My name is Helen Damon Moore, and I am the director of service and education at the Tucker foundation here at Dartmouth college. I am honored to welcome you all. And to introduce John Kabat-Zinn on behalf of the Dartmouth Hitchcock medical center, palliative care service, the Tucker foundation, the Rubin committee of Dartmouth college, Alice Peck day hospital, Dartmouth medical school, the Norris cotton cancer center, and the Valley insight meditation society special thanks to IRA Byock and Yvonne core Bay and the palliative care service for partnering on this project. And to those at Tucker who have worked so hard and who are this week celebrating the 60th anniversary year of the Tucker foundation Dartmouth center for service spirituality and social justice. We are pleased to welcome Dr. John Cabots to Dartmouth college today for the second time, Cabot’s in first visited Dartmouth in the summer of 1984, when the college and the Connecticut river served as the training camp for the men’s Olympic rowing team, he was the meditation trainer for the team, helping them to optimize their mental performance.
Today, he is here to help optimize our performance. Jon Kabat-Zinn holds a PhD in molecular biology from MIT. He is professor of medicine emeritus at the university of Massachusetts medical school and founder of the center for mindfulness in medic medicine, healthcare and society. And it’s a mindfulness-based stress reduction clinic. He is the author of numerous best-selling books, including full catastrophe living wherever you go there, you are coming to our senses and the mindful way through depression, coauthored with Williams Teasdale and seagull, Dr. Cabot sins research focuses on mind, body interactions for healing and on the clinical applications and cost effectiveness of mindfulness training for people with chronic pain and stress-related disorders, including the effects of mindfulness based stress reduction on the brain. His current projects include editing the mind’s own physician with Richard Davidson and guest co-editing with Mark Williams, a special issue of the journal contemporary Buddhism, Dr. Cabot’s sins work has contributed hugely to a growing movement of mindfulness in mainstream institutions, such as medicine, psychology, healthcare schools, and colleges, corporations, prisons, and professional sports courtesy of Carrie Joe Grant here, and our student health promotion department, Dr. Kabat-Zinn and his work have even made their way to the inside of our bathroom doors featured as they are in the current edition of the Dartmouth college stall street journal. Please join me in welcoming John Kabat-Zinn back to Dartmouth college.
It’s a delight to be here. do I have to have the light, this bright in my eyes? Maybe you could tone it down a little bit so that people can still see me, but I’d like to be able to see you too. it’s a delight to be here. it’s nice to walk into a theater where mindfulness is on the marquee. You know, you’ve really made it when it’s on the marquee, along with Frankenstein,
You’re part of the mainstream, so to speak. However, that goes from moment to moment and from day to day. But, it’s really a delight to be here and I am here basically because of Helen Damon moore in her work, which I got to actually see, at the University of Iowa when she was at Iowa before coming here and also, Dr. IRA Byock, who I met, in, in Ireland about two years ago, almost exactly two years ago. And I was just incredibly impressed with what he’s doing with integrative medicine and palliative care. And so, you know, it’s like, I don’t live that far from, from this place. And I got in the car this morning and drove up and I’m really happy to be here for the next three days. And, You know, so for, to have this many people come out at four 30 on a sunny afternoon after the kind of winter that we’ve had, to talk about mindfulness is really some kind of indicator that something has shifted in society. you all have better things to do. I’m sure this afternoon will come here, unless you have some kind of real intuition.
About what the healing power of mindfulness might be. And then it might actually be incredibly valuable to spend the end of a nice sunny Thursday afternoon here together. So this really, this talk is really not about me or what I have to say. It’s about us. It’s about every single one of us. And in some sense what the potential is as the slide says for living your moments as if they really mattered. And I put a little asterisk in there just kind of an aside and they actually do. and the reason they do is because we’re only alive when we’re alive. This seems kind of a no brainer, but, you could say that a lot of our lives were walking around with a no-brainer or just basically no brain or the brain is on autopilot or something like that. And what mindfulness really is about is bringing it back online, so to speak, in the present moment, because that turns out to be the only moment any of us ever have, but we’re so good at thinking so incredibly good at thinking that we can spend enormous amounts of our time and energy absorbed in the past. Have you noticed that like, just incredible preoccupations about who’s to blame for why it’s like this or how great it was in the good old days and why can’t it be that way now So there’s a tremendous attraction to the past or a tremendous aversion, but whether it’s attraction or aversion, we spend a lot of time there. Would you agree, have you noticed that a lot of the time, if you check on what your mind is up to, it’s up to memory, it’s up to thinking about things that are already over to a large degree.
The other favorite preoccupation of the mind is in the opposite direction,
The future, and if, again, you check in every once in a while, just to, you know, sometimes I like to say, you know, you can call yourself up. You may have to, you know, because we’re on 24 seven, we’re just infinitely connected. Probably every single person has one of these in their pocket. I hope there is some exceptions, but, and they’re called smart phones, you know, I mean, but they’re not, but we act, but they can really dumb us down because we can be infinitely connected everywhere except here. And so we may need to call ourselves up every once in a while. Although John, are you, are you actually here And the answer is no I’m off in the future thinking. And, and one of our favorite preoccupations, and by the way, of course you’ll get a bill from at and T Verizon.
But, but seriously, what, what are our favorite preoccupations in the future Well, one is worrying, I don’t know about the North country. Maybe you’ve gone beyond worrying, but, and the rest of the world, a lot of worry about things that, that, haven’t happened yet and may never happen. In fact, Mark Twain is famous for having said, and you’ve probably heard this in a lot of different sort of guises, but he’s famous for having said, there’s been a huge amount of tragedy in my life and some of it actually happened, but, but there is this sayings that, you know, we die, you know, he died a thousand deaths. I mean, we drive ourselves crazy over things that are not going to be happening because we’re not smart enough to actually forecast the future, but that doesn’t prevent us from driving ourselves crazy and perseverating over and over and over again about what will happen. And then something else happens because we’re not that smart. So something else happens, but, and we’ve said, we’re blindsided.
Now, how many of you would like the future to be different from the way it, the way we think it’s going to turn out, anybody ever find yourself, wishing the future was going to be like majorly different than we’d make some kind of change in the world, raise your hands. I want to just feel in the audience. So, okay. I heard social justice mentioned earlier, and this is after all a university, or I guess you call yourself a college, but I, you know, a campus kind of situation. So it doesn’t surprise me. but, this, this kind of engagement really requires thinking about what it means to make the future different. How do we possibly apply any leverage? Can we find an Archimedes, you know, fully in which to influence the future. There’s only one fulcrum that I know of for that.
