The Entanglement of Meditation and Medicine

[Music] good afternoon everyone thank you for joining us today I want to welcome you to the 2018 kin bar lecture on innovations in integrative medicine presented today by dr. Jon kabat-zinn and this year of 2018 marks 20 years that the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine has been in existence I have the pleasure of serving as the director of the UCSF Osher Center and that also gives me the pleasure of introducing a few very special guests first of all mr. Maurice can bar our wonderful innovator is here thank you so much yes the man of the hour the mr. can bar can bar lecture another name you'll recognizes mr. Bernard Osher or wonderful faithful friend thank you so much we also have some members of our oyster centered leadership board and I want to thank all of you for your for your support in your creativity as we as we move into the future the Osher Center was founded with a mission to provide the best integrative clinical care in the most innovative educational work and the most rigorous research and we've had already a 20-year history of doing that we put a special emphasis on health and wellness and making sure that what we do is accessible to everybody across society so health equity and aspects of health justice are extremely important to us over the 20 years we have not only expanded as a center but the Osher centers have expanded there are now six additional centers around the world and I'm very happy to say that we have the coordinating Center for all of those Osher centers here at UCSF at the UCSF Osher Center and that group provides all the infrastructure we need to be able to collaborate internationally on integrative medicine so as we're poised to begin our next 20 years I can't help but think of the the spirit of creativity and innovation that Mister can bars work represents and also that of our guest speaker today so I can't think of a better pairing than having this event come together with these folks so to give us a little bit more background on the can bar lecture I'm going to invite our research director dr. Rick Hecht thanks Shelly so um the can bar lecturer has really been created to honor mr. Maurice can bars generosity to the USSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine mister can bar as many of you may know is really a renowned inventor and a highly creative person who has over 35 patents some of which are really relevant to any of us in medicine including the the safety Glide hypodermic needle which as we've heard some of us were spending time with misurkin bar a little earlier today and talk he talked about that just the need to develop something like this in the midst of the AIDS epidemic that would protect healthcare workers from the the risk of needle sticks so he's done both creative invention but inventions some of which have really had a real impact on people's lives including protecting people from things like HIV AIDS he's also the author of book secrets from an inventors notebook advice on inventing success mr. Cain bars support for the UCSF osius under endowment is one of the things that really allows us to conduct groundbreaking research as well as developing new models of care in our clinic and training and new generation of both physicians nurses and other health care workers who have training and integrative medicine approaches to health care we are really deeply grateful for mr. can bars generosity to our Center and is willing to support the vision of his long-term friend mr. Bernard Osher who as Shelia said is also with us today we very much look forward to our continued collaboration with both of these visionary philanthropists [Applause] and finally it's my pleasure to introduce Helen winged one of our really innovative scientists who is studying mindfulness to introduce our speaker so Jon kabat-zinn is internationally known for his work as a scientist writer and meditation teacher engaged in bringing mindfulness into the mainstream of Medicine and society he is professor of medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School where he founded the world-renowned mindfulness based stress reduction course which is also my first introductory 'introduction into meditation and he also founded the center for mindfulness in medicine healthcare and society he has authored numerous books including full catastrophe living and wherever you go there you are which has been translated into over 10 languages fittingly enough the concept of MBSR came to him while he was at a meditation retreat for about 10 years after receiving his PhD in molecular biology at MIT in 1971 he was pondering what his true life purpose was then while on retreat he had an insight that lasted about 10 seconds that was the inspirational seed for what is now known as the MBSR program and this youth utilizes the ancient practices of meditation and yoga to improve participants quality of life and I had the great honor to meet John as a young graduate student he is very close with my graduate advisor Richard Davidson so as a young grad student I had I actually heard him tell this story um and I heard him describe the message that came to him as roughly I want to bring the Dharma into medicine and it was really inspiring to hear how these messages could could come to him during his practice and of course I was like I want something like that and through overtime and patience and deep