Mindfulness in Society | Jon Kabat-Zinn, Anderson Cooper

so we this nothing has happened yet hold your applause to actually be worth something so just a quick little short story Anderson actually had reached out to us and I think John a couple years ago to do a piece on mindfulness actually this kind of this topic mindfulness in America and that piece came out and since then we had been in touch and I was trying to get Anderson to come to San Francisco for our main event and he would work in his scheduling is like Soren it's just not happening however if something were to happen in New York it would be much easier for me so part of the reason that we're all here is because of his busy crazy schedule so if you're happy to be here as due to his schedule and I think we share a passion and an interest we all share a passion and interest on the power and the potential of mindfulness and in a world so divided and we're political beliefs and religious beliefs and it's like it's so easy to get set in our mental framework anything that helps us see our thoughts work clearly and have more social emotional intelligence and anything that sees that that that we're actually all human together we're all we all of a mind we all have a body and I think when we sit and meditate or practice mindfulness it doesn't matter our reputation it doesn't matter how much money we have in the bank we still feel the same physical pain our mind still wanders as much as it does and that there's this potential that we have to promote mindfulness in this like incredibly fast digital age that I think is really powerful and so it's a real honor to have so many people support your support but also Anderson's support and just saying how do we highlight this more how do we talk about this more how do we unnecessarily promote this more but how do we just bring this topic to light more in our culture so it's really an honor to be here and to have your time and your presence and probably one of the busiest schedules that exists on the on the planet so thank you anything well thanks I'm so happy that you're all here and curious I'm actually here how many of you actually I mean hell practice mindfulness in one way or another Wow okay everybody hey has anyone here not practicing but just curious about it at this point I'll ask a couple of people all right cool well I you know as Sauron said I really started getting interested in this I was asked to do a piece for 60 minutes about it and I'd always been interested in meditation but it could never really figure out how you go about it like I bought videotapes and I never actually watched them back when they had videotapes and I thought it was like some big complicated thing and I've had this weight on me for years like oh this is really something I should do which of course is not the way to think about it as John Kennington will quickly tell you and going to the retreat which is how I first met John and Sauron we were taping for 60 minutes and it was a three-day retreat and you know you put away your phones and they were very sweet to allow cameras in and we didn't want to disturb anything and I was going through the retreat with everybody else and about halfway through my producer who still had her phone got a call that I had to go I don't know if you remember the guy who owned the LA Clippers had said incredibly offensive things and agreed to be interviewed by me so I had to leave this really lovely mindfulness free to to go speak to perhaps the least mindful person at that time so it was a very strange juxtaposition but I so I only did about half the retreat and then once we've done the story actually went back and did it without cameras and and I've continued to try to practice as much as I can so I'm thrilled you're all here and I'm very happy to be talking to Jon kabat-zinn a man who I admire greatly so wonderful please welcome Jon Kabat yeah [Applause] so could we have the house lights up without messing up the the the web feed and and and so forth and the filming because it would be nice for us to be able to actually see who we're talking to so that it is not just kind of some performance on the stage but actually a collective inquiry so to speak into the nature of what's probably most important in our lives so if that's possible to raise up the house lights however you can manage it that would be wonderful if you're listening now that you're heard that you're you're talking to you are you talking time 90 there and put into the ether and look how responsive it wow this is an object lesson how we are can be in relationship to the world and to the unknown wow you're a master so Jules said last night that you know she asked that question like how often do you meditate you know and and and she got into a little thing with somebody about like you know I meditate morning you meditate you know which is a nice reflection of how people how our minds work that we sort of kind of make it into a thing when it's really not a thing so people used to ask me that all the time and I would didn't say well I'm you know carve out two hours in the morning to do my yoga and to my you know meditation practice and I stopped giving that answer because really the only answer is I mean it's all meditation I mean if we're willing to be awakened alive there's no moment of that's not available to us to practice so in a sense the real meditation practice is life unfolding here and now and they're an infinite number of skillful doors into that room and the important point isn't to take someone else's door but to enter into a door that feels like it has authenticity to you so just for fun I'll bring some bells because I brought them not necessary but you carry with you bells at all times they present a certain kind of problem at airport security the answer is yes so just following the sound into the sound if you will of your own breathing and the feeling of the breath moving in and out of the body and for that matter since we're multi-sensorial beings the feeling of being in this room sitting in anticipation of what's yet to unfold and just dropping in to the fact that it's unfolding here now and resting so to speak in the timeless quality of this moment with full awareness underneath whatever