No Small Thing: The CFM, Mindfulness, and the Healing of the World

okay well good evening folks welcome to uh the first of our uh annual lecture series events and uh welcome to the Cent for mindfulness in medicine Healthcare and Society uh this is our new building and uh while we've been here for 35 years we've been in we've been in an amazing number of rooms and buildings all over the medical center all over the medical school all over the various campuses of UMass uh and we've landed here and uh and and we really hope that you'll begin to consider your home we have lots of community events that you can find online and uh and lots of programs as well so um I I'm going to take a little time to introduce uh my friend John capit in uh so we met 33 years ago and I was 32 was 37 and and uh we hair our hair was black and uh gravity hadn't taken its downward toll and we used to run at lunch pretty much every day and and uh and uh we listened to each other's guided meditation tapes as we were learning about mbsr and uh in the basement of UMass yeah we used to joke about it but it was true we would come in in the morning and not know if it had rained or snowed or sleeted or or there' been a hurricane uh because you couldn't see anything under there but it was a fantastic place to be fantastic because nobody bothered us so we really got to do our work for a long time and now I'm 65 and he's 70 and and uh I was thinking a lot about uh Leonard Cohen uh and I know that Leonard Cohen is someone that John really loves his music and as I was thinking about tonight and writing this little piece I'm going to well I might not sing it but I'll recite it now there's these there's a long a song by Leonard called the Tower of song and the first lines go like this and they're really appropo that uh well my friends are dead and my hair is gray and I ache in the places that I used to play you know that feeling maybe if you're 25 you don't or 30 uh I've really was struck by what a remarkable gift uh we've been given and it all started with John's Vision I mean I've worked here most of my academic professional career and uh it's an enormous privilege to work across a field in the Arc of your career and see it move like this and and uh I I was reflecting on it thinking well yeah we're in this building and it's true I'm uh I've been sort of the I've been the director of the center for 15 years now but um this Garden is one of those Gardens that's been long in the planting you could say thousands of years in the planting but if we're talking about this Garden it's at least three and a half decades in the planting and it started with John and I was really reflecting on look what's happened to this Garden that was entrusted to you and how much it's flourished and blossomed and borne fruit that is now all over the world and how much gratitude I and I know our colleagues have for you and we have so much to celebrate so much to Rejoice about and only one way we can do it in a lot of ways one of the ways was to make sure you were the first speaker in this in this speaker series in this new incarnation of the center here in this building and there's one more thing if you if you know the song it goes on and the next lines are uh and I'm crazy for love but I'm not coming on I'm just paying my rent every day in the tower of song I'm crazy for love and I'm not coming on you know that how hard that is the crazy for love but not come on and you could say in a very real way that what has been wrought here is the result of being crazy for love being crazy for love so without any more Ado I want to introduce you all to my dear friend longtime colleague and brother and Dharma friend John CIT in okay wow so it's incredible to be here in this amazing space and and with all with all of you uh I see old familiar faces from a long time ago and new faces and um this is the beginning of uh an extended celebration of the 35 years icon you're in the same place you were last month uh this is an extended celebration uh over a number of days and not just celebration but a deep dive into the work uh that um takes place here uh and uh kind of inquiry in some sense uh as to what it all means and how it can can be furthered in the world so what I thought I would do this evening is in some sense um saki pointed out that I'm 70 years old and I started the stress reduction Clinic when I was 35 so that's half exactly half of my life there something very satisfying about that like I I get it it's half of my life uh and it's really interesting and I'm sure you all have the same experience that life unfolds and who you were who you are you're obviously the same person in the same body only not for the person and not for the body uh it's an kind of an evolutionary Arc so to speak and um and I love the way saki framed it as a love affair I really feel that uh this is a labor of love when I sort of was asking myself years ago after I did all the things that I did and got all the training that I got knowing that that was not what I wanted to be doing with my life but I didn't know what I wanted to be doing with my life I asked myself the question for many many years what would I love so much I'd pay to do it so just flip like a job you know I'm looking for a job because I need money what about looking for a job where I would love this work so much I'd actually get down on my hands and knees and beg somebody to let me do it and somehow or other for you you know reasons that are so improbable and impossible to describe I got a chance to do it here um and just from the point of view of full disclosure you know because we like to sort of say we have no uh kind of uh conflict of interest and that kind of thing or always signing things like that um I am completely conflicted I mean because this was like a labor of love I mean I wanted so much to do this work and yet I no credentials whatsoever for doing any of it I mean I'm a molecular biologist for God's sakes so how do you get to set up a clinic and work with patients and everything and the answer is I have no idea I mean really when it comes down to it there's no way to explain it but it did happen and um and my hope at the time that it you know started was that and and really sort of a deep conviction that if we could show that this was valuable in a place like University of Massachusetts Medical Center for all the various reasons that I thought it might be uh then the model would spread it would be a what they call a proof of concept and it would spread around the world and and and it has and and being trained as a molecular biologist at MIT and so forth uh I realized that I had no competencies on the research side in terms of working with human beings I worked with bacteria and bacterial viruses that was my training um so in terms of the research piece it it was mostly just how to hang in long enough to generate enough interest so really well-trained scientists would be able to do it and that's happened too A lot of it I can hardly understand I mean you know it's like heavyduty Neuroscience uh and beautiful clinical medicine we saw an example of it today in medical Grand rounds I mean this is Ron Epstein from the University of uh Rochester uh which has a long lineage of humanistic medicine and the art if you will of medicine going back to George Engel and all of George Engel students and here was Ron Epstein giving Grand rounds uh called mindful practice mindful Medical Practice he had written an article in Jama in 1999 called mindful practice and that that was kind of another initi so the first thing I want to say before I get down to my talk this is just in response to saki's int beautiful introduction um first thing I want to say is that the beauty of this work is that there's nothing special about it and it is insanely special and there's nothing special about me or saki or any of the other people who work here or you unless we're all equally that special and my view is that we are and often we forget it because we're under so much stress and then we kind of have you noticed under stress you tend to contract a little bit not just emotionally but cognitively and never mind somatically and and and and so the message here is really a universal one and very very profound and it goes beyond what we usually think of as health and well-being okay health and well-being were words that you know we and then Ron commented that it's better to use the word resilience when you're talking about you know to doctors at least that you know nobody's interested in health and well-being now it's resilience in 5 years it'll be some other sexy thing but what is real health and you know I mean I was at NIH 10 years ago for a a dayong symposium on mindfulness in medicine which the very fact that the NIH held the dayong Symposium out of the the uh president's office uh on mindfulness in medicine and health was so improbable from the point of view of 1979 when I started this you know stress reduction clinic and here's NIH now now 10 years after that daylong conference funding mindfulness research to the tune of millions of dollars a year and it's like how did that happen and somebody there got up in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck at the end of this dayong various presentations and he said you know on the basis of what I've he heard here today uh this is somebody worked at the NIH uh I think we should rename the NIH the National Institutes of disease and uh or live up to the name the National institute's Health now of course you know there's a certain amount of Hyperbole and something like that and exaggeration now like you know we've got Ebola cases happening in the United States all of a sudden so we need like to understand a lot and be very very mindful of how we actually encounter the things that we're facing and the Center for Disease Control and um the NIH you know this is like really really important work but in the larger scheme of well-being or health rather than merely disease or disease this we're still in our infancy we still don't really understand what a life of like profound well-being would look like and again this this morning um Ron used the word udonia you know this sort of ancient Greek word that really has to do with thriving it has to do with you know beyond well-being so to speak because