listening I've learned to cultivate my own internal intuit intuitive listening while practicing which I then try to encourage in my clients as wellness really witnessed some beautiful transformations and what I admire about John is that his own authen his own authenticity activates authenticity and others and I once heard someone tell John how much he admired him and John responded whatever you see in me see that in yourself and I think that's really how the power of his work continues to grow because as people learn from him in his work then we all learn from each other so it's my great honor to introduce dr. John kabat-zinn [Applause] well it's an absolute delight for me to be here and to gaze out at all of you and your faces Helen thank you for that magnificent very kind introduction and before we get started even with other thank-yous because of the essence and spirit of this talk why don't we take a few moments to actually recognize that we've come into a room and we've all sat down together and maybe I'll sit down too just for fun it's not like there's anything special about sitting but god help us if we can't do it you know I mean so let's actually just bring awareness to the fact that the body is in a seated position okay and you don't have to do anything particularly special or pious like sitting up straight or looking meditative but just be aware that there is sitting going on in the universe that you call yourself and can you drop in on it can you actually feel say the carriage of the head the neck and shoulders can you feel the backs of your legs and and your butt on the cushion on that chair can you feel your feet on the floor if they're on the floor or the legs crossed or whatever can you feel sensation in the hands of course the fact that you can feel any of this is miraculous and there are people who can't so that itself is an enormous gift that we usually completely turn out that we can actually inhabit the body with full awareness and sensitivity and therefore be a little bit more present there's something very interesting going on in the body and that is that breathing is going on have you noticed you're sitting here but the body is also doing something that thank God it doesn't need you to participate in because if it needed you you're so unreliable you would have forgotten and died long ago got an a text or something whoops dead so the brain stem and the you know the the phrenic nerve and and the diaphragm it doesn't not allow you actually anyway near the you know control knobs of this ongoing gift that we have of exchanging air with the world so can we not take that for granted for a second and not inflate it or Ray Fi it into some big deal but to just feel it and in a sense how we're being breathed and now we can rest in an awareness of the entire field of the body as if we were actually in it inhabiting not just the body but the awareness of the body and the answer is yeah of course we can we're wired up that way it's not like you have to get some special instruction it's it's is woven into the fabric of our humaneness is that this awareness can help us to actually be fully present in any moment and in every moment welcome don't be sorry no just perfect no matter what's going on so from that point of view from the stance that we're just taking towards the present moment and awareness there are no interruptions there's no Oh something else is happening no what's happening is always happening and it's always what it is and we don't have to like cognize it and explain it or say oh yes someone else came into the room or whatever we can just be aware and not go into our heads why because there are other domains of intelligence that we are born with one of which is like the magic of creativity and where that comes from the magic of imagination where that comes from and it does come from what we call the human mind but the fact is we don't have the slightest idea what the human mind is or how that arises or why it happens and some people in some ways and other people in other ways but the beauty is that we can we all bathe in and participate in not just the air that we're breathing in and out but this capacity for dropping into full presence and wakefulness embodied in the body and then to rest here in the present moment which really means outside of time just now and the interesting thing is that sometimes that can manifest itself as silence and we could actually be silent for the rest of the hour it would probably be the best talk I have ever given it takes a lot of courage though to do that especially at a can by lecture but don't worry I won't to keep it up too long but the same awareness can manifest as conversation can manifest as doing it can manifest as research it can manifest there's clinical care can manifest it better manifest if it's clinical care as actually caring remember what Peabody said the Francis of France Peabody said the secret of patient care is caring for the patient and the doctors who round in the hospital are called attendings and it would be a good idea to actually be fully present to attend to the full spectrum of what's going on with the patient because the patient's we all of us as humans we know when you're not paying attention to us and you're lost in some kind of thought chain even if it's about diagnosis or differentials or whatever it's a felt sense of separation when what we most need is connection this is the heart of