And that is the present, because guess what, we’re living in the future of every single moment in all of our lives that came before this one, do you remember back I mean, I see that a kind of a range of ages, although most of you don’t look like your college students. I got to say, and I’m a little disappointed. I mean, I, you know, I mean, not that I’m disappointed that you came, but I’d like to see a lot more college students. they look at th they’re going to Frankenstein probably later. It’s an awkward time of day for the young people. How many of you are under 25, 25 or under, is it, Oh, so I’m, I’m wrong. I’m, that’s really nice to be wrong.
So I was going to say to the older people in may, but maybe you did it when you were even younger. Do you remember before you came to college here and probably you got into planning, what the courses were that you’re going to take when you got ahold of the catalog or you went online and you began planning, Oh, in the freshman year, I’ll take this and sophomore year and junior year, and then maybe you planned even who you’re going to meet and who you might marry and what your children will look like. And now, does that sound familiar? That, you know, sometimes we do that when we’re young. and, and then we think that it’s all gonna turn out in the future. So no matter what your age is, I’ve got news for you. This is it. It already turned out.
And, and how did it turn out? It turned out just like this in this moment, your life is just like this, not happy with it, a little bit sad or depressed or wishing it was different. That’s not a problem. That’s not a problem because we can always sort of feel like, okay, how are we going to be in a relationship to this And of course, life is not easy. And a lot of times we’re faced with enormous challenges, sometimes with enormous pain, sometimes with enormous threat and that’s part of the human condition. But the real interesting question, when it concerns say the future and concerns living as if life really mattered is can we actually be in the present moment when things are kind of not the way we thought they would be, or, you know, sometimes this shorthand for it as well. I didn’t sign up for this. I mean, or another way to put it sometimes, maybe no offense meant, but how did I get born into this family Or who are all these crazy people Why am I the only sane person And you know, when you’re in a family, no one else can know the kind of genetic disease of that particular family that, you know, you know, that everybody suffers from except to you.
So if we hope for the future to be different, the only place we have to stand is now, because first of all, it’s the, it’s the future of all the moments that have come before. So, if you want to be in the future, here you are. This is actually non-trivial. It’s not just though. Yeah. What, tell us something interesting. because what it invites is a kind of shift in perception and a shift in awareness, a shift in consciousness that allows us to actually live our lives as if they really mattered in the only moment we ever have. And part of that means being embodied because a lot of the time, you know, we are lost in thought.
That’s another thing you’ll notice if you start to pay attention to your mind is that it’s all over the place. It’s all over the place. You don’t even have to meditate for that to happen. It just it’s, it’s default mode, it’s default mode. You don’t even have to have a smartphone. You don’t even have to have email. You don’t even have to have a computer. It’s the default mode of the mind to be all over the place and thinks this. And it thinks that, and it likes this and it hates that. And it’s like I want to approach this, but really wants to stay away from that. And it’s like wired into our biology. That’s called the approach avoidance.
And it’s kind of, you know, the hemispheres are actually somewhat divided in terms of the left hemisphere in the frontal cortical region is more approach related and right activation more. And that’s one of the fundamental biological, you know, features of living systems moving towards food, moving away from danger, perfectly natural, but how we actually modulate those impulses and those reflexes and those kinds of unconscious urges that drive us.
And that caused us to be reactive. A lot of the time is, is really an art form. It’s the art, if you will, of living our lives as if they really mattered. And when we begin to actually drop in on ourselves and I, I brought, I brought a few props, you know, so sometimes they said, when we begin to drop in on ourselves, you know, we can actually reclaim this moment in this body, with this heart, with this mind and shift begin to shift the default setting on how we live our lives begin to actually, move in a direction of greater balance of mind, greater groundedness in the body, greater clarity of sight, greater. if you will, recognition of what’s actually unfolding moment by moment. That’s not so conditioned by whether it’s a, we like it or not because, the world, maybe you haven’t noticed this yet, but it’s not actually organized around you being the center of the universe.
I know that’s really disappointing because you’re, I’m guessing now don’t take offense again, but I’m guessing that you are entirely organized around you being the center of the universe. Every single one of us is it’s almost unavoidable. It’s almost unavoidable. And that actually has representations in the brain. It’s turning out that there are medial, medial networks in the frontal cortex. And that is, that is actually called the default mode. And it’s what they think brains neuroscientists think is what’s, it’s what’s happening when you’re not doing anything. Well, it turns out when you’re not doing anything, you’re very busy. You’re very, very, very busy. And one of the ways that’s described is that your mind is wondering, and now there’s an entire field in neuroscience, focused on mind wandering. How many of you have noticed that your mind sometimes just has a life of its own It goes here, it goes there. It’s like I love to be entertained. You know, it’s very entertaining. So yeah, that’s, what’s called the default mode now. And another name for it is the narrative network. So it’s like, we’re continually constructing narratives about ourselves. I mean, after all, it’s a favorite topic, right Me, what could be more interesting than me The story of me starring me to pay attention, because what we’re talking about, what mindfulness is, it’s actually awareness.
Okay. And it’s cultivated by paying attention. So just to get clear about this, that doesn’t sound very Buddhist. Does it so far, or a very Asian or a very mystical or very, you know, anything, let me, it’s just paying attention. That’s what all the, how many teachers are there in the audience, whatever level you’re teaching at, raise your hand. So I can feel okay, don’t you want your students to pay attention? Isn’t it non-trivial to get them to pay attention first, you might have to be interesting. That itself is a challenge. Second, you might have to make the subject matter. Interesting. That’s also a challenge, but third it’s like I remember as a product of the New York public schools, you know, having teachers actually yell at us to pay attention, but that’s not a very effective way to get people to pay attention, because it turns out that attending is something that you need to learn. It’s a learnable skill, but instead of being taught to pay attention, you just like being told to pay attention, get with the program, pay attention. And a lot of people pay attention very differently. Some pay attention auditorily than really predominantly auditory. Other people can’t do auditory well. They got to see visually other people’s more intuitive. They feel it in it, you know, with their bodies in a certain way.