everything like after a certain point it loses its meaning and then you have to find a more hyperbolic word for it you know but so udonia a sense of like complete balance in the face of the full catastrophe of The Human Condition and because the full catastrophy of The Human Condition is not going to change anytime soon I mean we're born we die and in between sickness old age and death you know you could get very pessimistic about it but there's also just as much joy and opportunity and beauty and yet a lot of the time if we get caught up one way or another we we lose touch with that and we don't feel balanced or equanimous or openhearted a lot of the time we feel contracted because things aren't the way we want them to be and so I I thought this evening that what might be most fun in a way is to uh really explore in some sense um what the meditation practice is all about uh from a kind of a new beginning um or just another angle or just the same angle uh but I'll just sort of share with you some of you know sort of so some my kind of way of understanding it now because while we've reached this particular point in the evolution of mindfulness-based interventions is sometimes called MBI uh I don't know if you've realized this but it's getting awfully popular it's on you know Time Magazine and you know there'll be something coming out in uh 60 minutes with Anderson Cooper sooner or later supposed to be something time in the next month but that depends on the news Cycles because you know mindfulness is not great news it's really great news so you know really great news has to take a backseat to the pressing matters of the day and and and understandably so but with all this uh excitement about mindfulness you know that that could potentially be the kiss of death for what we're really have been doing for the past 35 years or at least something where we're going to have to take a certain kind of responsibility for the essence of this or it like everything else in this world gets commodified dumbed down exported uh you know uh turned into a concept um overdone in the media and then 5 years later no one cares about it anymore if this is really about the trans the healing of humanity which I believe it is and I felt that way from the very beginning then this proof of concept this test case of UMass we now know that that is more the case probably than less and so what is our responsibility not mine not sakis not even the center for mindfulness but every single one of us and every single other person on the planet who's either been touched by this already who or who simply is crazy for love and is not losing their mind coming on in that way but is paying my rent every day in the tower of song you know that phrase I mean Lenard con is such a genius I'm paying my rent every day in the tower of song and then there's a do up behind that up do up uh paying my rent every day in the tower song what's that mean what does that mean what if the Tower of song and I'm just at living here I haven't even thought about this but what what if the Tower of song was the beauty of being alive what would paying my rent every day mean maybe it would mean not missing the beauty not being so overwhelmed by the Urgent and the information overla and the endless communicating that we lose touch with the Tower of song The and and and the Tower of song you could think I mean again just right off the top of my head it's like there's a line from uh uh from RKA that goes much stands behind me I stand before it like a tree well what stand behind us is everybody that came before all of human history and even in our genes way back Beyond before history in the Paleolithic and before that we are in some sense these evolved beings in this towering uh lineage of human genomes figuring out what the most uh sort of adventitious circumstances situations are of the day and now we're learning that our genomes even inside of us they're not like some static you know genetic fate that was sealed for you when you were born because this new science of epigenetics is understanding that the chromosomes are completely Dynamic and what you eat and how much you uh uh exercise and whether you have Intimate Relationships that are profoundly satisfying to say nothing of meditating or other kinds of things uh actually upregulate and down regulate your genes by the thousands by the thousands so that means that if you actually align yourself with I'll use the word beauty but whatever it is that is deepest and best in us as human beings your chromosomes down in every tiny little cell of your body that has chromosomes not the red blood cells but everything else pretty much is listening and it is changing its bio ology on the basis of your cultivation of intimacy with your own mind and mine with my mind okay so this is like I can't be intimate with your mind in the same way that you can or with your body but if we forget that and we're looking outside for all these things that will get us through life uh with without attending to what's already ours then you're not paying your rent in the tower song and you're going to get eved uh so that's that's wild isn't it I mean it really means that we have a responsibility to appreciate the gift of this moment because when it comes right down to it this all all we have it's all we have and yet if you start to pay attention to your mind and what's on your mind which is one of the major lenses that mindfulness brings to the adventure the first thing you notice is that most of the time your mind is off someplace else and the you know two favorite places are the future and the past and in terms of the future it's all it's like either planning does this sound familiar to anybody you know planning planning planning and when you're not planning worrying planning for how it's all going to go wrong and you know and then what's going to happen and then the other part of it is like check it out I mean don't take my word for it how many of you would say that on a on a regular basis I won't say every day but more or less that meditation is in some form of or rather formal meditation practice part of your life anybody or you all just okay so I mean this is the center for mindfulness so I wonder like you know why would people come out on a perfectly miserable rainy Thursday night to hear a talk on meditation if they didn't care about it to catch my profile I don't think so no I mean and this is really the sort of people all around the world consider this place to be Mecca I want you to know that by the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands if not millions and that's only going to get worse so it really you know calls us to ask what is my responsibility each one of us not just saki or other whoever else works here or me or anybody else what is our Collective and individual responsibility to ourselves and to the world and to me that's like the foundational in terms of health in terms of really pouring energy into what's right with us as we often say to our patients rather than just attending to what's wrong it's not that we forget about what's wrong but there's always as long as you're breathing and we you know I've been saying this forever as long as you're breathing from our point of view there's more right with you than wrong with you no matter what's wrong with you and people go whoa imagine coming to the hospital and getting a message like that and it's like no wonder they call it the UMass Tower of song I mean that's a very very W wonderful way to be encountered you know since everybody gets an encounter form when they come to the hospital so it's all electronic now I know but but still uh the important thing is not the electronic encounter it's the encounter okay and so that means one human meeting another and as Ron so elegantly spoke about today how can you meet the other if you're not present if you're lost in thought if you're thinking about the last patient or lunch or whatever it is and then if you start to watch your mind as you know because you practice this the more you cultivate intimacy with your mind the more you see what's up and what's up is that the mind is like completely out of control most of the time what you're in there too my God P pot Adolf Hitler the the the works you know I mean it's like sometimes you know and and so it's re that and that's not bad you see this is where the non-judgmental thing comes in mindfulness is the awareness that arises so just to say okay nowadays I try to emphasize so that it's just to totally clear that and I like to say it this way to a first approximation mindfulness and awareness are exactly the same thing pure awareness okay uh now in science there are sort of methods of successive approximation so what we can take in now in 2014 is very different from what the world could hear in 1979 believe me I mean it required something else to get through to the mainstream then about something as weird and Lunatic Fringe and Crystal gazing New Age nonsense as meditation okay now we're in different territory but that doesn't mean that all of that stuff can't very easily accrete back to it and be completely dismissed as idiotic or you know sort of whatever and so this me means that um in some sense it's the outer reflection of the fact that if you practice you discover that it's it's infinite it's like successive approximation there too like that it's not like okay I've done 40 Years of meditation practice I've arrived I'm here I'm enlightened or whatever the end of this is what is the what is the goal of all of this anyway and and if you do wind up having that kind of feeling that you're enlightened uh or that the mind is saying that to yourself like well I wouldn't say it of course but when it comes right down to it you know I'm really getting there I've like really grown a lot in the past 40 years the problem isn't with the word Enlightenment at that point the problems with the personal pronoun and the need to identify that way okay so all I want to convey and for the rest of this talk if nothing else is that mindfulness is as far as I'm concerned one of the deepest things about being human that is available to us in human culture I mean it's it's just endlessly deep and so it's at least the light life times engagement and if we engage in it in a way that really understands the