medicines the heart of good medicine and so let's just sort of extend the silence for a few more breaths where we're actually bathing in the air the air is bathing us inwardly the mind is simply open and it doesn't have any agenda so it doesn't have to think about anything or invent anything or come up with anything but it's just at home and rather than sort of on autopilot or asleep it's simply awake it's aware and now why can't we just live this way all the time I mean the real meditation practice is not sitting full low low you know in the full Lotus you know like a statue in the British Museum or something like that the real meditation practice if we're talking about meditation and medicine the real meditation practice is how much you're willing to show up in your life moment by moment by moment by moment no matter what's happening and sometimes I'd have what's happening is supremely beautiful and sometimes what's happening is supremely terrifying horrific and if it's not horrific for you it's horrific for somebody else or you need to do these days turn on your television the Anderson Cooper is a student of mindfulness and if you watch him carefully while he's interviewing the students from the school in parkland Florida see how present he is see how present he was when he interviewed the second wife of the White House Porter Ron Porter just it's a it's a it's a case study it was a magnificent example of how you know training in psychology or anything like that so nothing to interfere with his completely open presence with no agenda commodifying and just invitational allowing the things to be expressed that millions of women need to hear because that's happened to them but they don't have a vocabulary for it and all of a sudden it's on see and in so the the value of transformation and healing really in some sense I will argue at least lies in our individual and collective as a society or as a species or as a planet capacity to recognize hidden dimensions with our within our own being within our own heart and then to inhabit them and not get so hijacked or diverted by the perpetual self distracting and self-centeredness of our own thought stream which I'm not knocking thinking thinking is fantastic I mean you know without thinking you wouldn't have any in veg invention you wouldn't have any insights but thinking is not our only intelligence and we've reached a point I think in the evolution of the species where we need to recruit all of our intelligences in order to live with the actuality of our experience the lives that are ours to live and not the lives that are thinking mine says now you're relegated to this now it's all over for you now you're to this or you're to that or this is what or they're to blame or I will never happen for and all of those kinds of things that we believe are actually true it's just thinking it's just thinking and Einstein I think at one point was you know commented in passing that you're lucky if you have one or two good thoughts in your lifetime I mean most of them are like just useless so why ray if I them into the most important thing when the most important thing is knowing that you're having a thought that's called awareness when do we get any training in that in school never except if you're in school now because now mindfulness is being taught in school for lots of reasons one of which is you know when you went to school didn't the teacher want the class to pay attention and then the teacher often just get desperate to get the classes attention because why should the kids want to pay attention to the teacher so often like I'm a product of the New York public schools you know and the teachers would yell at us to pay attention it's not that skillful what about teaching the kids had to pay attention because it's actually there's an architecture to it there's a kind of geography to attending whether you're a doctor or whether you were a first grader there's a lot to do with listening but it but but also hearing and let's make a distinction between listening and actually hearing and then actually apprehending what is being offered and that's what the teacher would want to see on the faces of their students is like I get it you know that that wordless I get it the aha moment the UH pursues like whoa you tell me what you invented I get it I mean it's like wow it's like we're connected because I'm having once removed the same kind of insight that when you had it no one else had had it okay and this is the beauty of science I mean it's a it's coming to know something that and see something or suspect something that no one's ever on the planet seen before you have that first and often it comes out of not knowing scientists need to become really comfortable with not knowing because otherwise you're completely oppressed by what everybody else knows and what you are supposed to know and you forget that hey on the tiny little surface of the ocean of not knowing your little knowing is floating around but there's this huge potential energy and then not knowing if you can hold it that way thinking of insight scientific insights inventive insights is a famous story of calculate the German organic chemist who there's a statue to him in front of the university and bond you know the famous story of calculators he's trying to figure out the the chemical structure of benzene and he was like banging his head against the wall banging his head just won't the