stream of thought and sounds from far and near might be happening eyes opens fine eyes closed - fine but befriending your own experience a kind of silence that's like the stillness of the ocean underneath even the most turbulent surface waves and it's just this it's not like we have to attain some special state oh this is what it's all about if I did it could only hold on to this experience because it's so transcendent or whatever no it's not about having some special experience it's about recognizing that whatever you're experiencing is already insanely special and the very fact that you can experience anything is liberated informative generative of infinite possibilities that might not have existed the moment before because you weren't really here for it or you insisted it it'd all be a certain way my way of course and so in that sense befriending a silence and stillness that's underneath all the ambient sound in the room or the thoughts in your own mind silence that's available always infinitely right here if we care and if we care to remember so it's just this nothing special and insanely special okay so in that spirit this meditation is not gonna ever end and we'll carry the same moment a moment nonreactive non-judgmental awareness as best we can without contrivance or forcing or striving through the entirety of today through all of the listening the presenting the conversations that deep inquiry within ourselves the wondering why we came in the first place they're being illuminated the being depressed it's all the curriculum and I just want to say it's like total honor to be sure that you've Anderson and you know of course I see you on the screen a number of times a week and I just wonder how the hell do you keep it up in the toxic atmosphere of you know the truth is I'm heavily medicated but [Applause] well I mean I think that's I think that's a good starting point because I do think for many people this is you know that whether it's a daily practice of mindfulness or just how ever one practices it how do you particularly in this day and age and in this particular time in our country's history where you know I mean talk about non-judgmental awareness about trust about you know seeing things with with fresh eyes with with beginner's mind how do you cultivate that given you know the world of technology that we're all carrying around with us in our pockets and given the political world that's happening all around us yeah and you know in a sense your life because of your your job and your assignments is like at the absolute frontline of all of that so by comparison we don't have any problems at all you know you know stress in terms of being sent off here or there or having to deal with you know a steady stream of pundits who all have different ideas about how great things are how horrible things are and are always fighting with each other so to cut to the chase I mean really I think the meditation practice and this is often not really understood is about not making friends and making enemies and falling into camps even inside yourself because we can be very unfriendly to ourselves as well as to others depending on the filters that we put up but actually actually understanding understand that that the world is actually one it's one seamless whole and so what we're talking about is a kind of a non dual way of actually not getting into uh seing an Deming and that's very very hard to do because have you watched cable news I mean this that's what it is but the question that I think from an evolutionary point of view because of like this the challenges that we're facing as a species now is can we find some elements within ourself that are truly native to us and that we're born with we don't have to acquire that can allow us to hold the whole thing of all of the the the different dissipative forces and toxic forces and violent forces which are also to some degree inside of us ourselves and hold them in a way that's not only benign but that in some sense cultivates a certain kind of caring equanimity that allows for a kind of new view of the whole thing that might lead to healing and transformation or at least to learning and growing and that wouldn't be Anderson's responsibility or mine it would be a distributive responsibility that we all in some sense need to take because in some sense you could say we were all the cells of the one body politic you know the planet if you will and no one cares except us you talk about though you know we in mindfulness you talk about acceptance and being non-judgmental and non-judgmental awareness I mean at a time when you know people are so polarized I think people can interpret acceptance or being non-judgmental as being passive and just accepting this is the reality and it's not be it can't be changed and so glad you're bringing this up because this is an absolutely fundamental point and so in terms of the working my working operational definition of mindfulness that it is the the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose in the moment non-judgmentally this this notion of a moment to moment non-judgmental attending doesn't mean the non-judgmental doesn't mean that we won't have judgments it means that we'll have judgments galore but we'll be aware that their judgments in a certain way and that they have physiological effects on us and we tense and we contract and the jaw gets and get angry and we get violent in a certain way and then recognizing that the awareness is in some sense another dimension that's available to us as a human being that if you inquire about your own awareness is that tense is that stress does that taking sides the answer is no it doesn't have to be taking sides it can be a new perspective in which to see the the idiocy and the failure and the violence and the harming that comes out of that and that would be akin to what I would call wisdom and I think that's what we need as human beings at this point in time now the track record depending on how you look at it doesn't look so good but on the other hand somebody like Steve Pinker in his book the better angels of our nature I mean you could look at things that things are actually improving I mean a hundred years ago women were property in this country of