ndu element of this that mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose in the present moment and notice it never says to what paying attention on purpose in the present moment and the kicker non-judgmentally okay now people argue with this definition or they have other definitions or whatever but I did never meant it to be like now we'll seal this in some vacuum proof uh you know um frame and we'll genuflect to that no it's a it's it's an operational definition it's just to try to get things going so to speak like okay mindfulness is awareness and we can cultivate it like a muscle we can exercise it how do we do that we we pay attention on purpose in the present moment when else are you going to pay attention and intention on purpose means intentionally so you have to like do some work to do it and it's only the hardest work in the world this is and then non-judgmentally and when you start to look at that as you know you see that we've got ideas and opinions about everything we're continually judging evaluating liking disliking wanting rejecting and so the the kind of those qualities that we started talking about of like a fully healthy UD demonus human being well they're not plagued by constantly you know being distracted and then aversive or grasping because those are emotionally unbalanced and we're talking about balance we're talking about equinity we're talking about well-being I mean there you know endless words for we're talking about being so comfortable in our own skin that nothing else needs to happen and the practice is paying the rent but then there's a way that we can misunderstand that and that is that we think oh it's just like everything else playing the violin or riding a bicycle or or whatever and uh so the more we practice the better we get and that's true and that's called the sort of instrumental learning but this is where mindfulness is different from everything else probably that you've ever encountered in your life and that is that there's an equal non-instrumental piece to it and if you don't inhabit the non-instrumental piece you can practice practice practice till you're blue in the face but you're missing the essence okay and that is paradoxically and very difficult for us as Western go-getters to understand that there's no place to go there's nothing to do and there's no special something at the end of the rainbow to attain okay the special something is here now and it's insanely beautiful so then the non-instrumental part coupled with the instrumental part it's like and and I sometimes use the example of with non-instrumental instrumental it's like the wave particle nature of Elementary particles like electrons okay when you look at a certain way it's it behaves like a wave and the physicist like every property it has it wav like non-local another way do other experiments particle like localized and this it's not one and it's not the other so can we actually resonate with that around meditation practice yes we do need to practice and yet we have to be very very careful how we practice what kind of attitude we bring to it can we bring an attitude of non-striving of non-doing this is beginning to sound very anti-American non-striving non-doing what's he talking about okay so that's the preamble to my talk uh I thought well the first thing I guess I want to do in the talk I don't have a clicker do I so I have to go up there okay I want to dedicate this talk to to four people uh just just out of love no other reason uh and the first one is Jim D how many of you knew Jim ah man we getting so old you know no uh okay so four or five people so Jim was the chief of medicine uh in 1979 when when I started and even before Judy came to UMass and uh and he was just an extraordinary being he was he was simply extraordinary chief of medicine and I won't say much about it except that his whole life changed in some way by beginning to just allow this kind of thing to happen in his Department you know CU he could have killed it in a second and he had every reason to and some people suggested that he do it you know like uh because I was a huge liability and he didn't see it that way and he befriended me and he was a kind of true leader in the sense that he empowered others to find their way not to do something something so that he would look good I mean that's like in some sense the kind of one of the qualities of a true leader he just like he said do this but I want you to do research on it which of course I would have done anyway because like I'm a research scientist and I knew that we could have had the greatest thing here at UMass and if it was just anecdotal believe me we would not be sitting here tonight the reason we're sitting here tonight is the scientific papers that came out of the stress reduction clinic and that are continuing to do and that are Again by success of approximation getting more and more rigorous because it's hard to do rigorous science when you don't have any money at all so Jim is uh one person that I really want to dedicate this talk to because without Jim D there wouldn't have never been a stress reduction Clinic it would have been gone very very quickly or never started and now he lives in Arizona and he's the head of the Andrew wild Foundation you know Dr Andrew wild was like one of the most uh so he's kind of like gone through a kind of what you could call an orthogonal shift in Consciousness because that's a long long way the other person is brownie wheeler who is the chief of surgery here uh for the entire time I was here and and uh and I wrote a piece in my book coming to our senses about how I met brownie I was last night at a talk he gave in The Faculty conference room uh he now has Parkinson's and it's not so easy to understand him but he had all four or five surgeons up there reading a book that he's just written uh but brownie when he was in his prime which you can see here um he was again well he and Jim Dal were the most powerful people in the place and the way I met him was in the room that he we had this thing yesterday The Faculty conference room that's where I was holding my classes in the first cycles of the stress reduction clinic so in the winter of 1980 in the middle of a body scan how many of you know what a body scan meditation is great okay so if you I shouldn't have asked you know I know where we are you know it's like if if if a lot of hands didn't go up here uh we'd be in trouble so anyway I'm leading a body scan on these brand new beautiful yoga mats they lots of different colors and everybody's like dressed like they're going camping in the wilderness um and and I'm in black Karate pants Barefoot and a black T-shirt and I'm halfway through we're up to here in the body scan I'm lying on the the floor and the door of the faculty conference room opens and this very tall man in a white coat comes in followed by 30 people in white coats and suits and he walks right up to me I'm lying there on the floor and he walks right up and he looks down and he says what's going on here you know I say well this is the new the hospital's new stress reduction clinic and he said well we have this room Reserve for this super powerful meeting of the you know surgeons with the surgical com Community surgeons and so forth at that point I stood up I came up to about his shoulder and uh and he looks at me I mean you know Barefoot Karate pants black T-shirt and then he looks around at all these people and this was like a big meeting I found out later it's a very there was a lot hanging on this meeting he had every reason to think he had the room and he had all the power he needed to seize the room I mean to just take it especially given what it looked like was going on you know it could have been Crystal gazing for all he knew you know it's like what are these people doing you know so uh and he looked around and he asked one question one question only he looked around at all these people or you know and he and he and he said he asked me are these our patients and I said yes and he said well then we'll take our meeting someplace else and they paraded right out the that was in The Faculty conference room I can hardly tell the story without crying and I wrote a a chapter in my book coming to our censes called witnessing hypocritic Integrity where I describe the whole thing and and the last sentence is something like cuz I had just started the clinic it was like the second it was one because cycle the first cycle I don't remember what cycle you were in Connie I think it might have been yeah so was it winter or spring you were on the floor then uh I called the first cycle zero because I you know it's like it was very experimental uh so that was cycle one and um I I I said this is how I ended the chap I knew I was going to really have a wonderful time at UMass I mean to have that kind of quality of heart and and mind and then we became good friends and and over the years and you know again a lot of sort of things that you'd think would be like barriers just dissolve in Integrity when you live with integrity and there's no one right way to do it it's not like oh just come to the CFM and take the stress reduction program and you'll get the curriculum on Integrity no the the curriculum on Integrity lies in your own heart and your own discernment and your own willingness to be honest and again you know maybe that's by a success of approximation too you grow into it witnessing Hippocratic Integrity so is there an ethical Foundation to the work that we do you bet there is and in the hospital that ethical Foundation is the hypocritic oath it's an oath and the how does the oath Go I mean doesn't it say first Do no harm premium non necessary how would you even know if you were doing harm if you weren't aware if you weren't mindful you have to be aware of the ways that you might not be aware of the effects you're having on another person or your thought patterns everything that Ron was talking about in his talk that you get fixated on a particular idea and you close off other Alternatives and you come to premature judgment and then you generate medical errors this is not like you know night dim store relaxation to make people feel better this is like the critical element of care and caring and it has to do with being present and having all your faculties