carbons and the hydrogen's just would not work out and then he went to sleep one night like what's banging going on in his head and all of a sudden he had a dream in the dream it was a snake swallowing its tail and he woke up and said oh my god it's a ring no one had had that thought in organic chemistry ever before that you could have six carbons in a ring he didn't do it through thinking he did it through banging his head against the warm thinking as far as he could think and then letting go and often it happens at the edge of sleep you you know Archimedes in the bathtub Eureka well that's not just the territory of an Archimedes or a calculator or an Einstein or a Madame Curie that's basically part of the signature of our genetics our inheritance as humans and it's not all about it your education it's all some of its about re-education or D education or education I mean getting out of our own way so that we can get back to fundamentals and the fundamental is often is always what is this moment what's unfolding what is the story I'm generating around it that's probably just a story and not true or not true enough and that I'm really attached to and of course believe it's true and the only way out of that conundrum is awareness wakefulness mindfulness and to do it in a way that is no separation between what we would call in English mindfulness and what we might call heartfulness in other words kind compassionate caring for ourselves because in all Asian language is the word for mind and the word for heart same word so if you're hearing mindfulness in English and you have some kind of cognitive behavioral perspective on it you are like you know not know another planet wrong galaxy so it's closer than close and what I hope to do in this talk is just to give you a little bit of a flavor for let's just take a moment listen for the words medicine to the words medicine meditation mmm little suspect little suspect when I started MBSR in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center the idea of bringing meditation into mainstream academic medicine was tantamount to the visigoths are at the gates of the cell of Western civilization about to tear it down completely and besides right behind the first phalanx of meditators Yogi's even worse I mean now it's gonna be yoga and meditation inventing in inserting themselves into mainstream medicine oh my god what's next I kid you not I mean that was the climate and now it's like meditation medicine ho-hum everybody thinks they know what it is no one knows what it is that's part of the beauty that is like we know and we don't know let's keep the not knowing let's keep reminding ourselves we don't just have another intervention another modality that we can throw into our basket of integrative medicine modalities this is something far more profoundly far more generative far more creative and totally universally distributed so it's not like it's in one guru or other what the gurus are doing guru just means teacher in you know Indian Sanskrit it's pointing pointing out pointing at something and it's not saying oh look at the finger it's a look where the pointing is going so if I say touch base with the sensations in the body now and the breath moving in and out of your body you don't come on to my words you use my words as a vector to invite a feeling for how it is in your belly and the interesting thing is you don't get stupid by doing this it's like oh now I'm gonna meditate I'm gonna lose all my you know cognitive juices you don't get stupider if anything gets smarter why because you know that 99% of everything you think is wrong and it's also about yourself and who you think you are is not who you are so like big mistake unreality big mistake so let me just review what the title of this talk is because I thought about it you know it's the entanglement of meditation and medicine okay the entanglement entanglement is now a very popular word in cosmology in quantum physics because it seems like the universe is such according to Bell's Theorem and so forth that particles infinitely far apart that could not possibly transmit information at the speed of light between each other are completely entangled in each other that what happens the one the other knows in quotation marks trillions of light-years away or billions I'm sorry and maybe trillions because we don't go out beyond 13.7 built billion light years thirteen point seven years billion years so there's a kind of entanglement that I'm pointing to as I said between the words medicine meditation and this really this is what it is can I learn this from a quantum physicist not from from David Bohm who worked with Einstein and who was also a friend of Krishnamurti and deeply into meditative world that is medicine if they both come from the root meaning well they both come from the Latin mederi which means to to cure okay mederi to cure but the mederi comes from the deep indo-european root that means to measure so what does medicine or meditation have to do with measuring well nothing if what you're thinking of when you think of measure is like okay we're gonna measure how long how far it is from here to there and feet you know an external standard it's more the platonic notion that everything has its own right inward measure so a sphere would be a perfect it has its own right in would measure a sphere is not a pyramid and the pyramid has its own if it's a tetrahedron or it's or