So, this is incredibly important in education at all levels because bef you know it, as they say about orchestras, you know, even the greatest of orchestras with the greatest musicians, with the greatest instruments, playing the greatest music before they perform, they get together and they tune their instruments first to themselves. Then with each other, until there’s a kind of dropping, if you don’t mind me put it that way into kind of resonance,
Call it in. I’ll call. It’s what you like. But I kind of have an interconnected feeling that we are in some space together, you could call it relationality. And so mindfulness is the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose in the present moment, paying attention on purpose in the present moment. And non-judgmentally, non-judgmentally, that’s the kicker because, as I said, the default network is operating constantly and the default networks got ideas and opinions about everything it’s judging constantly. So nonjudgmental, that doesn’t mean that you won’t be judging when you actually start to pay attention to what’s on your mind, or what’s going on in your life. But that you’ll notice how much you are judging, how much you want to approach this and push away that. And you’ll just allow that whole thing to be there as if you just put out the welcome mat for it. Okay. I’m not going to have an opinion about my opinions. I’m going to just let it rain down for, for a moment.
Can you feel how radical a shift that would be in your life to just take one moment and allow everything to be, as it is, instead of wishing it was one way or another, the Buddhists would call that liberation. It’s a kind of freedom that we, no one else can give you, but that allows us to, in some sense, rotate in consciousness so that we, for one moment, we’re stepping outside of time, because if you live in the now, well, maybe you’ve had this experience. So just check your watch and take a look right now. And what time is it? I’ll tell you what time it is.
It’s now. And every time you check your watch or your phone bloody it’s now again.
Now, why, why am I even talking about this, why did I even come here? It’s always good to ask those questions. You know, it’s like, I don’t know, actually, because it’s usually bigger than whatever you think, you know, your reasons for going. but, it has a lot to do with, with, the medical school and with what, what, IRA’s doing there and with what, Helen is doing, in the undergraduate school. It has to do with the fact that the society has reached a point where we’re beginning to understand that the exponentially increasing levels of stress in medicine, in our professional lives, in our personal lives at every age, really require some kind of shift that is not in the form of taking some pill to numb yourself out to it or get it together. But actually, we need to cultivate what’s often spoken of as the domain of being in order to not be so overwhelmed by all the doing and the performing.
And while it’s true that with the Olympic team, we were using mindfulness to actually improve their performance. It was a kind of Zen operation in the sense that you can’t improve performance by trying to prove improved performance, especially with the mind, because the kind of mind that’s grasping for an outcome is exactly the kind of mind that gets in the way of any desirable outcome. Have you got that Did you, did you catch that as it flew by Okay. So this means we’re in new territory, one example, common example, you can’t get to sleep by forcing yourself to get to sleep by telling yourself how important the meeting is you have tomorrow. In fact, that’s probably a very bad idea because that thought will actually secrete one more thought, secrete, one more thought about the meeting or the stakes of it, or w and then that will lead to something else in this default network of mind, wandering. And pretty soon you are wide awake, desperately wanting to be asleep and not knowing how to get there.
Okay. So, so. That’s, non-trivial to actually be friends, our own minds and our own lives in such a way that we can actually work in these paradoxical ways where striving won’t do it, striving won’t do it. That doesn’t mean that I’m advocating that all of us like abandoned ambition or don’t care about anything in meditation is not about becoming stupid. Not really even being nonjudgmental is not about becoming stupid. It’s saying, it sounds like, well, don’t judge anything. Maybe I’ll just walk off the stage and break my leg. You know, now I’m aware that the edge of the stage is here. And if I do fall off my, the stage and break my leg, it will have been a moment of mindlessness or out of touch if you will, but, or walk across the street without looking, because, you know, we have this sense that, you know, we’re not going to judge that, that truck coming at me.
You know what I’m saying There’s a big difference between being a non judge would be judgment and discernment. So mindfulness is all about discerning with clarity. What’s actually going on now, most of the time now, how many of you would say that you are engaged in some kind of way that doesn’t feel all that good A lot of the time in, multitasking, anybody find yourself multitasking, confess, you know, that when you’re on the phone, you’re actually sending an email to somebody else anybody ever do that, raise your hands. I want to see confession time. Okay. You know, and we actually do it a lot. Why part of it is that we’re S is, is, is really because we’re so stressed. We don’t have enough moments in, in our day to get it all done. So we start to like to discombobulate a little bit and juggle and cut corners.
And there are now wonderful studies that are showing that, that actually, impedes or reduces, or, any kind of, you know, objective measure of performance that doing two things at once, detracts from the quality of, in either of the one, doing five things at once, or being that scattered in your mind, you don’t even have to be doing anything, but when you’re at the mercy of this kind of mind wandering all the time and, and, and you’re trying to get things done, it’s very, very challenging, very challenging. So the question is, is there a way to actually live that will, will allow us to deal with what Zorba the Greek in cousin novel and movie called the full catastrophe of the human condition, the good, the bad, the ugly, the unwanted, the feared, the traumatic, the awful, and to be able to hold each moment in its fullness and allow our attention faculty in our awareness faculty to actually hold it in such a way that we can then inhabit the next moment with authenticity and maybe even respond appropriately to this vast range of demands that we’re faced with all the time.
Now, when I started the stress reduction clinic back in, at the university of Massachusetts, back in, 1979.
And, I did bring some slides, which I don’t know if I’ll show you, but I’ll just sort of take that moment by moment. Maybe I’ll show them to you. And maybe I won’t, because I’m, I’m trying to actually create more of an impression. I don’t want to leave you just with things in your head, just facts. Okay. Because you’ll, you’ll, you’ll lose them immediately. Okay. Because other facts will come in and, you know, whatever, if you’ve spent time and energy getting here and I’ve spent time and energy getting here, then what would make me feel most satisfied is if one, you had some kind of inkling why you came today, I’m sure you all do. It’s a mystery though. I’m sure. Hoping maybe to be entertained or maybe to connect on some deeper level, or maybe you practice mindfulness, or maybe you’ve been to an MBSR program, but if you peel back all those layers, there’s some really, really, really, really, really interesting reason why you’re here. And I’ll bet you don’t know what it is. I’m not joking because there are intelligences at work that are just deeper than the thought function. And the thought function is so smart that it sometimes outsmarts us completely. Have you noticed that And then it’s like, we’re stupid. We’re so smart. We’re stupid. It’s very hard to see that in yourself, but you can see it in other people just really easily.