available including the sort of capacity to discern what's really going on even in your own head so that you don't like take a right turn when you need to go straight and not even know that you've done it and then get lost in some way that causes harm so there's a profound ethical Dimension to this work uh a lot of the time we don't make it explicit it's implicit because it's under the umbrella of the Hippocratic Oath but there is a very very deep history associated with mindfulness it's not like we made it up in the basement of you know on a level uh at UMass uh you know 35 years ago this is like you know a tradition that goes back thousands of years and it's a very venerable tradition and it sometimes can be looked at like it's Buddhist or religious but it's actually not it's more like a discovery that was made back in the day 2600 years ago about the nature of the mind and the nature of suffering and the Buddha wasn't a Buddhist anyway H that's all like a particular kind of cultural framework and overlay a very beautiful one by the way I'm not I'm not in any way uh uh disregarding it or dishonoring it it's but if he discovered something akin to the law of gravity something to do with suffering and the nature of suffering and the potential for freedom from suffering especially the kind of suffering that we generate or compound for ourselves then you know to say to keep it just among the Buddhist that would be obscene even the Buddhist don't think that's a good thing and so actually turns out that huge number of people in the Buddhist tradition Look to You mass and I'm talking about Zen Masters I'm talking about monastics monks and nuns from Korea from Taiwan from mainland China from you know all over the place Hong Kong uh Thailand look to this place and they recognize it they said this is fantastic why cuz it's serving people who are suffering okay so these two people really created a a climate in this Medical Center that had a lot of ramifications and repercussions the next person that I want to dedicate this talk to is this man I looked I have a lot of pictures of Saki when I really get into my uh IE photo I got tons of pictures of Saki I we we've been leading Retreats forever together and I really love this one saki I uh there's something about it just holds the multiple dimensions of this man's heart and you know as you heard we've known each other for 33 years now and uh you you know saki's commitment to this way of being is huge and it anti his coming to the stress the nent stress reduction Clinic he is a deep deep student and lover of wisdom and compassion and uh joyfulness and how that manifests in the formless as as well as the in the world of form so we would not be sitting in this building if it weren't faki I mean he has been a remarkable leader through thick and thin I'm not sure which is the worst the thick or the thin but in both sides of it like pretty intense and pretty awful and he actually wrote a paper that was published about that called enjoy your death because this whole thing was like on The Chopping Block about to die and did in fact and then was in some sense resurrected that's all due to saki so again this this is a point this is not in Praise of Saki or Jim D or it's saying look let's get some kind of understanding here that all of us in some sense have the capacity to contribute to put our shoulder to the wheel to in some sense or other do our peace do our work and that whole business about like what would I love so much I'd pay to do it well that's your job do you know what I'm saying now that doesn't mean that you Mass doesn't cut your paycheck but you Mass would really like it if you gave 100% of yourself showed up 100% at work with all of your creativity all of your faculties and that would transform the institution that's what we need in all institutions corporate you know and otherwise we need to create a kind of distributive community of responsibility and creativity and ultimately an understanding of what what business we're in and then to do it 100% maybe you heard on NPR today and in the New York Times yesterday or the day before about this judge in in in Texas who went to Duncan's the man who died of Eboli went to his home and spoke with his fiance with no protective gear or anything and he's the head of Homeland Security in that county and Emergency Management and so forth um he went with no protective anything and he transferred them in a car to another location and when he was confronted by his wife who was enraged for this because they have small kids and like you know and then also you know other people saying you know this might have been hugely unwise but he had checked it out with you know everything about the medical principles associated with when people are infectious and when they're not with ebola he said listen we are completely committed to stopping the Ebola epidemic right here in Dallas right now okay but there are two ways we could do it we could do it as a PO we could go into police state mode or we can do it with compassion and kindness and I'm choosing to do it with compassion and kindness I want them to be treated the way I would want my children or my spouse to be treated and so you know this is like it's it's in the present moment I mean it's like we see this a lot of the time and time will tell you know we're all on a very very rapid learning curve you know associated with but let's not kid ourselves I mean remember in 1918 there was an influenza epidemic because influenza spread you know in the air and I don't know what fraction of the human people population on the planet died but it was considerable you know we need to stop Ebola because you know these things mutate and they mate with other viruses and you know you the one thing you would not want to think about is that it could actually become a respiratory illness okay this requires huge mindfulness on the part of the CDC on the part of hospitals on the part of everybody to sort of take responsibility for this but to do it out of clarity rather than out of fear because once you go the fear route you lose your mind you know and we say that in language you know I saw red I I I lost my mind you know what when we feel threatened to a certain extent and just to say parenthetically that you know studies on the Neuroscience of mbsr have recently shown on our patients here that um that the that threat reactivity Center in the brain called the amydala it gets thicker with stress chronic stress and it gets thinner with eight weeks of mindfulness the the gray matter density is lower by 8 weeks of mindfulness meanwhile other regions of Interest so-called in the in the brain that are involved in all sorts of important functions like emotion regulation and perspective taking and uh executive function and so forth uh learning in memory in particular with the hippocampus and other areas of the lyic system actually and the cortex actually um um get thicker so this is like one example of not that it's not just our genes that are paying attention with their ear to the rail but actually our uh our brain is continually reshaping itself based on experience and meditation may be really profound in that way so and this is the fourth person that I want to dedicate this talk to Florence Milo Meer who has made so so many different contributions to to uh the work of the center for mindfulness over so long I mean it's almost impossible to enumerate but she now like flies all over the world with her colleagues training people in more and more countries in this kind of thing why because it's very easy to misunderstand what this stuff is about and without really good training we're going to sort of it will be degraded and so just a a deep bow to Florence I don't know if she's here there oh there you are yeah yes um and and and again I mean how long have you've been here I mean what year did you come 94 94 1994 so longevity in the stress reduction Clinic tends to be that way you know BEC again why we're paying are rent in the tower of song and it's all love okay now B Pascal said so if I close this will that just shut off bless that's all the slides I'm showing tonight folks it's like amazing usually I know people think I have a disease because I show far too many slides but uh bz Pascal is famous for having said uh all of man's problems stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room by himself does anybody here know who B Pascal was even you know he's a famous French philosopher and mathematician of the 17th century and he was What's called the Genius of the second order uh a genius of the first order is somebody who like if you were just smarter you'd be like them a genius at a second daughter is forget about it all of man and th the women in the room maybe this is one time in which you don't want to go for gender equality all of man's difficulties stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room by himself you know so we punish people by doing that instead of teaching them how and teachers when you know more and more I don't know if you're aware of this but one of the beauties of the the repercussions of the work of the center for mindfulness over all these years is that it's moving into education and not just higher education it's moving into higher education big time it's funny how we like to Pat ourselves on the back and you know talk about ourselves higher education uh but so in lower education you know it's coming up through the floorboards seriously it's coming up through the floorboards because the teachers are pulling their hair out they don't know what to do and they're beginning to actually recognize that if they want the kids to learn maybe they need to teach them how to tune their instruments of learning before they play just like an orchestra they don't say well I'm the greatest music musician I got a strat of Aras and I'm a member of the New York philarmonic I don't need to tune of course they tune so what is meditation it's like tuning medicine according to sort of the deep induran root of the word medicine and meditation is the Latin is mederi which means to cure but the deep indoeuropean root means to measure many of you know this of course of course so what is medicine it's the restoring of and it's not measure the way like we can just take a ruler and measure the