men is that not true and this is some people call this Columbus day but this is you know now being called indigenous peoples day and on the New York Times front page today there's conversations about what Columbus really did that we're never taught in history so his certain way which I think evolutionarily it's time for us human beings to figure out how to transcend the dualistic disregard of the other all this other in the racism the sort of implicit biases through the only way we have the only instrument we have awareness itself it's unbelievably powerful and as I said it's not something we have to get it's something we have to cultivate access to under fire so in a sense even the President of the United States he then becomes part of the curriculum did we ask for it well yes some people asked for it some people didn't for all sorts of complex reasons how about how do we actually find a wise way to be in relationship to it and I would say just to close the South it would be nice if we could take the thousand year view because the general trend is in the right direction and Robert Sapolsky just wrote a book called behave which I recommend all of you to read that falls on the the side of we can actually transform as well I mean it's actually interesting citizen it Christoph The Times has written a lot about this if you look you know it I do a lot of speaking in front of groups and I usually ask people do you feel like this is the worst you know most dangerous time that you have ever been alive and most people will say yes this things are just getting worse by every metric everything is actually getting better I mean it may not feel like that I think it doesn't feel like that for people because unlike previous generations we see it on television we see it on our devices we have instant access to it but you know literacy I think in the 60s 85 percent of the world's population of adults was illiterate today it's only 15 percent poverty every day 250,000 people leave extreme poverty which is you know not having access to water or clean drinking water shelter the basics Wars don't last as long unless people die a violent death any of us in this room are much less likely to violate die a violent death than ever before by every single metric the world gets better and yet I feel like we don't feel that way at all you know this is the cutting edge of the unknown future you know so historians will say you know well if you if you go back to why more buy more Germany I mean it feels just like this there are a lot of people who are doing stuff that is very reminiscent of the kind of other ring that winds up with concentration camps and genocide and there's a long history of it's not just the Nazis I mean you know it's like goes on you know back to Columbus the Native Americans 400 years of slavery in this country that we've never really taken you know sort of our responsibility for in a certain collective way and what the long term sort of implications of that are in our society so I think in this sort of very brief time we have what I would say Anderson is that in having brought mindfulness into medicine for the past almost 40 years into the mainstream of medicine where you know the idea that you could bring medicine and meditation into medicine 40 years ago was like insane and now it's like people realize it's absolutely critical part of it what we've learned through the new science of neuroplasticity the new science of epigenetics a new science of telomeres and aging and so forth is that the human being not just the human body or the brain is unbelievable the word that they use is plastic in other words how we intend to cultivate ourselves influences every conceivable biological and psychological and social interactive function that we have so in terms of the potential directing of not biological but cultural evolution we have an insanely unique and precious moment an opportunity to do this and in the sense all of the horror that we might feel is part of this is also a tremendous opportunity and yes we've never been quite here before because of the digital age and how we're you know completely caught up in you know the imprisonment of our devices and so forth and distracted perpetually but there's also a deep interior connectivity that if we can have it with ourselves and have it with each other non digitally as well as digitally then in fact we've already changed the world even if it doesn't seem that way and if we keep that practice up moment by moment day by day week by week month by month year by year decade by decade my own sense is that if I saw some other doorway to the beauty and freedom of humanity it's expressing itself in its fullness and not the toxicity that's going to in some sense destroy it I would be doing that but I've never found anything more powerful than mindfulness and it starts here if you're not practicing then it's just blah blah blah about mindfulness it's like we're turning it into one more thing when we're product one more commodity it's too deep for that and with the show of hands that Anderson asked for that's really extraordinary if we were having this meeting thirty years ago or even ten years ago almost nobody would have raised the hand that they were meditating this is actually a social phenomenon it's not just me doing a little stress reduction for myself do you worry about the spread of it in that way about it it's sort of morphing into either another should or that it becomes a commodity you know that gets marketed like you're I worry about that a lot it's happening because it's inevitable that some people whenever anything becomes hot or you know sort of people talking about it a lot then people want exploited or you know get on the bandwagon by the way I'm marketing Anderson Cooper mindful t-shirts outside I tried there you go but you know I my optimism really Simpson the fact that the feeling tone in this room the feeling tone in all of the places that I wind up going where people care about this in a deep way including two weeks ago in the parliament in Ottawa the Canadian Parliament next week I'll be at in the Parliament in the UK where hundreds of parliamentarians are practicing mindfulness never ever happened before on the planet and they're