Maybe you’ve noticed that. So I’m going to try to weave together a whole bunch of things that probably none of it’s going to make complete sense, but what I’m doing here is I’m trying to, in some sense, plant seeds, I’m trying to plant seeds in the fertile ground or garden of whatever it was that brought you here so that when you leave here, something has been touched. That will keep those seeds. That actually I’m not planting. They are already in, you keep them being watered, nurtured, protected, privileged in a certain way so that it nurtures in some profound sense, some aspect of you that wants to be.
As alive as you can be while you have the chance. We say to people coming to our stress reduction clinic, and they come with every conceivable kind of human ailment referred by every conceivable subspecialty and specialty in generalists, in medicine. And we say to them, and it’s an eight week long course designed to teach you how to take better care of yourself as a compliment to whatever the healthcare system is. I should call it a disease care system that can do what you can do for you. And, we say to them, from our perspective, as long as you’re breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong with you. No matter what’s wrong with you, no matter what’s wrong with you, and we see people, you would not want to be in their body or in their mind or in their life. And they probably wouldn’t want to be in yours either, but you probably wouldn’t want to hear that because after all, I mean, you’re the star of this movie, aren’t you so there’s more right with you than wrong with you. No matter what’s wrong with you. That’s a radical perspective.
And very, very important because, you know, I started the stress reduction clinic in 1979 in 1979, a surgeon General’s report came out called healthy people. And what it was saying is forecasting into the future, which is here. Now we’re in this future that no matter how much money America spends throwing money at health and healthcare, it will never be enough to have health because there’s a missing ingredient. And that’s the humans that the health care is supposed to care for. And that there’s not enough money on the planet to do all the various things they would have to be done to us when we don’t take care of ourselves. When we don’t know how to handle stress, when we do not know how to be in wise relationship with our lives and our lifestyle and our diet and exercise and our bodies and aging and everything else that if we leave that all to, you know, auto mechanics model of medicine, you drive your car around until it breaks down, then you get the carburetor replaced or the engine or whatever the tires but this is not a machine. I know a lot of people, even in biology, love to use machine analogies and even nano machine analogies are about the body. And to a degree, they’re correct, but there’s another piece of it. Like no one understands the construction of the machine. That’s you, let me give you one example. How many of you see that slide up there And what’s the color of the background Blue is everybody agreed that it’s blue. No one knows how you do that. No one knows how you go from the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation in the blue region. Okay. In the visible spectrum, no one knows how you go from this wavelength, which is colorless. It’s just energy to a subjective feeling of blue. And we also really don’t know where we have a consensus reality, the degrees that the blue that you’re seeing in the blue, that I’m singing the same blue, but it’s not always true. And it’s not true for color blind people and the blue-green color. Okay. So there’s a lot of kind of consensus agreement here, but the brain weighs approximately three pounds. Okay. And it’s all cells and cables that are part, you know, made up of cells, neurons, and then all these glial cells in there supporting the neurons and incredibly specialized. I mean, it’s really the most complex assembly of matter in the known by us universe, right inside your little old body. And no one knows how consciousness, how knowing how even thinking arises in these three pounds of what some neuroscientists call meat. It’s a little distasteful, but, you know, to just kind of make it graphic. So if you forget every once in a while walking around in, on the Dartmouth campus or in Hanover or wherever you happen to live, that you’re a miraculous being Well. Okay. Let’s just mind wandering, you know, one more default sort of, not really being aware of how amazing it is that you can see for instance, that you can hear that you can taste, how many of us eat food and we don’t bother to taste it. We just like to devour it, or we taste the idea of the food. Yeah. That was really good. Yeah. But you didn’t actually taste it. Have you ever had a mindless hug from somebody who is really trying to be friendly? Instead of impulse to be friendly, but not in one’s body. Okay. So of these things we take for granted, but we can actually begin a process of reminding and I put a little hyphen in there reminding ourselves, re bodying ourselves when now, because why does the only time you have, and coming back into a certain kind of vector or alignment with your entire life trajectory, tire, life trajectory, and it doesn’t matter how old you are when you begin this process, the native Americans actually measured your age from when you became, they started to measure age from when you became a grandparent before that it was like you were too busy to really be human.
Okay. And the Asian Indians, measure your age from when you start practicing yoga. So if you’re 75 years old and you’ve been into yoga for three months, you’re three months old. I like that. Isn’t that nice? What about a new beginning Every moment, a new beginning. That’s what mindfulness is about every moment fresh.
Now, this is not a philosophy. It’s not a good idea. It’s not a concept. It’s a way of being, it’s not a technique. It’s not a technique and it’s not a special state. Oh, I think I’ll try it over to the MBSR clinic. Meditate. Maybe you’re waiting for something else to happen, but nothing else, nothing else happens. This is it. You know, say goodbye. Maybe you’re hoping for something special to happen. Some special meditative state, some kind of vision, some kind of alignment of the, you know, spheres.
Some special bolt of lightning out of the blue to wake you up. This is a mistake. A miss hyphen takes on meditation on mindfulness on reality. Let’s just pretend okay. Why don’t we just sit for a moment Oh, you’re already setting. You don’t even need to shift your posture. Although I see some people getting ready. Okay. Now going to get into it. It’s going to be somewhat experiential. Thank God he could talk forever. But you see, you know, you don’t even have to shift your posture to be awake or to be aware, you could do it like this and really be aware.
And by the way, I can’t see my hands, but I know where they are. How do I know a sense called proprioception? Maybe you’ve heard of it. Maybe you haven’t, but there are a lot more than five senses. I just want to put that out. Okay. When we’re talking about miraculous beings or genius, it, Scott, lots of different dimensions to it. Men, if I ask you, how are you in the elevator And you say, fine, how do you know aside from the fact that you’re probably not fine, but you just don’t want to go into it in the elevator with somebody you don’t want to tell anyway, but when, you know, you’re sort of someone, a friend asks you, how are you And you say, fine. How do you know That’s another sense And, and, and, you know, very quickly, and you know, when you’re not too, what is that knowing called it’s not, well, let me think. Hmm. I don’t know how I am. I know, you know, instantly that sense is called interoception. There are ways that the organism has, you know, using the brain and the nervous system, which has lots of maps, by the way, the brain is loaded with maps of the body, loaded with maps and not just the somatosensory cortices, but the insula and the cerebellum and the, you know, the hippocampus, I mean, lots and lots of, and again, I stress, we’re beginning to understand something about what lights up when, when you meditate. And you know, when you do this and do that, when you go into depression, all sorts of wonderful, wonderful things happening, brain research and neuroscience nowadays, but still no one knows how it all comes together in you in this moment in a way that actually you don’t have to think about.