length of the stage that's external standard this is every more platonic everything has its own right inward measure so uh in a multi-dimensional dynamical system like a human being's Health it's not like yes I've got my health and I'm going to hang on to it health is a dynamical process it's not a thing you put it in the bank and hold on to it it's it's lifestyle related it's moment to moment what I what I would like to do with you is actually practice for a little while would you be up for that and then use that in a way it won't be totally silent because I like to use it as a way to kind of inform some of these uh points that I've been trying to visit or or point out uh today so let's just and I'm going to actually do it on the cushion uh just to kind of not that you have to practice on a cushion at all U but there's these formal meditation practices are really important we all understand that the real meditation practice I hope we all understand that the real meditation practice is how you live your life okay there's no point in doing any kind of exercise if it doesn't translate into real life but the paying the rent in the power of song has these two elements to it that is the formal meditation practice and the informal and then remember what I said about instrumental and non-instrumental so the non-instrumental you could sort of distort that to say well I don't really need to sit you know because it's like there's no place to go nothing to do nothing to no special state to attain so to hell with it I'll just be mindful would it were that easy this is the hardest work in the world for us folks and the fact that so many hundreds of thousands and millions of people are doing it now is really testimony to the the the wisdom of human beings the original idea for mbsr was that it would be probably really good if Americans meditated and did yoga all of us who wanted to because it would be so conducive of with wisdom well-being greater self-compassion so forth so okay then you get you know at a certain point to say okay I'm I'm going to meditate now which is always a it's just a thought by the way but it's a useful one because it'll get you on the cushion or on the chair or uh lying down doing a body scan it doesn't really matter but so you settle in and I invite you to just settle in and then see if he can just be aware just be aware of whatever is Salient whatever is here in this moment and seeing if you can feel the wakefulness the the non-conceptual knowing that awareness already is so you you don't have to do anything just sitting here and knowing it I'm not even telling you to sit up straight or to focus on anything and since the present moment has these interesting properties of it's always now and yet this moment of now is rapidly gone can you actually stay in the emerging moment of now with whatever is most Vivid in your experience for and you might think of this uh setup as a kind of Laboratory you've got your own laboratory for investigating the Tower of song for investigating who's meditating if you think you're meditating we're simply apprehending what is arising and passing away in this open spacious cognizant knowing field we call uh awareness and an essential element of our Humanity that's already available to us so we don't need to develop it it's here it's online on board can we rest in Awareness itself just even for the briefest of moments and now this briefest of moments without any agenda without having to have a special feeling or anything just as an experiment whether you've never meditated before or whether you've been meditating forever and now if if there's any way in which you have some kind of thought or frame work in the mind that you're meditating see if you can just simply let that dissolve and continue being present so you're not going anywhere you're not trying to do anything you're not looking for anything You're simply resting in wakefulness how is it and I don't mean oh start thinking about how it is I mean apprehend directly how it feels what is what is known what is felt what is heard what is seen what is tasted what is touched and noticing how easy it is to fall into thought to tell yourself how to do it when there's no doing involved how e easy it is to fall into commentary or liking or disliking or impatience or into not being comfortable in this moment and wanting something else to happen and can your awareness again experimenting can your awareness hold that without having to make it good or bad if impatience arises then you know you're asking yourself who's impatient I mean you came for a talk if it if it weren't this it'd be me blabbing about something else but you know it's all this this moment so can we befriend this moment just exactly the way it is and again it's an experiment it's not a catechism can we inhabit it and and what role does the body play where's the body in all of this in this vast field of awareness what role does self-criticism play or emotions of one kind or another or boredom or any other mind State and can we hold the whole play of whatever is unfolding Moment by moment in Awareness without needing to describe it or judge it or pursue it have rejected just this sitting here feeling what you're feeling now let's just play with transitioning from this moment to this moment where you're listening to a talk how's that different from being awake if you're really attending to what's being said or attending to your own interior experience can you see that it might be a seamless hole it's life expressing itself in the only moment we ever have and the more ways we have of inhabiting the present moment and the more comfortable we can be with whatever arises within it which sometimes is unpleasant discomforting aversive confusing painful sometimes neutral and sometimes seductive enticing Pleasant sometimes completely thoughtbound and sometimes just not bound at all just awake No Agenda no place to go nothing to do already in touch with life itself expressing in all the ways that it's expressing in you in US Moment by Moment by moment so the Tibetans this is now the talk so you know or the song or I don't know the Tibetans have a a very interesting phrase they talk about the real meditation being what they call non-meditation non-meditation because as long as you think you're meditating you're probably not you're probably trying and if you know you watch what's going on when you meditate a lot of the time it's commentary you know what how come your mind wandered get it on back to the breath or whatever you know do you know what I'm saying it's like it's like a a football game or a basketball game it's like the commentators are endlessly doing the story line and really there's no story just here but then of course when the mind gets going how many of you noticed that um there was something of a thought stream going on during this time anybody noticed that like not and that you could sometimes feel like wait a minute that's not what it's about let me get to someplace else who said anything was bad about thinking see the only thing I suggested was that you bring awareness to it right not that you bring awareness to the entire dimensionality of your experience whatever it was so how many of you felt something in the body you know that you the breath or Sensations in the body and and then in some sense put the welcome that out for whatever it was because that was what was here right it is here in that moment so there's the body all the senses seeing hearing smelling tasting touching and then there's interception propri reception you know it's like can we just put out the welcome mat for experiencing living in the body and of course breathing now one of the big mistakes that people make is that if we start out meditating with the on the breath as the object of attention one of the big sort of confounders is that you wind up thinking it's about the breath it's not about the breath it's about the knowing of the breath through this faculty called awareness which I sometimes like to use in the present participle form awareness thing okay because awareness is kind of a noun and as a verb it it kind of in some sense makes more sense we're awareness in as we go along and it's like another sense in fact the Buddhist consider it to be a sense and without awareness you could see without seeing we've all done that you know the the gorilla movie this morning you know I mean there are more Vivid examples of it than that but you can actually see things not see things that are present you can equally see things that are not present we human beings like you know the brain is actually optical illusions everything else were very unreliable how many times has someone in your family that you dearly love said to you you're not listening to me or worse you never listen to me you know it get more contracted okay it's it's not like you're not hearing why because you're not available why because you're lost in thought underscore the Lost okay can we eat without tasting you bet you we're masters of eating without tasting wolfing it down or whatever you know paying attention to actually chewing and tasting your food could be like one Major Tool in the Obesity epidemic one among many but to actually really tune into your body in that way but again it's not about the tasting it's not about the food it's about the awareness in do you get this that so that any sense you choose the important thing is not the object that we are choosing to pay attention to but the attending and I love that Physicians who round in the hospital are called attendings are there any attendings here one or two shy ones uh attending hugely powerful when teachers you know what if teachers taught the kids how to pay attention instead of yelling at them to pay attention attending and so that in some sense it's like the invitation is to learn how to inhabit this other human capacity that we've been gifted and that we never get never gets any airtime awareness what gets all the airtime thinking thinking thinking thinking thinking thinking in school and everything else me we've become terrific thinkers you know you get into bed you're still thinking you can't stop thinking it's like can't get to sleep H so but awareness could hold any thought I mean awareness always trumps thought it's always bigger than