"Mindfulness Ιn Everyday Life" Jon Kabat Zinn with Oprah Winfrey

is there too much stress in your life this could be a game-changer if you're sounding along on autopilot you may miss most beautiful aspects of your own life mindfulness is a love affair with life renowned scientist and mindfulness expert Jon kabat-zinn what mindfulness is saying it find your own way help yourself become more mindful if you could get out of your own way you could be yourself 24th that's a super soul Sunday all new Sunday 11 a.m. 10:00 central only here so is mindfulness science is it art is it spiritual it's it's a gateway into the full dimensionality of being human Oh being alive I love that it's a gateway into the full dimensionality of being human and without it you're just missing out well you're missing a lot you know if you miss the look in your child's eye one day you've missed it if you've missed the look in your lover's eyes the next day you've missed that if you miss the beauty of sitting under trees well you've missed that if you sum that over many moments many years you may wind up missing the most beautiful aspects of your own life who you're gonna blame for that well I was too busy well who-who is too busy who tells oneself I don't have any time when all you've got is time all you've got is this moment when Jon kabat-zinn began meditating as a young man the practice was considered the product of the 60s counterculture it wasn't considered science but in 1979 he had this revolutionary idea to bring meditation and yoga to mainstream medicine he developed a program called mindfulness based stress reduction to help patients transform the experience of pain by changing their relationship to it over the last 35 years Jon's trailblazing approach to health and healing has gone mainstream bringing relief to countless patients suffering chronic illnesses and Payne today his eight-week mindfulness based stress reduction course is available in more than 700 medical centers hospitals and clinics around the world let me ask you this do you have a morning ritual yeah of course what is it I wake up and I do yoga and then I sit mindful drop in drop in yeah okay so waking up of course is what it's all about I mean it's about being awake right yeah but there's waking up and then there's waking up so you can wake up and like drag your self around so brushing your teeth meditation be in the bathroom it's all like part of it but then I go downstairs and I get on my yoga mat and I have a routine that I've developed over the past 50 years that's just like what I like to do and I do that mindfully so it's mindful yoga and then out of that at when the time is right maybe it's an hour maybe it's 40 minutes or whatever it is then I drop into sitting and I usually sit cross-legged on the floor but you can sit in a chair and I just kind of drop into the body mmm body is like a really important part of this can we live inside the body because most of the time we don't and then can we rest in awareness just rest underline rest in wakefulness in awareness in mindfulness in heartfulness and that's the practice now there are a lot of different ways to do it there are a lot of different details but the most important thing I think for your viewers is drop in drop in on yourself and rest for a stretch of time and then as you go about your daily life mindfulness in everyday life check in it's just like that once an hour once once a minute check in once a day it's like you decide but at a certain point it's gonna wind up teaching you you know do we'd like to say I'm I meditate you know just a little like I'm breathing I'm meditating or you'll say I'm doing the practice that's a way meditators talk they say I'm doing my practice after a while it doesn't feel that way anymore it feels more like the practice is doing me I am learning so much it's like the world is teaching me everything I need to know if I only get quiet and drop in and attend and guess where we are we're here and guess when it is right now now okay right now lovely thank you thank you how do we balance the doing with the beer well mindfulness is all about being and the cliche goes were called human beings but we actually have lost touch with that element of life that's what we were doing sitting around fires as hunters together being but now it's gotten so much more complex what mindfulness is saying is find your own way listen to your own heart listen to your own use the word longing longing listen to your own yearning because what we're really trying to do is live our life as if it really mattered because it does it does and I like to say more than you think and then more than you can think it's interesting when people have a difficult time understanding and I think your shower example is the best you remember that yeah hmm I like to say to people okay here's a little homework for you after we've talked about mindfulness and and it's very important to keep in mind that mindfulness is not a concept it's a practice you have to actually exercise a certain kind of muscle so I said here's a little mindfulness homework for you the next time you're in the shower check and see if you're in the shower because you may not be in the shower you or you may have your whole Monday morning 9 o'clock meeting in the shower with you but you are not actually there under the water feeling the water on your skin you're off in the future or off in the past so that's exercising the muscle the more you do that the more you realize when I'm in the shower I'm in the shower when I'm brushing my teeth I'm brushing my teeth when I'm saying goodbye to my family I'm saying goodbye to my family it only takes a fraction of a second longer to do it with awareness okay so everybody who's watching this right now I mean the next time you get into the shower you're gonna think am I in the shower are you in the meeting or you already checked on the freeway check and as soon as you check your back and you