And even if there’s something going on, even if you’re in say pain from your lower back, and you’ve had it for a long time, or even if you have, you know, cancer at the moment, or you’re a cancer survivor or whatever it is, or you have heart issues of one kind or another, whatever it is, the sum total of this universe of between 10 and a hundred trillion cells, the whole body. Now we’re talking about is good enough to have gotten you here today. Hmm. That’s good enough for now. And the more energy you pour into it, the more that robustness, whatever it is sometimes called homeostasis. But it’s a very dynamic process that we call health as opposed to disease or disease. When we start to pour attention, energy in the form of attention, into what’s already right with us, it turns out that the body hesitates to the rail, the brain has its ear to the rail. The brain is part of the rail. The heart, every aspect of our being is one integrated whole. It’s not like different systems. The immune system talks to the nervous system. The nervous system talks right back and everybody else is listening in on the conversation and it’s all cells. And if you took your liver, if we all took our livers and put them out on the stage here, that would be an interesting exercise. And then we shuffled them around. And then you were all encouraged to just pick yours up on the way out. You wouldn’t know which was yours. You can look at all hundred trillion of these cells in your body, and isn’t your name Isn’t on any of them. It’s like, Oh, here’s my liver. Here’s my gallbladder. This is the punctuation from the cell phones is actually really, if that it was a cell phone, that’s really interesting. But do you hear what I’m saying I mean, even the question of who we are, when you start to actually ask it with tremendous authenticity, it might not be so facile to just say your name or even describe what you do or even send in your CV. If you’ve ever hired people, you know, the CV is not the person you hire the CV a lot of the time.
Because he can’t work with the person. A lot of the time, what you want is congruence. You want integration. So when we take our seats, so to speak, we’re actually engaging in a recognition of how integrated we already are. We don’t need to, Oh, I’m such a Brack. I got to get integrated. No, from this perspective, you’re already as integrated as you can to be in this moment. Is it enough? Is good enough. So let’s actually take a moment. Dave even brought another proper, brought some bells. We don’t need the bells, but I’ll ring them. And when I ring them, why don’t and why not Just for fun, you don’t have to shift your posture, but just for fun, why don’t you shift your posture and sit in a posture that for now embodies dignity, whatever that means for you. Look, the entire room is moving.
Not that dignified, I guess. Alright, but actually it doesn’t matter. The posture is secondary. What’s most important is the inner orientation. The willingness to open to the present moment to put out the welcome mat and to get, and to let the idea that, Oh, now we’re going to do something special drop. Because as soon as you sort of plant that seed, now we’re going to do something special and we’re going to experience something special. Then you’ll be on the lookout for something special, but you see nothing special. There’s a wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker that I actually mentioned, in, long time ago. And wherever you go there you are with two Zen monks. You know, one, obviously old elder, the other young and the young ones looking up quizzically at the older one. And, and the caption underneath the older one’s speaking, saying nothing happens next. This is it. I just said that to you earlier. But this is, it is really important. Otherwise you could spend 20 or 30 years or more and people do this meditating trying to get someplace else, trying to have some special experiences. That’s what it’s all about. Now I’m enlightened. The problem is you’re already enlightened, but the personal pronoun that wants to grab it and say, I’m enlightened. It’s the personal pronouns. That’s the problem. Not the enlightenment. Your eyes are already enlightened. Your ears are already enlightened. Your belly is already enlightened. Your feet actually do what they’re supposed to do for the most part. Your brain is actually doing what it’s supposed to do. Your liver is doing what it’s supposed to do. Very famous scientist and physician named Lewis Thomas once said, he’d rather be at the controls of a seven 47, trying to land with no pilot training whatsoever. Then at the controls of his own liver for 30 seconds. So you don’t need to find something special. This is good enough. Okay. So let’s actually sit for a moment if you’re sitting or stand. If you’re standing in a posture that for you at this moment, embodies wakefulness and dignity. You don’t even have to close your eyes, but you can, if you like, or let them fall unfocused, on the chair in front of you or whatever, I ring the bells seeing, if you can just follow the sound of the bells into the space of the air and allowing the space of the air to be coextensive with the space you could call it of awareness. So that there’s simply awareness hearing. What’s here to be heard. The sound of the bells are past, and now there’s just sound whatever’s arising. And you could feature hearing as a way of anchoring our attention. You can focus on some object like or field of objects, like hearing and just rest in being aware of sounds and the stillness and the silence in between inside and underneath any and all sounds including, of course my voice, alternatively, because there’s more than one thing going on. There’s not just hearing going on. There’s also seeing and smelling and you know, all the sensors are actually operating, seeing if you can actually, instead of hearing feature for now, feeling a sense of the breath, moving in and out of your body, wherever it’s most vivid in the body, just allowing awareness to inhabit the whole of the body and, be most vivid in the region where the breath sensations are arising and passing away in breath.
And seeing if you can ride on the waves of the breath with full awareness moment by moment, by moment and noticing any time the mind goes off and gets involved in anything else, including judging how stupid this is, we came for a talk and all of a certain way of doing this stupid exercise or whatever is flitting through the mind at the moment, just making it so spacious that you can see whatever’s unfolding here. My guidance as I’m speaking, and at the same time ride on the wave of the breath coming in and the breath going out with full awareness and the kind of interest that kind of in some sense, affectionate attention. Even if the breath isn’t all that interesting to you or all that boring or, or your mind says, okay, I get that concept. What else? Staying with the breath and then playing with the possibility of expanding the field of awareness around the breath, wherever you’re experiencing it most in the body, until it includes a sense of the body as a whole sitting here, we’re standing here breathing and noticing you can do that. Just easy as pie. It’s not really doing, but when I say it, you can easily, the awareness can hold the whole body to one degree or another and whatever degree you can hold it, that’s fine. It’s not like, Oh, if I practiced, I’d get better at this. That’s just the thought, nevermind, just letting the thoughts come and go and staying with the awareness of the body as a whole sitting and breathing.