thought and there's nothing wrong with thought I'm not criticizing thought at all I mean you know everything depends on thought but sometimes thought is very narrow very kind of circular very limited Einstein you know said if you have one or two good thoughts in your entire life you're you're ahead of a curve so thinking you know to a certain extent it's like you know we in in terms of the future we were talking about the future we're not smart enough to forecast what's really going to happen somewhere where're we're worrying we're worrying about things that are never going to happen for the most part and that's like driving your car with the brake on it's stressful it burns you up and but if you catch it then it's not a problem because the awareness actually can release it liberate it evaporate it purify it because the objects of attention are not a problem it's the attending that where the where the space is where the well-being lies excuse me whoa where the udonia is it's not like now we have to go out and get this fancy Greek sounding word no you already have it but better you already are it but if it gets obscured all the time then you know pretty soon you feel like alienated totally in the body like who where did body come from and you know who's you know it's like not not a friend of mine and and this moment isn't so great either you mindfulness people all you do is talk about how great the present moment is but this present moment sucks you know I don't want to be in here well I I get that but the next moment's not going to be any better if you bring that kind of attitude to it what about experimenting with like holding it in awareness like say when you're in a lot of pain and asking questions like is my awareness of the pain if you want to call it pain in pain when people even hear that they go whoa whoa haven't heard that those words put together that way is my awareness of my fear frightened see it may give you without dissociation it's not like a clever way to dissociate it may give you an entire enely different angle on how to be in Wise relationship with this moment good bad or ugly now that's that's that's a high rent in this Tower of song this is hard work folks it's and I think the hardest work in the world for us human beings to show up to pay attention to be compassionate enough with ourselves so that we can catch our own um highly conditioned Tendencies to stay locked in some kind of narrative that we tell ourselves about why it's not okay for me now which is just more thinking okay not necessarily bad not necessarily even inaccurate but may not be the whole story it may not be complete enough and when part of this investigation of sitting here is like the most powerful meditation practice I know of is to just ask yourself who am I and then listen don't fill it up with narrative what am what what I or what am I these are very famous meditation practices you know but like who am I and then what would the most honest answer be are you your name name are you your age are you your CV and all your accomplishments are you your positive emotions are you your less positive emotions you know or who's meditating who's breathing I like to joke when we're teaching you know the leading Retreats meditation Retreats I like to joke you know we say that uh you know I'm breathing but let's face it if it were up to you to be breathing you would have died a long time ago you know talk about distraction you know whoops dead so the brain stem doesn't allow you and a frenic nerve don't allow you any and your conscious don't allow your prefrontal cortex anywhere near the brain stem and the sort of self-regulatory breathing apparatus like yeah you can hold your breath but you can't commit suicide holding your breath and so it's why should we say that it's my breath maybe it's like if we were to just hold it in awareness and honor the mystery of it like cuz if it was up to us to breathe we'd be dead if it was up to us to do the liver we'd be dead I mean how how do you know how to run you know thousands 100 thousand enzymatic reactions per second to keep the blood purified how do you do that so you know I mean if you frame it that way then don't get too depressed I mean you know your liver's doing well your heart is you know usually doing well your feet actually carry you around your eyes work your ears work to some degree or other yeah aging does attenuate a lot of that but still if you're breathing you're ahead of the curve why is this not a source of like udonia joyfulness like you know like getting into like this moment because you're not dead yet and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and whatever it is they're just thoughts they're just stories and the the trouble is they're not big enough they're not who we are they're who we think we are when we tell ourselves stories about who we are and then the beauty is lost and the ud demon is lost and the and it's all here now it's not like you think in 10 years you'll be more beautiful when you meditate more no you'll just be older so this is like it's no joke folks I mean this is like this non dual awareness is if that gets lost and this gets turned into some kind of uh reduced to some kind of um you know sort of I don't know how to say it but in a framework where it's all conceptual we will have eradicated a Priceless opportunity to transform the planet and this talk was like I couldn't believe I gave the talk this title you know no small thing the CFM mindfulness and the healing of the world I mean wow you know it's like that's a big topic and how how arrogant can you get yeah now we're going to like heal the whole world you know but the interesting thing is is it's not you know it's no small thing what we've been doing already and if we don't sort of exaggerate it or beat our own drums or you know sort of fall into sort of some kind of triumphalism as always happens when you know something is successful and it just like it's killed so what we need to do is keep paying the rent maybe each INB breath is paying the rent maybe each out breath is paying the rent maybe each step maybe each sound maybe each moment where you could be present and then you catch yourself Contracting and then you catch it fast enough so that you open rather than close close and maybe you do that as a kind of yoga open close open close in out Moment by moment lose your mind in thought and then an hour later you realize I haven't even been here I've missed three exits on the turnpike or whatever or I've missed my child or grandchild or lover or whatever because like I'm lost in here and maybe even like hey this place I don't even visit except on rare occasions you know and the rarer the better my friends are gone and my hair is gray I ache in the places where I used to play and I'm crazy for love but I'm not coming on I'm just paying my rent every day in a tower of s Len con is a genius but we are are and if we disregard that then that's a form of violence that we're doing to ourselves if we only stay in the domain of thought that's a form of violence and ignorance we're ignoring something fundamental about our actual Humanity that we are then not inhabiting and then conceptualizing and making a big deal out of meditation so the Tibetans say non-meditation is the real meditation and they have a couple of uh adjectives that go along with that which might be instrumental even to think about although this is not about thinking this is about experiencing it undistracted okay so one of the things that we could be mindful of is how mindless we are in fact that's usually the first thing that happens when you start to practice mindfulness is like you realize my God I'm almost never present I'm almost always in some thought or other or emotionally aroused this way or that way pursuing that pushing away that that's like inherently stressful in the the rest of this talk what I'd like to do is sort of use this as a platform undistracted the next word is UN fabricated when I grew up in New York City I don't know how this happens and maybe it's still happening I I I don't know but there's a certain kind of age range of kids especially Bo Boys in New York where they get very aggressive and they really like to sort of throw out hooks to see if they can hook the other person and get them to react to something and really lose their mind you know the best way to do that is insult the kid's mother and that we used to be like par for the course on the streets of New York and then like we'd fight you know I mean like because you'd get enraged and the language that was used is to say you want to make something of it I love that I don't know where these 11y olds get this but you want to make something of it to get angry about taking everything personal that's not personal it's just a hook to see if you go for the bait and you go for debate every time because you take it personally can't say anything about my mother like that I'm going to beat the hell out of you but they're just waiting to see you lose your mind I don't know how these kids do it this is like Supreme Zen Dharma combat in the streets of New York without any training and has passed from generation to generation to generation generation like you know only between the ages of 8 and 13 do they do this but it's like in some sense I don't want to exaggerate it you know take it more than it is but but there's something about it that's like they're you know sort of uh dissecting the anatomy of human relations and the key understanding although they wouldn't put in these words is don't take personal things that aren't personal and you'll be okay you'll be free people throw negativity at you and it's not your problem it's just a test you don't have to take it if you've ever seen the movie The U Seven Samurai anybody ever seen that movie The Seven Samurai it's about 5 hours long or something like that I'm saying uh but there's you know they they're finding these Samurai and one of them and the way they do it is like they have this test where somebody's like standing behind the door and he's going to bop them over the head and just see what they do and and one guy just comes and you know um he stands inside the doorway and there's the the head guy who's doing the hiring of the Samurai and he he's a samurai too he's sitting there helping