whatever dodecahedron they all have their own right inward measure in other words properties so medicine is the restoring of right inward measure when it is disturbed sometimes through drugs sometimes of surgeries sometimes for just and I suggest I shouldn't say just through deep connection with another human being with high regard for the other and what they're suffering suffering from the Latins carry what they carry and everybody's carrying stuff all of us and if we're not now so overwhelmed by it just wait sooner or later you know it's part of the human condition so if medicine is the the restoring of right inward measure when it's knocked off balance what would meditation be it would be the direct perception of your own right inward measure now we say to our patients because you can say well my right inward measure is way off base I mean I need surgery I need radiation I need chemo I need amputation that what you know we need to deliver a lot of cater to people but what even if you're in that circumstance what meditation the word what mindfulness is saying is you're already okay yes you didn't need to go through these kinds of procedures and so forth but the you the real you is already whole it can never be more whole even if we had to amputate an arm and a leg you would still be whole you would have to deal with the trauma of loss but your essential humaneness your essential wholeness and we know this in other people we look at somebody like Stephen Hawking you say how can he live in that body hmm how can he live in that body I don't need to live in that body he's one of the most extraordinary minds in a body that you know has broken down and it's the same for people with pain and emotional pain and grief and sadness and loss and trauma of all kinds there is some kind of node or essence that's already okay and always has been even before their trauma and since the trauma and the skillful clinician if you will has to bring that medicine and meditation together in the direct moment of that perception of welcome of Nexen and then we recruit a certain kind of common humanity to whatever the specifics of treatment are but that's really that common humanity is what I'm calling the love okay the love and it's everywhere I mean you know I'm guessing Barney that you know if push comes to shove and I really pushed you and shoved you about why you have created these Osher centers I am guessing that ultimately we would get down to something that you love or they at you envisage that you've thought so powerful that it had the potential to offer something beautiful in the world so I'm using the terms love and I'm using the term beauty in that way and then all the rest is detail it's a really important detail but it's like if the love's not there then it's just more stuff that you've created and another building and more employees who are busy thinking they're doing great things but it's not transformative it's not healing are you with me do you I feel where I'm going with this so I don't want to be inflationary about it but I think we do the opposite often we don't recognize the beauty we don't recognize the love so for myself for instance I've been meditating since I was like 21 years old I discovered it at MIT when I was a graduate student in Salvador Luria slab rhetoric he won the Nobel Prize while I was a graduate student in his lab got to see that whole thing unfold you know traveling in those circles but what touched me in 1965 was a talk on Zen that I happen to go to all of MIT seminar hour you know like you know it's like thousands and thousands of people and three people came to that talk in addition to the speaker and the person who invited the speaker three people came I just happen to you know sort of by accident see a poster on the wall the three pillars of Zen by Philip Kaplow at the invitation of Houston Smith I didn't know who usin Smith was I didn't know if it look a blow as I went to that talk and it blew the top of my head it's 21 years old so now I'm 73 so 52 years I've been practicing meditation virtually every day and I'm gonna talk about what that means practicing meditation because it doesn't just mean this sitting okay but I began to feel that I had been looking for this my entire life of 21 years like 21 years and like I've been looking for this my entire life and what it was was the kind of unification of different ways of knowing things what my mother would say because she was an artist what my father would say because he was like a super scientist and that they you know often didn't understand each other's domains and I'm young and seeing wait a minute their different ways of knowing there are different ways of seeing the world but is there some kind of way to cisu mall those ways of knowing so that we don't fall onto one side of knowing or another side or some lenses but not other lenses and somehow that was like in me as a young child part because of the families and stuff like that but then it was like holy cow this is the way to do it just sit just drop in to the present moment and watch what's unfolding and be the knowing that kind of knows what's unfolding because you're not stupid because you have awareness and because you can actually even bring awareness to awareness so then I I've been meditating now for 53 years and at a certain point along that trajectory I began to realize when I sit in the morning or let me say when I practice in the morning