And if possible, remembering that this isn’t some simple little exercise that we’re doing in the middle of a talk, that this is your life unfolding in this very moment, and this breath is important to you. You wouldn’t want to do without it. So with that kind of quality of attending that it’s not, it’s not, really it’s like tuning a guitar string, you know, two loose notes to tone too tight. No two-tone, but if you can just bring the lightest of touches, the lightest of touches of awareness to the sense of the body as a whole breathing as if it mattered. And of course it does because it’s your body in this moment is your life and the breath is vital. And then one more before we end, noticing any thoughts that may be moving through your mind and noticing how easy it is to self destruct that the mind does wander and it wanders away from the breath. If we did this for any period of time, sooner or later, your mind would be somewhere else, probably not even in the room, maybe not even in the present moment, you’d be having dinner in Paris or Bangkok or, or in an argument three years ago in the shower with yourself.
So when you notice the mind has self distraction, no problem, no judging just, or if you judge it, don’t judge the judging and just see if you can come back to this moment in awareness, featuring whatever object of attention you care to. It could be anything that’s in the field of awareness, but the last little pieces to it just underscore that none of this is about the sound of the bells. None of this is about the feeling of the breath and the body. None of this is about the thoughts moving through the mind. Those are all important and they’re secondary. But what it’s really about is the awareness that knows the sound when it comes to the years, that knows. And I mean, non-conceptual, they knows, not just conceptually knows the feeling of the breath, moving in the body, non conceptually inhabits the body as a whole in awareness, sitting in breathing non conceptually knows when the mind self distracts or when we get into an emotional Whirlpool or turbulence of some kind or another. And the awareness can just like, allow it to just be here, feature it, center stage, let it come, let it go. And meanwhile, we just continue to rest to rest in awareness outside of time because the present moment is time, time less in some profound way. Awareness and silence and stillness are all different ways of saying the same thing of pointing to something that’s already yours, that you don’t have to get, but has tremendous healing, potential, tremendous potential for learning, for seeing things in new ways for that rotation in consciousness that I was speaking of, everything’s the same only, nothing’s the same way because you showed up in your fullness. So learning and out of that learning, growing, and none of that growing healing, which in my vocabulary, the way I define healing is coming to terms with things as they are coming to terms with things as they are very different from curing. There are very few cures in medicine, but the opportunity for healing, as long as there’s breath, it’s in some sense already here, or we need to see it, feel it, live it. And it’s not about denying pain and suffering. It’s about some sense befriending, even that. So resting for a final few moments and stillness in silence, full in wakefulness in full awareness outside of time, as if you had nothing to do no place to go, nothing to do and nothing to attain because you were already whole meaning by the way of the words, health and healing, and even the word Holy HOLY. And by the same token, the word medicine and the word meditation, they grow out of the same tree, same root Indo-European root medicine and meditation are joined at the hip.
It was not so radical to actually bring them together in mainstream clinical care. In fact, it’s essential for caring, so silent weight from us attending to what is.
So now the real meditation practice never stopped. Just because some bells got wrong, just because we’re going to shift gears a little bit. The real meditation practice is how you’re living your life from moment to moment. It’s not how good you are sitting without moving or what great yoga poses you do because yoga is itself. A meditation, a beautiful form of meditation that we use enormously and to good purpose in MBSR mindfulness-based stress reduction. I’d like to just say a few things about stress and medicine, and then open it up to and give you a little bit more of an expansive, of how we work. But I wanted you to have at least this taste of it. And I want to share a couple of poems with you, and it’s not like all of a sudden I’ve gotten a little weird on I’m going a little weird on you. how many of you, when you hear the word poetry or poems, you go AI, Oh, no, not a bomb. it’s like, I don’t understand those things. That’s not uncommon. but, but, one of my colleagues, John Teasdale, with whom I wrote that book, the mindful way through depression, who is like one of the world’s great cognitive scientists is coming out with a several papers in which she’s arguing that, that the root cause of suffering and human beings is not knowing how to deal with our emotions because we don’t know how to inhabit and then shift our relationship to what he calls implication or meaning implicational meaning is what moves say in poetry. Okay. It’s different from the propositional meaning, which is just the kind of bare facts. Okay. So if I recite a poem for you, this is a poem by Antonio Machado. Who’s a great Spanish poet of the turn of the 19th to 20th century and won the Nobel prize. It’s very short, but see if you can feel it. The wind one brilliant day called to my soul with an odor of Jasmine, the wind one brilliant day called to my soul with an odor of Jasmine in exchange for the odor of my Jasmine. I would like the odor of your roses.
I have no roses. All the flowers in my garden are dead. Can you feel that I have, how many times have we had that feeling or a similar feeling I have no roses. There’s nothing beautiful about me. All the flowers in my garden are dead. Well then I’ll take the withered petals and the yellow leaves and the, and the waters in the fountain and the wind left. And I wept, and I said to myself, what have you done to the garden that was entrusted to you Can you feel that this is a poem about great sadness Could easily go into depression I had actually just because of Nobel Laureate doesn’t mean, you know, I like to actually change the last line.
And I would suggest that for our purposes, rather than what you have done to the garden that was entrusted to you, which is a kind of blaming wouldn’t you say I mean, it was like, stick the knife in and then, Oh, what Right. As long as I’m feeling down, why not just go right over the edge And a lot of cultures actually perpetuate that kind of perspective, but instead, why don’t we say, what are we doing with the gardens that are entrusted to us Gardens plural. Okay. Because right now we have a lot of gardens and trust in us. I would say the closest of, you know, to us is I would say the garden of the body, you know, better than an American express credit card. You can’t leave home without it, but a lot of the time we’re not even in the body. And a lot of the time, our feelings about the body are so negative that like the less said, the better just don’t bother me about the body. And I don’t even want to know it exists. If it doesn’t, it’s not driving me crazy. I feel lucky. And a hint and a William James Joyce is famous for starting out a short story in Dubliners with the following sentence. This is an approximation, but it’s because Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.