the villagers the poor villagers out and and this one just goes and he just Smiles he just laughs and says what's really going on he's not going to walk in the door and get popped on the head he got it do you know what I'm saying he just picked up the vibe well you know we all have that capacity if we're not lost in thought if we distracted now you start to bring mindfulness to how often during the day you distract yourself just yourself you distract yourself then you can throw in email and all the other distractors and pretty soon you know it's like have you ever had the feeling like you're just like drowning in stuff coming out at you and we it's like and it's coming at you and you have an obligation to respond to all of it but like who are you you know I mean it's stretching the envelope this whole technological you know we're uh 247 connectivity pretty soon I don't have it with me but you have to pick up your iPhone and call yourself up and say John are you there even are you even there and then of of course it wouldn't be there it's here there's no there there it's always here so then this turns out this is the the last part of the talk uh what about the world the CFM is doing its job and it is in in my view without being triumphalist about it um it's doing it with enormous credibility uh sometimes in the face of enormous obstacles uh which is just part of life I mean being part of an institution and being a group of people trying to sort of uh move something into the world that's you know hard to language never mind you know operationalize and uh you know it's very complicated lots of moving parts you've got the clinical you've got the educational you've got the research I mean this is like major operation and it's absolutely wonderful and this is just the first 35 years you know uh with the right kind of leadership and the right kind of successions and the but most of all the right kind of understanding you have a center for mindfulness where nobody understands what mindfulness is you're in trouble believe me it happens you know reporters will come up call up or whatever and they'll talk about well well I I've heard about the concept of mindfulness and I'd really like you to explain it to me and you know my impulse is to hang up the phone because of the word concept I'm I'm not joking I mean this is like because but that's the place they're starting so you have to start where you are right but we've got an enormous amount of work cut out for us to actually bring them from this kind of idea that everything is conceptual and and merely conceptual and that if you get it then you'll get it conceptually then you'll understand it then it'll have all sorts of UD demonic effects on you it won't this has to come from the inside and it's larger than conceptual it's not like there's anything wrong with the conceptual except that if that's all there is it will you know deflate every tire on the car and the only guarding against that is you all of us to keep deepening the non-doing now how do you do deepening of non-doing it's Paradox okay it's paradoxical that's the non-dual awareness that we're not getting caught in this or that and we rest in an awareness that can hold this that and every other shade of gray between black and white or zero and one and catch the fleeting look on a child's face of fear or delight and not fall into thought around even that but be in appropriate relationship to it and there's no catechism there's no textbook now how do I be in appropriate relationship with that's your Genius if you don't get caught in thought all the time or aren't aware of how much you're caught in thought and if you the Mind goes off you can bring it back you know mind goes off you can bring it back that's the instrumental thing okay the awareness can see the mind go off and not bring it back it's like oh the Mind goes off and then it goes off here and then it goes off there and then it goes off someplace else and the the non-instrumental awareness could care less it doesn't matter it's like because the awareness is what's important not what's happening in the field of the objects of attention that's called life but with awareness there's Discerning and then there's kind of aligning oneself with what is deepest and best and most wholesome and most beneficial as opposed to always going for the things that are sort of lowest common denominators sometimes the most contracted and also in some sense violent sometimes to yourself or to others and what could differentiate that what could re recognize that recognize that recognize that only our awareness and as soon as you recognize it you're free of it then of course the next moment because it's strong habit comes back recognize it again the Tibetans often say brief moments many times and then so there are many many different ways to practice but the most important thing is to remember that it is not about the objects of attention it's about the attending and then again to notice how much we generate narratives especially you know and what's the subject our favorite subject of narrative it's those it's those sticky personal pronouns right me my success my failure my triumphs my pain my fear my depression i i i me me me m m mine so if we Discerning enough we can actually recognize when we're taking things personal personally creating a big story about it the story is like maybe even has elements of truth to it it's just not big enough so that we fall into this and then we you know compound the misery compound the suffering just writing yourself a restrain order every once in a while around that would be a huge Liberation I'm not joking I mean a huge Liberation in fact just occurs to me yeah maybe meditation is really writing ourselves as restraining orders every every 30 Nan seconds you know but with kindness like not don't do that but don't go there but to see what furthers you demonia what furthers well-being what furthers wholesomeness or health or you know happy happiness and what furthers more and more misery then we're then going to blame on somebody else because we can't ever take responsibility for generating a lot of this daoka this a lot of this suffering ourselves and again that's another narrative now uh this narrative stuff is actually they're very interesting scientific studies that I'm not going to tell you about tonight that actually show that 8 weeks of mbsr actually uncouples the narrative networks in the brain from other networks that are more like present moment experiential and not narrative based it's really interesting there's nothing wrong with the narrative I mean if you didn't have narrative you wouldn't find your way home tonight you because you wouldn't know who you are whoops we just meditated with John and we really got to the nature of non non selfing and then all of a sudden like I I don't I better check my license see where I live no I hope not this is mindfulness is not about getting more stupid seriously I mean seriously this stuff is way too serious to take that seriously seriously so what are the larger ramifications I mentioned mindfulness and education that would be a whole other talk uh do you know that over 100 people in the UK Parliament have been trained in 8 weeks of mindfulness course Ally mbsr uh you can look it up on the web I mean it's just un remarkable the whole Shadow cabinet that if this Administration uh the conservatives lose power they're all already to move in with mindfulness in education in health and you know criminal justice uh military all sort they've been thinking about this they've been training in it it's like come on can you believe that I mean it's like oh just that's just one example I mean there's something happening on the planet that I think is very very powerful uh you know Saki and I were in Beijing pretty much this time last year uh we had 300 people attending our uh 7-Day Retreat uh and one of the in and and we it was sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and many of the best medical centers in Beijing and Shanghai and we had Dr Leu here this summer is that not right as a kind of uh you know um a visiting scholar here at the center for mindfulness from Beijing and uh you know and at the end of the seven days like the Chinese love to take photographs group photographs and they make us look like turkeys they're so good at it I mean they so there was this place where they I mean they have digital cameras that like go like that you know and then then and then they give you like a 10t long scroll with everybody's face so clear that you could see you know in 300 people everybody looks like they're like right there um and the file's so big you can't email it to anybody uh so in order to go to this have our photograph taken at the the last day we had to walk five or six blocks out now 300 people walking even be getting to together in in China is definitely not allowed definitely not allowed you have to have permission from like the Communist party and the police and everything to do this and it was no problem for us why because the Communist party was there you know I mean you know they they the all the professors are probably part of the Communist party and you know and they know how to make the the situation work you know so so it was like no problem you know that there we have this like celebration and they love to put banners over the posters so this Banner in Chinese and in English mindfulness flowers in full bloom in China welcome to you know blah blah blah John Kitts in saki Santelli me um but stop for a moment and think you know I found myself saying this in China the number of times when I've been there and say you you know I mean you guys are interested in mindfulness and mbsr mindfulness is mbsr is much more Chinese than it is American I mean really when you talk about this Nono n doing I mean doesn't that sound kind of Chinese you know it's going to Zen you know Chan kind of thing it's like nowhere to go nothing to do in fact that is Chan it is straight out of the heart Sutra one of the greatest Mahayana Zen teachings straight of China all the wisdom in China is like unreal in Chinese culture they know nothing about it they have to hear it from Caucasians coming from you know Worcester who are also trained as scientists and clinicians and you know then it's like