you have you have something you can do about it if you are obsessed with some kind of thing worried about how things gonna go that day or whatever that's all fine your awareness is big enough to hold it all it's not like now you have to suppress all that thinking or the meeting in the shower then knowing it is good enough that knowing is what we call awareness and then it's laughable so you'll feel better because you'll feel a lot of humor I have some of my best ideas in the shower and I think one of the reasons why I actually questioned why so many great ideas come in the shower somebody said it's because of the warm water on the back of your neck but I think it's also because when you're fully just in that moment there there creates an opening or clearing for other things to come through and that's intimately associated with mindfulness that creativity and imagination when we get quiet when we get still when we rest you could say in awareness our natural impulse to see connections that we didn't see the moment before is unimpeded and we can actually make these connections and realize them in ways that we might not have been able to do the moment before so being in the shower when you're really in the shower does meditation practice that's a meditation practice and a beautiful one and guess what doesn't take any more time [Music] so is it the same thing as meditation it is a form of meditation okay because it's an easier and easier injury glide by like glide path it's an easier glide path I think for people to accept I want to be more mindful than I I want to meditate because whenever we done shows with Deepak and others about meditation people like I'm not doing it I'm not doing it right when in fact how it whatever is happening is what's supposed to be happening this is the biggest problem people think something's supposed to yeah and I know it's not happening because I'm just sitting here miserable and bored and and and the breath is so stupid and why do I have to pay attention to that or or my mind is so inflamed and they think oh if I were really meditating in my mind would be a blank my breath would be easy I'd feel so wonderful so the easiest thing for people to think about mindfulness is that it equals awareness you and I sitting here having a conversation you know the thought might cross one of our minds well when are we going to get down to meditating the fact is we are I love how you say that the negative thoughts often that we often hear are not big enough thoughts that's a big aha explain what you mean by that a lot of the time we think we know who we are and we have a whole story about who we are yeah well that point is is that the story's just not big enough how much is the story about how beautiful you are how much is the story about how large your heart is when it's at its most content yeah happiest ah yeah okay so we write the story of how miserable I am how much I need this or that need more money need more this we need more that need more health all of which may be true on a relative level but it's just not a big enough story so the story of like you're a luminosity your beauty the fact that there is more right with you than wrong with you no matter what's wrong with you I love that it doesn't come on the radar screen but as soon as we bring it back we remind ourselves you see that's the meditation so are we as human beings will be designed and to just judge ourselves by the negative all the time because why is it that I don't think why is it that the negative thoughts have such an impact on it a lot of it has to do with our upbringing and our education that you know we are educated in a certain way but we're not being educated to help to be only how to accomplish so it's all about acquisition it's about getting stuff we don't have you say it's when we actually believe our thoughts that we spiral into anxiety and depression exactly and as soon as you see that though that depression is caused by what was called in psychology depressive rumination it's like a particular kind of toxic thought pattern that drills you down deeper and deeper and deeper into a black hole of nothingness yeah and as soon as you realize that's a thought pattern then the you that realizes it isn't part of the pattern and you can actually stop it you can write yourself a restraining order you know just or like a soap bubble you know you touch the soap bubble it goes poof thoughts when you see them in awareness when you hold them in awareness it's like touching a soap bubble will just self liberate it'll go and it doesn't spiral down into that chain of concatenation of depressive when you realize that you are not your thoughts but the awareness of youth exactly not the thinker but the awareness the awareness beautiful [Music] so what does it mean for us to cultivate mindfulness it's actually very simple there's the simplest thing we could ever do is totally simple but it's not so easy and this is one of the beauties of it is that having work now in medical field for over 35 years who's seeing that even though it's not easy thousands and tens of thousands of people are willing to roll up their sleeves and actually cultivate it so what mindfulness is is a particular way of being in relationship to your life and the place to start of course is the fact that we're only live in this moment the future hasn't happened yet the past is memory and is over but if you start to pay attention to where your mind is most of the time is not in the present moment it's off someplace else obsessing about the past or planning or worrying about the future so what mindfulness is is a particular way of paying attention and the awareness that arises from paying attention in that way [Music]

Channel: Mindfulness 360 - Center For Mindfulness

Views: 71,324

Rating: 4.8875303 out of 5

Keywords: Jon Kabat Zinn, Mindfulness

Id: D5r2sBQM31k

Length: 13min 12sec (792 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 16 2017