And if you start to pay attention in the way that I’m suggesting in the present moment, you will discover that, that’s your address as well. A lot of the time we’re in our heads lost in thought someplace else, not in the body that has biological consequences, by the way, everything I’ve said tonight, when I started the stress reduction clinic, 1979, it was like, there was almost no science of the effects of stress and the biology of stress on the, on the body and on the mind and on the brain and on the heart. Now, the data is just overwhelming, including as I’ll show you in a minute, aging, that it’s turning out that, you know, stress uses this. They used to say stress is not real, a real risk factor for morbidity or mortality because, you know, it’s not like, you know, a high fat diet. It’s not like cigarette smoking. It’s not like hypertension, high blood pressure, but now it turns out is incontrovertible evidence that stress actually reduces increases the rate of death, gradation of the, the ends of all of our chromosomes, which are called telomeres. You’re going to hear a lot more about that word. The woman, Liz Blackburn, I do CSF who actually discovered, Tullamore race, which is the enzyme that builds them back up, won the Nobel prize in 2008. Okay. And her lab is studying the effects of mindfulness on telomeres and telomerase. And the evidence is moving in.
The direction of meditation can actually be in Hanse telomerase. And, and not just that, it’s, it’s more than meditation or mindfulness. It’s your attitude towards what’s happening. It’s not like these people aren’t under a huge amount of stress, but it’s never the stress. It’s how you choose to be in relationship to it. And if you have really exhausted your resources, sources for handling stress, then of course, yeah, all bets are off. But if you know how to draw resources to yourself, then, then even under very, very high levels of stress, you can dance with the energy.
Sometimes it’s unbelievably painful, but nevertheless you’re much bigger even than the pain and suffering and liberate yourself from that. And guess what The teal telomeres get longer. So every aspect of our biology is what’s now called plastic. And, that’s a new terminology. It’s not like, you know, Dustin Hoffman in the graduation. This is for the older in the room, But it means that our biology is miraculous in another way. It’s constantly reorganizing itself. It’s not just, it’s all downhill from here. Yes, there is aging. Yes, we are all going to die unless somebody makes a very important discovery very quickly. But you know, the question is not, is there life after death or is there some way to escape death, but actually, can we live while we have a chance? Is there life before death?
Yes. That’s the most interesting question and right up to the moment of that and a lot of time, I think that really, when we talk about fear of death, we’re really more afraid of life than we are of death. And, there are two chapters. I was going to say, actually tell you some stories, but I don’t think I will. About my early days at MIT, one of which was how I got into meditation. I got into meditation at the Massachusetts Institute of technology as a graduate student in molecular biology with a Nobel Laureate, believe it or not go figure, not in some monastery in Asia because the Zen master came and gave a talk actually at MIT. And I was one of five people in all of them. I did that and went to the top. And took the head off.
It took the top of my head at the age of 20. And it was like, Oh, oh my God, there’s an entirely different way of knowing why didn’t they tell us this in kindergarten, an entirely different way of knowing and no less beautiful, no less profound, no less transformative than thought. Just different. And this should be part of the repertoire, so to speak.
And part of the science and investigation, the other thing was the story of my thesis defense, because I wrote, you know, a thesis on some arcane topic and molecular biology. And I had, you know, it’s like all these MIT, Nobel Laureate types, real hot shot, molecular biologists, and a few from Harvard who came over because you always have to have someone from another institution. And, and, and, my thesis, you know, it was an existential challenge for me. I don’t know how many of you are graduate students here and it’s anybody who graduates. And it’s hard, hard to be a graduate student because nobody cares. And most of the time you don’t either, but it’s, it could be really humiliating. And like, you know, and then of course, if you’re a scientist, science is 99% failure, which doesn’t do that much for, you know, your self-esteem so to speak. And then you’re looking for that 1%. And so I finally got my thesis together and I wrote in the front page on the page by itself, you know, they let you have a little dedication, a little sayings or something like that. I wrote he who dies before he dies, does not die when he dies.
I don’t even know where I got it. You know, it’s like it was some Greek, very old Greek. so I put that line in the first, you know, page by itself before you get into the thesis and stuff. So I go into the, the, the, the, a room with all these scientists who are going to decide whether I get my doctorate or not after what’s called, I don’t, I don’t know, even I forgot what they even call it, but a thesis review where, you know, defense, defense, right. Defense, it’s a war term they’re going to attack and I’m going to defend. And if I do well enough then, so I go in there and, you know, I know them all because it’s just a small community and everybody sort of likes each other. And, but I was of course terrified. I mean, you know, it was like a lot hangs in the balance. And, so somebody says, what’s this, he who dies before he dies, does not die when he dies. This is the first question on my thesis. So I’ve worked five years on this research and they want to know he would die before he dies. And of course they were pushing 50, you know, I was 27 or something like that. They were in their fifties. And like, thinking ahead. That obviously piqued some interest. You die before you die. You don’t die when you die. I want that.
So, I said, do you really want to know And they all said, yeah. So I said, well, it might take some time. We’ve got time. So actually, I would say half of my thesis defense was actually unpacking what mindfulness is about to these guys. This was in 1971, by the way. And a, and I wrote it up, it’s a chapter called dying before you die, because the first time before you die was, was, the other story that I told about, you know, first encountering meditation at MIT. So, that’s just to say that, I didn’t want to continue a career in molecular biology. I wanted to bring my training as a scientist together with my training in meditation, because it seemed like, well, everybody’s doing the science, but nobody’s paying attention to the balance between thought and this other function of our brains and nervous system that no one’s paying attention to called the awareness that is patently, obviously bigger than thought, because whatever thought you have or whatever emotion you have, you could embrace it in awareness and not have to do anything with it, but it would change by virtue of simply holding it in awareness.
If you were patient enough to do it, especially if it didn’t feel good. And so that’s what we teach now. And it’s come into the mainstream of medicine, in ways that are really astonishing. The national institutes of health is funding hundreds of studies on mindfulness to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars. And the idea that that would have been the case in 1979. I like to say more improbable than that. The big bang would just all of a sudden stop and implode back on itself, and yet it’s happening. And so mindfulness is now in the mainstream of medicine and then the last, so I’ll just show you some pictures before we go to questions. Okay. Would that be alright with you? Are you still awake? Good, because you don’t ever have to stop even when you go to sleep. I mean, you know that it’s being present, that’s all being fully present.