oh my God you know 1500 years of this nonuel pristine beautiful wisdom expressed in so many different ways and you know and the reason why you might ask well why am I doing that aside from the fact that I think everybody needs to practice it you know bar you know none you know all the different countries because we need to wake up to not destroying ourselves and the planet which we are really well on the way to doing just go check out where the Glaciers are now compared to 30 years ago it's terrifying especially if you live in low-lying regions like 42nd Street I'm not joking but uh you know the Chinese if you read the newspapers you'll notice that they have a lot of problems with their minorities I mean Tibet because the Chinese think that Tibet is Chinese like unreal and also all the Muslim I'm not even sure how to pronounce it but the yugar or whatever I mean it's like heavy duty horror going on there and I like to think imagine if the Chinese got in touch with their own wisdom Traditions Dharma in particular that ethical Foundation of first Do no harm which is deeply integrated into the Chan tradition it's called the bodh SATA vow and it's everything in the Buddhist teachings that have to do with ethics and morality like and the reason is that if you are causing harm you can't possibly drop into you demonia because your mind won't let you unless you're absolute you know sort of outlier psychopath your mind will not allow you know you'll feel something and that that's not conducive to well-being so you're doing yourself violence as well as violence to others when you do that imagine if the Chinese like as a culture got in touch with the possibility of organizing their society around Dharma principles around mindfulness and heartfulness by the way just to be clear about it in Asian languages I'm told the word for mind and the word for heart is the same word so if you hearing mindfulness and you're not and you're not actually hearing heartfulness as you're hearing mindfulness you're not understanding it again it's conceptualizing okay mindfulness oh yeah I get what that is that must be fully aware of your mind but it's so um of course you know about Tim Ryan is Tim Ryan coming to this uh celebration that we're having or okay well anyway you probably know that Tim Ryan wrote a book actually the just before I finish with the UK so we have China you know and now that the Chinese all of a sudden going to get into mindfulness like the Chinese Communist party I don't think so but we're planting seeds thoro is very famous he wrote a book called faith in a seed thoro is famous for for saying um although I'm not convinced that anything will grow without a seed show me a seed and I can imagine that it will produce wonders I've been looking at uh morning glories uh with my one-year-old granddaughter recently the morning glory is like unbelievable the way they got and they like Jack and the bean stalk you put a few morning glory seeds in and they just like they just grow these things that keep on growing themselves I mean I've never seen anything like it I'm not exactly a gardener you know so I I'm coming to this late in life through my one-year-old granddaughter but all that beauty of the morning glories the vibrancy the the star-like pattern the yellow against the blue and the white and like which are all like you know just seductive ways to get the bees in there it's like it must be really incredible for the bees if I can see it this way and I don't have compound eyes um but you know they all came from seeds like you know the the the and the cliche is the flowers is in the seed the tree is in the seed you know in essence or in potential so we are all seeds of a world that um Honors udonia that honors well-being that you know I mean that honors um what's deepest and best in us as human beings about falling rather than falling into you know the big three that drive everything uh greed hatred and delusion and then creating institutions that drive greed hatred and delusion like banks for instance who are very happy to take you know the world economy and destroy it if it's possible to you know dice up the risk and you know just sell people houses they can't afford and and then you know derivatives and all the that's like you know that's called Wall Street now not everybody's doing it but the but at when it was feeding frenzy time it was irresistible they're doing it we got to do it or our bank will fail so all the bank almost brought down you know these economies like you know all over the world something wrong with that picture we need legislation to modulate Greed to modulate violence to modulate delusion you know or at least to try to encourage the direction of Greater mindfulness and heartfulness so it's it's no small thing what what is being done here uh and I love that it can be the tiniest things are not tiny the seed and the result of the seed they're not separate that's also nondu the one is in the other in some very profound way and so we are all in some sense the seeds of the healing of the world the more we align with the Central axis of our own being the world's already different the world is already in some sense in some small but not in significant way healed we've learned this in medicine over the past 35 plus years in mind body and Behavioral Medicine and everything the enormous amount that we could learn that that that medicine could use to like move to the medicine of the world the healing of the world okay um the healing of the body politics so Tim Ryan Congressman six term congressman from um Ohio remember Ohio it's a swing state you know uh that it's like he wrote a book called The mindful nation and then got reelected I mean that's like a really dicey thing to do um and I think he's just coming out with a book on food and awareness of like you know food and its relationship to health and well well being so I just want to say that those are a few of many many different things that I could point to that suggest that the world is really in a place where it's actually starving for what is being offered here and for what is being researched here we dying for this it's not just the glaciers that are dying for we're dying for it you can be totally successful and completely miserable because that conventional View is too small and I'll end with this like what what mindfulness really does is it it offers us an opportunity to kind of undergo what I sometimes call an orthogonal rotation in Consciousness that was just a fancy name that I made up when I was at MIT and to reach people at MIT you got to use big words uh but like where when you wake up everything's exactly the same as before except it's all different because you're here with the full repertoire of your humanity and you don't have to go off half coocked because you can see your impulse to go off half cocked and write yourself a restraining order and and play around with it and it just becomes the yoga of flowing into our moments as if they really mattered living Our Lives as if they really mattered and facing the full catastrophe of The Human Condition and learning how as Zorba did in this great novel Zorba the Greek and then the movie with Anthony Quinn dance in the face of success and failure that's the ud demonia that's Health as opposed to disease or disease or stress and it's all here now that rotation and Consciousness that can happen it's not like a one-time thing have to Moment by Moment by moment in Breath by in breath out Breath by out breath so I want to thank you folks for your attention let's take 30 seconds before uh we close to just drop into uh this moment in the aftermath of everything that's been said and felt and heard and however it is sitting with you whether that's one way or another way just allowing yourself to take up residence in your own awareness in your own body in your own life unfolding and I want to say in closing that uh when it was first proposed that I come out here and look for a job it wasn't stress reduction I was in the anatomy and cell biology department for 3 years before I started the stress reduction clinic and somebody proposed that I work with uh a scientist here and and uh he told me that uh I should go and check out this guy at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and I said where's that this was in 1976 I said where's that and he said there in Worcester and I said where's that I kid you not you know uh and I have to say that in the years that I was here uh there's something about central Massachusetts every time I come back I feel it I mean it is just there's something about it that I don't I don't even want to put into words but it has some elements of Innocence some elements of grittiness I don't know what it is I can't put my finger on it but it is insanely beautiful and every time I come back here I feel it and I love it and and so I I just want to thank you for your attention this evening I want to thank you for coming and I want to encourage you since I as you heard AK say I'm the first of a a long line of speakers who are presumably going to be giving talks of one kind or another different doors into the same room I'm guessing uh the room being mindfulness or heartfulness and the the the doors are uniquely amazing so I would encourage you to come back if if you care to uh and to stay in touch with the CFM through the website and in every other way uh and but most important if anything I've said tonight resonates with everything that brought you here in the first place and everything you've been through and understand already then um as best you can take that to heart and don't let it fall into memory or into a concept but to see if you can in some sense enliven it or let it enliven you keeping it uh in some sense in uh creative oscillation with the present moment because that in fact is the core of the practice undistracted but the awareness of it isn't at all distracted okay we're constantly fabricating stories but the awareness of it is liberating in the fabricating okay and then that non-meditation that's wisdom that's embodied compassion that's what I would call Health thank you folks e

Channel: umasscfm

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Id: Jg0I228SySg

Length: 122min 52sec (7372 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 26 2015