it's not always sitting because there are many different doors into it you can do standing meditation you can do lying down meditation in bed you can do walking meditation sometimes slow sometimes you can do wheeling meditation you can do breathing meditation you can do watching thoughts meditation a million different but it's all at ending and what I came to discover it or realize was that when I take my seat in the morning it's a radical act a lot of people think it's insane you got so much to do why are you sitting there doing nothing ya hear my father saying that to me you know why are you doing nothing this is not nothing it's an on doing and what I came to realize is that it's a radical act of sanity actually to stop all the doing and the driving through our moments to get the better moments and actually be in the moment that we have this breath in this breath out this thought this bad feeling if it's a bit hard moment this good feeling but good bad or ugly the full catastrophe of the human condition wind up with the welcome at out why because it's already here it's completely influencing us how am I going to be in relationship to it that's what mindfulness is the relationality so I've come to see it as a radical act of sanity and ultimately a radical act of love if I take I'm taking care and it's not narcissistic it's not like radical act of love for myself it's a radical act of a willingness to be to remind myself that it's possible to rest in awareness as we were just doing and that awareness is boundless it's not limited to the skull or to the skin it's like if I try to find the extent of your awareness I don't think you're gonna find it try to find the center of it even the center like moi me where it you will find it excite you to experiment don't take my word for it but that's interesting if this the boundless spaciousness is inside us in some sense or part of our true nature you could say then who are we really and maybe dropping into being outside of time for a few moments at least is kind of like when you have an orchestra they don't just get together and play great music outside Beethoven whatever with great instruments and great performance they actually tune their instruments through themselves and to each other right before they play what if you see this as a tuning before I go into the doing of the day how about tuning the instrument so that when the first thing that I could get angry about arises and how long do you think that will take I noticed the arising of anger and I noticed that my awareness of the anger isn't angry you can ask yourself you can look and this is not dissociation this is not a prescription for dissociation this is like discovering a hidden dimension of your humanity that then you can inhabit and then all the doing can come out of that being all the creativity comes out of that all the imagination and basically all the love because the love you know we can't talk about it anything we say about it turns to you know just garbage in our mouths it's it's like because that's all mere cognition merely conceptual and like you know in relationships like when you're the love is there and feel it words are useless maybe poetry but not certainly not prose and when the love's not there no amount the words could be of any use and when the the love is there we also don't need words so medicine and meditation are linked at the etymological hip and so the thought was when I started MBSR why keep this to myself I mean I'm finding this to be extraordinary why not go to places where people are suffering because this comes out of the Buddhist tradition primarily although it's totally Universal but the Buddha was you could think of him as a very sophisticated scientist who ask deep questions about the nature of the mind and the nature of reality and he didn't have an fMRI in heaven going to go into the fMRI scanner and you know sort of artificial intelligence programs decode what's going on when he pays attention to his breathing and so forth he didn't have that you didn't even have to want the tative EEG just add this and he said okay I just have this I'm gonna sit down and this is going to be the instrument to my inquiry this is gonna be the laboratory and he discovered some things that are profound and they have nothing to do with Buddhism in the same way as you know gravitation you know say Galileo discovered gravitation or if you want Newton did the math gravitation is not Italian gravitation is not English it's not like you know the sort of Cambridge University is trying to get a patent on gravitation and and the Dharma isn't Buddhist wisdom is not Buddhist awareness is not Buddhist mindfulness and that Buddhists although it's the heart of Buddhist meditation because Buddhism is not Buddhism because as soon as you make an ism of any kind as soon as you make this you make that and that's a dualism and Buddhism found non duality so there are all sorts of very interesting currents and ironies here that are deep and profound and transformative and the wisdom and it's in some sense the endo you're the indo-asian you know indo-tibetan Indo Chinese culture that is kind of offering us now stuff that a hundred years ago no one would had a clue about this I mean William James was writing about the wandering mind in any kind of education that would help us to deal with a wine during mind would be the education par excellence he said meanwhile halfway around