inviting parliamentarians from thirty different countries to come to London on that day to talk about how this could actually be leveraged in ways they get beyond the kind of dualism that's so much a part of the political process and that's so much what I'm saying is that we've learned in medicine something that applies not just to the body but I think metaphorically at least it needs to be applied to the body politic if we begin to look at ourselves as all cells in the one body of the planet then you know things like say the levels of income inequality that we've driven in the past thirty or forty years it's like a heart saying like you know we like the way we look and we are like really important we pump all the blood so screw you brain and liver we're not going to give you enough blood to actually just even do your thing you know we wouldn't last very long if the body were operating on that kind of capitalistic greed hatred and delusion principle and I think we need to look at that whether it's bankers whether it's the economy whether whatever it is that we need some kind of redistribution of plug in the society so everybody is fundamentally healthy enough to do the interior work that leads to a healthy planet a healthy world the healthy climate I don't see any alternative to that everything else is kind of a quick fix and medicine demonstrated very very few cures in medicine very few quick fixes but healing is always possible right up into the moment you go and that itself is not necessarily a failure it's just part of the way things are I wanted to ask what two particular things that I struggle with one is this idea of beginner's mind I thought I think that story termed that and I was thinking of this very much in Las Vegas this past week where you know I've been I've seen a lot of death and and a lot of people die either in front of me or after I you know right before I get there and after a while it's very it's to me it's important to see everything with fresh eyes every time because if you're not outraged or horrified as a reporter you can't do a very good job to tell the horror of the situation but how do you keep that beginner's mind that beginners eye of being whether it's horrified or whatever it is every single time well I wouldn't because you talk about beginners mom yes well it's a phrase that Suzuki Roshi coined when the the founding teacher of the San Francisco Zen Center and Tassajara and Green Gulch in California but it's a beautiful concept from you know Japanese Soto Zen beginner's mind and the quote is in the mind of the experts there are a few possibilities and the mind at the beginner there are many so take point keep the mind open new emergencies are possible that when our minds are closed we can't see so this has to be a practice it can't be a philosophy or a catechism or you know some kind of thing it has to be a practice and you are like right in its face in a way that none of us are except in our own ways but you are like very publicly out there and and so I think that cultivating a certain kind of empathic transparency so that it's not like you shut down which often happens even in medicine that you know it can only take so much suffering and then you shut it off and the mindfulness is the opposite that's opening up the space and letting it move through so it's not like you don't have profound compassion empathy and so forth but your humanity and I see this in you on television your humanity your very presence is healing for people because you are listening and that listening is a form of mindful and true you're also giving people an opportunity to have millions of people listen to their grief listen to their loss listen to the insanity of what's happening in the body of the United States of America it is we need to hear that it isn't to me how grief and loss is something that we don't talk about that people are surprised if they see on TV if people see anger on TV that's normal they think you know on cable news it's normal to have a person be angry and shouting and whatever arguing each other if you turn on and you see a genuine expression of sorrow or sadness or loss people seem surprised by that I think this is part of our collective education and that in that sense the media you know the media's be challenged I don't know enough about a hest history to know whether this is the first time it's ever been this bad or it's always been this bad but in different ways and then Trump's added a completely orthogonal dimension beyond belief orthogonal that's for another but but that but the thing is I write about it only to I son yeah but but but the thing is it is I think an incredible opportunity for all of us to not fall into despair depression reactivity or anger but to actually fall into wakefulness with compassion and find new imaginative creative ways to interface with those who we project other nasaan to them not the sort of people who love us and who think we are the greatest but just those very other people and to give voice to them as you do on CNN and to sort of have us actually realize that genetically speaking and medically speaking and in every other way including I think politically speaking although it seems like the differences are insurmountable as human beings we are virtually 99.9% the same around the world no matter what our beliefs and those beliefs are really fungible and they have a lot to do with the pain and suffering and fear that we've experienced over life and also personality and how our brains are wired and I do recommend you read Robert Sapolsky it's only six or seven hundred pages but I've absolutely brilliant on the best and the worst of human beings and of course being a neuroscientist and a primatologist he can tell us how you know a lot of stuff didn't just come from like the Middle Ages it comes from like when we were on the Savannah in in Africa you know a way before we became human so a lot of this is we call ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens you know I've talked about that sometimes it means from Latin so peri to taste excuse me it means that the species that knows and knows that it knows a certain kind of arrogance today yeah we the species that knows and we know that we know and so