sounds or thoughts or other people interactions the critical element is the inhabiting the alignment and then all your natural intelligences plural come online and you can see what's here to be seen feel what's here to be felt no what's your to be known underneath thinking but thinking is part of those forms of intelligence so you can actually utilize thought as well and emotion as well to actually be emotionally intelligent emotionally in touch in the only moment you're ever alive anyway so can your awareness as you sit here be aware of the people on either side of you without looking at them but just sensing that you're not alone there people in front of you back are you you decide the parlor hole already no matter what's wrong with you we're already whole and we're part of a larger circle of wholeness because every single one of you decided to come to friend's house this evening we all have better things to do but somehow when you colluded state we decided to come in you moon you and so resting in this awareness of a sense of us being whole and part of a larger whole for the cell of one body your body came from one cell talked about miracles many of you in this room grew those cells inside your bodies and they came out as human beings each human being adults human being is something you know just trillions themselves the body billions 86 billion at last count neurons in the brain many more in the body but all connected to the brain eighty six trillion glial cells by vehicle number of glial cells no one knows what they're doing in there that they probably not by accident and then hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections that are changing all the time on the basis of whether you are following my words and whether your touch with the breath of whether you are resting in awareness or lost in thought or in the turbulence of emotion right in this moment you don't have to think about it it's just that's how you think I mean because you've got this most complex organization of matter and then known by us universe not just Einstein or the Dalai Lama every single one of those like you know got the apparatus of total genius miraculous being every single animal and we discount it but not talking about me we visited that and but yeah I'm talking about you the real you your true nature you and so resting here and awareness yes I'm wagging my tongue and moving my lips and taking the air all without knowing how this happens out of my lungs moving it over my vocal cords and the concert with the lips and tongue moving the air and it's vibrating your to panic your you know eardrums and sending signals to your auditory cortex that are then spread out throughout the brain and you're following this rather elaborate ruse which is purely totally grammatical QED and the story that's a work of staggering genius on your part that in my part why by virtue of our being human meanwhile you haven't died because the brain stem and the phrenic nerve and the diaphragm are doing nothing they are going to keep you breathing for now the heart is going to keep you pumping that breath around the body and form of oxygen and you know the out-breath the flying so how at home can you be in this moment how comfortable in your own skin and in the carriage of the body in your spine and shoulders and the whole of your body in this moment so this is for malpractice and by the way I have bells here but I didn't ring them even to start and I'm not going to ring them now because well wait a second I mean are we meditating or am i giving a talk you are we still meditating I am my my walking the best talk I could give would be picking emotion the Buddha did that one one hour went by everybody came Buddha's going to even the top eight o'clock ComNet big buddy and thousand people showed up one hour went by two hours went by and they're not sitting on comfy chairs there is like unlit rock three hours went by I wasn't there again so this is apocryphal but he reached over and took a flower out of a vase and held it up and it said that out of the sea of you know ten thousand faces there were 9999 quizzical looks and one smile happiness and that's said to be the first moment of the direct transmission of mind from the Buddha to a disciple and recognize that maha kassapa was his name recognized as the first moment of zen direct transmission outside the traditional teachings or the cobra sutras we don't have to read a thousand books about meditation to know what you're doing just stop smile or respond appropriately sometimes the appropriate response is silence along the famous is saying if you want happiness practice compassion if you want to be happy yourself practice compassion we want to help other people practice compassion what happiness is like here now if we're not lost but self-destructing when we are lost in self detracting no problem just be aware of it I'm back and then the meditation practice what we've been doing that's not the real meditation practice as I said the real meditation breakfast is how we conduct ourselves how we live our lives action for happiness not basis for happiness mmm action engagement in body in action action en ACP Island we living the actuality of our understanding of our truth of our love in probably I've been meditating since I went to a talk at MIT as a young graduate student I was 21 years old I went to talk by Zen master named Phillip Taplow at the invitation of a professor of philosophy and religion called Houston Smith and I saw a sign the three pillars of Zen this was in 1965 and it's sort of sign two pillars of Zen I didn't know what then was I didn't know who used instruments was I didn't know Philip Kepler was I went to that talk so did four or five other people that are mighty counting the speaker and the person who invited them filled wasn't like so popular I was 21 years old took the top off my head I started meditating that day and then never stopped him probably that was a long time ago at 52 years you each one of you who's meditating knows how you got into it not a cult it's not a fad it was like totally improbable that I'd be meditating 52 years after you know that event but it meant that much to me people look at and say well is like nothing what do you not thing so this is the land of Shakespeare right so I like to say and Shakespeare wrote a play called much ado about nothing and so the more popular mindfulness guests and warts on everybody's lips Taylor my mum of Mangalam Mangalam Mangalam and in compassion compassion is by comparison maybe there should be a little less talk about mindfulness a little more mindfulness let's talk about compassion a little bit more embodied compassion you you you so can we actually live our way into the space of our own homeless then act in ways that serve others that serve humanity that invite happiness you and you know it's just I've come to see over those 52 years that I've been meditating you know regularly I'm very disciplined guy once I do come bananas do it I've come to over the years or decades realized that when I take my seat in the morning to sit to practice in a formal way or body scan where it's a radical act and it's hard it's the hardest work in the world not necessarily to be disciplined about this but to be awake the string as I said even to moments with mindfulness together but is worth doing because what's the alternative mindlessness we practice that all day long practice not being present all day long practice makes perfect the more we practice it the better we get it being mindless so this is kind of antidote so I've come to see this just taking my seat there's a radical act of sanity in this insane world and a radical act of love not self centered