the world without the internet in 1890 there were people who have been practicing that for centuries how to deal with an unruly wandering mind but know now in the 21st century everything is out there everything is everywhere but the question is can we bring it inside in a way that is fungible that is valuable and so just to say a before closing I decided that what I needed to do was after asking myself for about ten years what is my job on the planet with a capital J in other words what would I love so much I'd pay to do it okay that's my idea of work you know I realize it's very privileged I grew up in a very privileged environment I went to very privileged schools but I didn't know I was privileged I just thought that's the way it was and I just did what I did you know so I was asking the question what would I love so much I'd pay to do it and I came up with MBSR and believe me I paid to do it for a long time he's like I'm not fun wasn't easy in a certain way but it was love so you said love doesn't always have to be fun right I mean and if you were married you have children the love transcends everything tense ends this and that good and bad hard times in beautiful times I mean it's like it's always there and we hopefully don't always need trauma and tragedy in order to remind us of the preciousness of life in that it can even be snuffed out at the age of 14 or 12 or 19 by some madness that our society has not been able to diagnose and deal with well enough to prevent this kind of thing or is so attached to weaponizing you know you know militias from 1790 that you know that that did not have ar-15s that we're in this circumstance now we're met the world needs medicine it needs what we've learned in integrative medicine let's not keep it to ourselves we need to bring it into the domain of economics and behavioral economics and domain of social justice and equity and why because we're generating more and more suffering in humans but really our karmic assignment is generate less alleviate the suffering be of some use before we die and all of its going to be over before we know it no matter how old you are the good side is there are an infinite number of moments between now and the time you're going to die through a first approximation they're still an infinite number of moments no matter how old you are how about inhabiting more of them so the idea of MBSR was to create a clinic in the form of a course that would catch people dropping through the cracks of the healthcare system and in 1979 they were cracks in the health care system now it's chasms hmm and and challenge them to do something for themselves that no one on the planet can do for you starting with starting from exactly where you are if you had four back surgeries and you're in more pain than ever great we'd love to work with you as long as you want to work with us if you can't walk no problem come in anyway but you have to want to be here we can't do the motivation part for you if you have cancer of this kind or another and you're still breathing our perspective the more you there's more right with you than wrong with you no matter what's wrong with you as long as you're still breathing we do not have a great track record with the dead okay other people like specialize and you know that kind of thing but that's not but you know so that was the idea behind MBSR and when when I talk to doctors about it the first thing he said well I could think of a twenty patients off the top of my head that I would love to send here because I don't know what to do with them do you know what I'm saying it's still the case and now you folks at the OSHA send a you have MBA sir you have in spades it's even in the surgery department I mean as we heard in the talk yesterday I mean you're doing remarkable things and and I guess what I'm here for is to in some sense be provocative and challenge you because there's a way in which even the remarkable things they get done become normalized they become in a certain sense normative and then you kind of doing MBSR on people rather than letting it still be that exciting innovative beyond time and space connect tivity and that has to do with one how well the train the people are who are doing it to how deep their own practices now I think you're at the cutting edge of the curve so my my my sort of the message I want to leave you with is is it in is it important to be mindful of how easily complacency could set in and you begin could begin to think we got this down now integrative medicine is worldwide recognize we've got seven Osher centers it's all fantastic we're doing amazing work and you are there's no question about it at the absolute cutting edge of what's going on in the world and is there something that still needs a little tuning and that even a tiny bit of tuning would actually have orthogonal e transformative potential and that's something that there's no answer to it's a question of can you be with the question and reflect on that in your own practice like what is what is the next something how could we perhaps it's how could we teach people how to stay out of the hospital for as long as possible and then to utilize their practice when they come into the hospital in concert with their caregivers you know so that hospitals now have a different kind of what's it called cost Center where one cost Center is devoted to teaching people how to stay out of the hospital not not use it