that's awareness and meta awareness not cognition and metacognition so I think that it's time we lived our way into that because the stakes are only whether we our grandchildren will have you know the possibility of living a life of integrity or whether they're going to create a hell on earth we're a very small minority we'll have everything and the bit large venerable majority will be suffering like nobody's business and if we can imagine it what's gonna happen actually is the unimaginable you know whether it's North Korea or whatever was gonna happen is the unimaginable we're not that smart as you know Mark Twain observed to sort of really get it right in terms of the future but we can change the future by changing our relationship that our present that's the only leverage the only fulcrum we have and that's what the practice is really all of your I want to ask you about the idea you've said that the person we think we are is completely different than the person we actually are who you've done your homework if these are all negative anything that's probably the most important question I just find that such a can you explain and I know that you've been to our lab at the Center for mindfulness in medicine health care in society and Jed brewer you know this is part of the your 60 minutes show showed you some of the neural feedback around the practice of mindfulness and so in the midline of the brain is what's called a network that's it's known as the default mode network because when you put people in an fMRI scanner and tell them to do nothing they default to thinking and what are they thinking about their favorite subject of course our favorite subject me why my self lie and it's like my you know my shopping list my to-do list my tomorrow my yesterday and it's a narrative so some people also called the narrative mode and it's a particular region in the brain that just goes insane when you're told to do nothing just lie there in the scanner and it also involves mind wandering creativity so it's not bad but it is imprisoning the alternative is after eight weeks of training and MBSR there seems to be another network a lateral network that comes down on becomes active and there's an uncoupling between these two networks you still need this one or you won't find your way home at night I mean you have to know who you are in a certain conventional way but on the other end if if your neck if you're stuck in a narrative of who you think you are and you say like I'm Jon kabat-zinn and I live here and that that's all in a certain way just relatively if I were really true to myself I have to say you know there's a lot more not knowing who I am than knowing who I am and what's wrong with that actually because you know the narrative is never big enough that's your point I think in asking is like we have these small narratives of what it means to be an American or what it means to be a Democrat or what it means to be a Republican or what it means to be this and and none of them are true none of them if you examine it they're not true they're fictions or they might have an element of truth that when they win think well yeah this is true because there's a 10 percent true or something like that and what I'm saying is that when we drop into wakefulness into awareness into the spaciousness of what who we already are that is almost like impossible to put into words that's why poetry becomes so important but that humanity what happens on the performance stages in the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and so forth that's the human mind and heart when it knows itself when the human mind doesn't know itself you get outlets you get the killing fields of Cambodia you get Rwanda you get shawls ville and so that's our that's our challenge it's like a yoga you know you work with the tension you work with the sort of elasticity and plasticity but also the resistance if you will you don't work against the resistance you work with the resistance that's the deep grounding of the martial art of Aikido so what we're doing is like in some sense we're doing by dropping in on ourselves we're doing an Aikido online entire world together I think we're almost at our time is that or I mean as people think about the day and face this day what do you want what do you hope people come away at the end of the day with well let's let this entire day be a deep inquiry and meditation in and of itself into Who am I who are we not believing the narratives that come up but staying with the questioning the answers are cheap the questioning priceless and and trusting that there's a wisdom that's distributive throughout all of us that by virtue of our DNA by virtue of the the plasticity of our genome all sorts of ways in which we are so much bigger than who we think we are individually and together that when you know we have these kinds of conversations and we listen deeply inwardly and outwardly they can find a certain kind of clarity wisdom and bravery that will allow us to sort of find the edge of them and us and allow it to dissolve into love into but I think this is all about when you take your seat in the morning to practice it's a radical act of sanity but even more deeply I've come to see it as a radical act of love and when you do this even you yourself and nobody else is doing it the lattice structure so to speak of the entire world is different simply because there's one more locus of sanity for this moment one more locus of caring beyond the me myself and I that's awareness and that's cultivatable it's intimacy with our own awareness and it's loving what is you know as Byron Katie says it's loving what is that doesn't mean you have to accept it acceptance doesn't mean passive resignation to look back to your other question acceptance means recognizing things as they are and then responding appropriately instead of reacting from someplace out of your own mind thank you here we are [Applause]

Channel: Wisdom 2.0

Views: 37,961

Rating: 4.8078604 out of 5

Keywords: Jon Kabat-Zinn, Anderson Cooper, Mindfulness in America, Wisdom 2.0, Wisdom, Mindfulness, Soren Gordhamer, New York, 2017, NYC, Meditation

Id: RnLRhHulcDU

Length: 35min 40sec (2140 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2018