self preoccupied love but loving the less love to the beauty of the breath still breathing it's unaccountable why why doesn't it stop or someday it will but right now what a blessing and love for connectedness that I didn't just kind of pop out of nowhere you know I have a mother and father and I have children and I have grandchildren and and I'm connected through you know I feel deeply connected with you even if I've never met you and I never see you again we're part of some larger community some kind of larger movement that has to do with sanity that has to do with love that has to be a human intelligence and underscore plural Hill human intelligence is and it's not like there's anything wrong with you will is something missing you have it all already the question is can you realize it make it rule can we and and then act in the world in ways that optimize or at least promote greater well-being and reduce greater into the harm you know the Prima no no Sarah the first do no harm how would we know we're not being mindful harm through Commission what about harm through omission to what we don't know don't do and then don't even know that we could have done and then wake up like Thoreau at the end and say holy cow I blew my whole life because I thought it was all about this it turned out that was some big ego trip let's say a few more things about and I'm going to stop in a few minutes we want to say a few things so the meditations never going to end folks just go out and keep cultivating mindfulness in the present moment heartfulness so say a few things it's spreading like wildfire through the world because frankly in my estimate estimation the world is starving for it in fact it's literally dying for it dying for us to wake up not just us as individuals but the human species we call ourselves as a species do you know the book sapiens by the way book sapiens read it it's great but the species not called sapiens Homo sapiens species called Homo sapiens sapiens - sapiens from the Latin superior which means to taste or to know so we're the species no meaning not near cognitive or conceptual knowing but tasting you know you don't need to read the Encyclopedia of bananas when you bite into a banana you know that's a banana ok you don't have to think about it no it's a banana before you think of yeah it's a banana that's a form of intelligence and we totally take for granted if you have anybody in your family that's Alzheimer's you lose that too so before we lose it why not pop it why not cultivate intimacy with awareness intimacy with awareness and then life itself at the practice so this is in some sense it is a movement it's coming up to the floorboards and I'll just give you a few examples last week the Golden State Warriors won the NBA National Basketball Association championship okay Golden State Warriors they're wild to watch they're all in their 20s pretty much they can shoot baskets from so far away you get three points if you don't know anything about basketball and it's like they go in I mean they actually go in you know at a very high rate they meditate Steph Curry the entire team meditates why the coach meditates coach's name is Steve Kerr eternal suffering his father was the head of American University in Beirut back in the eighties he was he was assassinated by terror when Steve was a freshman at the University of Arizona so that suffering when he was and he was really good at basketball so when he joined the NBA he went to the Chicago Bulls in the era of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen to the great Michael Jordan he graded and the coach was a fella named Phil Jackson of Jackson Center and mindfulness so he hired my colleague George Mumford who was running programs that the Center for mindfulness and prisons and in the inner city and you know feels like somebody that I've been you know friends with the Dharma friends with her longer to actually train the Chicago Bulls in their championship years in mindfulness and then when Phil Jackson went to the Los Angeles Lakers George went and they transition to Lakers so okay so I'm trying to say this for a number of reasons one is which it's like if it's in the NBA it's everywhere the other thing is that you got some interesting role models when african-american you know boys in the inner-city hear that Michael Jordan or Shaquille O'Neal or Steph Curry now meditate from hearing that I meditate okay that's an inspiring it's like they meditate maybe it's got some value I'm going to do it too that's happening on so many different levels in our society and again teachers are bringing it up in their classroom why because they can't they can't to not bring it up because they can't teach so this is part of an ongoing flowering that could easily become corrupted and the last thing I want to say is that the more it gets out there in the world the more people are going to say hey I can make a few bucks on this or I can come modify it or I can sell this or sell that and you know so it's like more and more mindfulness and everybody's doing it and pretty soon nobody even knows how to spell it nevermind what it is and and the rigor of it the fact that this is pretty much the hardest thing in the world for human being do God the only defense against that is you in your practice it's a distributive human function it's not up to me or any other you know sort of figures it's up to every single one of us what's up to us to practice living our lives with integrity I don't care if you meditate I don't care if you you know are mindful or not but if you love it if the love if you have some kind of passion ignition for allowing the world to actually experience who you are and you get to experience it as well instead of the the contracted narrative of who you are then you're already free and you are exactly what the world needs to recognize its own wholeness its own capacity for cultivating connection so let's take final 30 seconds and just thank you for your attention and for coming tonight I wish we had another three or four hours I feel like I'm just getting started but I want to share a poem with you which I share a lot it's one of my favorites and it's by derek walcott Nobel laureate from Lucia Cheerilee in the Caribbean it's called love after love and goes like this the time will come remember it's all about now so when will that be the time will come room with elation you will greet yourself arriving in your own door at your own world the time will come one with elation we will greet yourself arriving at your own door in your own mirror and each will smile at the others welcome and say sit here eat you will love again the stranger who was yourself give wine get read the 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 a photograph the desperate notes peel your own image from the mirror sit please on your life thank you [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] you

Channel: Action for Happiness

Views: 251,893

Rating: 4.7028756 out of 5

Keywords: mindfulness, happiness, wellbeing, action for happiness, meditation, kindness, compassion, mindful living, happier world

Id: espfm5_YvBU

Length: 90min 1sec (5401 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/HereNowBeing]

I'm a teacher for severely traumatized middle school students in a behavior program. I introduced meditation and we had amazing results. This man in the video is doing incredible work.

[u/the_dinks]

Mindfulness has changed my life.

[u/sugarwax1]

Am I reading correctly, he married Howard Zinn's daughter, then took her name and hyphenated it? I'd think he was a modern man if I wasn't skeptical it really helped that his father in law was a best selling academic royalty.