services okay and could you make money out of that could you actually have it both ways the fact that we're all gonna die the hospitals are not going to go out of business but the fact that the burden of stress pain and illness and chronic stress pain and illness are in our society is enormous the cost to society are enormous is there a way to actually restructure it remodel it remonda ties it so that we're actually developing businesses that teach people to wake up and to integrate since we're calling it integrative medicine when you take your seat when you drop in when it becomes a love affair with the present moment and with actuality and possibility in the face of the full catastrophe of the human condition your genomes listening neuroplasticity is listening your telomeres are listening all of the science is suggesting that when you do something as weird as nothing or non-doing you're actually laying down new neural pathways my colleague Judd brewer at UMass is you know showing remarkable things as is Richie and Helen and hundreds of other neuroscientists and you know what about these neuroscientists there were all meditators there were all meditators twenty years ago when Richie was a closeted meditator his his advisors were always told them you let it out that you're a meditator your career is finished this is like a career-ending move to bring meditation into neuroscience now all the smart neuroscientist students they want to do mindfulness and they have a practice they've been practicing since they were 10 or 15 there's not just coming to it and then saying oh yeah Richie makes me meditate so I can do the work no there's a whole cadre of people who love the meditation practice that's and then you get to be the laboratory and also be in the laboratory and you know so it's like you inner and outer are connected in ways that are profound and transformative so my question to you really is the entanglement is like a dance the the dance of mind body inner and outer society and also what we must love the true the true sort of interior peacefulness right inward measure that can be even the day before you die you can be economist it's a skill it's learn about it doesn't mean everything will become kumbaya but it means that you will be fully who you are while you have the chance and then out of that comes beauty here comes creativity comes all sorts of things so let's take another moment because I've been talking a lot and just drop back in to whatever degree you've drifted into thinking let all the reverberations of what I've said just be there in some way or other but feel in whatever way you care to whether the body and the rest of you has any kind of vibrational feeling tone in the aftermath of what was just spoken and just resting in that awareness and you know sometimes on meditation retreats I'll ring bells at the end of a meditation but see this meditations not going to ever end okay so no bells and talking is good and walking is good and working is good and being in trouble is good and you know being stressed is it's all good because your awareness can hold all of it and your heartfulness can hold it in a way that doesn't blame you or make you a problem or have some kind of analysis of what's going on that's painful but wrong and that's self-inflicted pain and therefore the essence of this is liberation its freedom its freedom that's what the Buddha said mindfulness is known as the heart of Buddhist meditation he called it the direct path to liberation and so it's like the law of gravity it's like you know or it's just so but don't believe Newton or Galileo or Einstein where the the evidence from the LIGO observers or authorities that have felt the the Wiggles of space-time from black holes colliding billions of light years away gigantic black holes believe this trust your heart be the love and notice that there's no center and no periphery to that either so that it's it's a gift that radiates out each one of you in a your own particular way and those of you work at the OSHA centers underscore centers and congratulations for the latest one why not explore what these growing edges of potentiality are that could easily fall through the cracks of just we think we got it all we know it all already and any institution is capable of that and really is the kiss of death so I encourage you to out of your own meditation practice resting in the knowing and resting in the not knowing and the knowing that knows that the not knowing is much bigger than knowing and I'll come back in twenty or thirty years and see how it's going okay thank you very much and I and I want to thank and I want to really deeply on a personal level for myself because it's such a gift to the world - thank you Barney and - Thank You Maurice for everything that you're doing to support the these centers and the the absolute cutting edge work that is being done here that allows and recruits people who have the deep love for this to actually be able to have this be their livelihood and to create something new in the world that medicine is dying for starving for and the world is in fact dying for and starving for so just the deep out gratitude to both of you [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 36,091

Keywords: Jon Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness, stress, meditation

Id: VZCNdjz3PrI

Length: 57min 31sec (3451 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 06 2018