Okay. Is anybody good at this No. Okay. So don’t make like, Oh, I’m no good at this. Nobody’s any good at it. But all you need to do is be a little bit better than an automatic pilot and your life will rotate. I mean, it will be very, very different and every time anger comes up, the default mode comes up, whether it’s anger or anything else, tech, not Han lights to say, you know, the reasons we have to practice mindfulness, the reason we have to cultivate it intentionally is that we’re busy cultivating the opposite all day long, cultivating anger, cultivating jealousy, cultivating, you know, sort of a low self-esteem cultivating, you know, all sorts of negativity in the world, emotional domain or in the thought domain. And the people who are doing the telomere research thing are saying that their research is showing that the real stress comes from thinking.
So this is a biological and molecular biological consequence that accelerates aging and accelerates a lot of heart disease. I mean, it’s, you know, you can’t interview people who die of sudden cardiac death, but if you could you find out like, probably it was a thought that did it. The wrong thought, the wrong time that I’m not, I’m actually not joking. I mean, it’s, it’s so serious that we need to laugh. And, and I want to say that about meditation too. I may have seemed like, I’m not taking this stuff seriously. This stuff is so serious that it’s too serious to take too seriously. And I’m serious.
So this is, if any of you were alive back then, this is the cover of a time magazine back in 1983, four years after I’d started the stress reduction clinic. And it’s just like, you know, I look back on that time and I say, stress, what stress compared to now I mean, there was no internet, there was no email. There was no instant messaging there wasn’t. I mean, you know, there were no computers except mainframes. I used to say in the early eighties that I could get more. Once I had my first PC, you know, which was so gigantic that I could get more work done in a month and I could get done. I could get more work done in a day than I used to be able to get done in a month. Well, that was in the mid eighties. Now. It’s like, I can get more work done in a day than I could get done in a year.
That’s not so good. You know, we’re always on, you know, we’re always on, not so good. we’re not computer surfers where human beings are. So here is the evidence from Liz Blackburn’s lab and Alyssa EPO, who is the mindfulness researcher in her lab proceedings, the national Academy of sciences showing telomere length as a function of years of chronicity, of caregiving of children. This is parents with children with severe medical and disabilities. Okay. So it’s like an unavoidable stress. You can’t just walk out on your chest. I don’t stress. Sorry, goodbye children. No, you can’t do that. But look at this also in that study, this is a perceived scale, a perceived stress scale. It’s the perception of stress that makes the difference. If you are just dealing with it, because it’s the way it is, then you can be more transparent to the stress.
Your telomeres are longer. If you take everything personally, your telomeres degrade. So if you want one take-home message from this, this turns out to be harder to enact than it is to, to say, don’t take things personally, when they’re not personal, then you might ask, well, when are they not personal That’s a good question to keep asking yourself, it may be the never personal. It may be that the you, that you think you are is not the real you, that you are much bigger. And now the neuroscience is actually showing that you want to be your narrative self fine. Then you’re using certain regions of the brain. You want to be your moment by moment, experiential self grounded in the body. You use lateral networks in the brain, a whole different brain profile. So you choose one that is related more to happiness, the left activation in the prefrontal cortex. If you put monks in the scanners and I’ll show you some pictures of that, you know, they have tremendous activation in the left prefrontal cortex in particular regions that have to do with approach and that have to do with emotional balance. And when we train people in MBSR, they shift from right activation to left activation in eight weeks, their brains actually change structure in eight weeks, work out of Sarah Salazar’s lab, a German postdoctoral fellow who’s training with us in MBSR. And who’s, our has been our student Britta soul for years from Germany, young neuroscientists, as demonstrated that, major regions of the brain change with eight weeks of mindfulness training in MBSR, including the hippocampus, including, the cerebellum, including, the posterior cingulate cortex, all of these are involved in, making meaning in, in, in self-regulation in, perception, decoding, memory and learning, not bad for eight weeks of what looks a lot. If you were looking in from the outside, our patients look a lot like nothing. They do nothing lying down. Then they do nothing sitting. Then they do nothing walking, like this, like the night of the living dead, you know, really slow meditative walking. They’re doing nothing and healthcare is paying for it. Amazing. How did they pull that off And it turns out the brains are changing, not just in terms of activity, in terms of structure, significant thickening in those regions. I mentioned significant thinning in the amygdala, which is the emotional reaction reactivity center, the threat center that triggers fires off all the time. Whenever we feel threatened or, you know, a cost that in one way or another. So, God, I got a whole talk here that I’m not going to give, how many of you see a triangle Raise your hands. If you see a triangle in this picture, okay. Now keep your hands up there. Okay. Now look around so that, you know, you’re not alone. If you see a triangle in that picture. And it’s interesting because there’s no triangle in that picture, a triangle is defined by three a three-sided figure. And what your mind does is it puts in the sides. If we shifted that little Pac-Man the tiniest little bit, so the mind can actually see things that are not there. The brain actually does that. It’s so good at that. If I had time, I would show you this movie, which, how many of you have seen this image Yeah. You can’t use it anymore, but I’ll just play it anyway. Oops.
I Don’t want to do that. Let me see. Okay.
Anyway, it’s a movie and they’re passing around basketballs and you asked the group. Yes. The room to sort of count the number of times that people in the white shirts pass the basketballs. And, I could get it to work, but it would take too long. So, and in the middle of it, I’ll try one more time in the middle of it. Cause it’s, you know, oh no. Okay.
So you’re counting the number of times that people in the white shirts are passing the basketballs, one basketball per each, the whites and the blacks, and then in the middle, this gorilla comes out and it goes off to the other side. But when you ask people well, to count the number of times, the people in the waitress have the basketball. They don’t actually see the gorilla if we did it. And none of you had seen it, 95% of people would have counted. The number of times the people, the, usually get a plus on distribution, so you can’t even count correctly, but then you don’t see the gorilla. Why? Because the mind has told itself the brain has told itself a white shirt. So what’s important is to tune out everything. That’s not white. Well, the brain, it turns out is fantastic. I just showed you, it sees things that aren’t there and it doesn’t see things that are, they’re not very reliable.
Now, does that apply to you? I’ll leave that for you to decide, just ask your spouse or your mother or your father, because that is part of the default mode. We S we, we are out of touch seriously, out of touch with a lot of different elements of this. And this is just a quote from William James, that, that basically saying if we could learn how to bring the mind back when it was wandering, that would be a good thing. It turns out the Buddhist had been doing that for thousands of years. So I’m going to stop actually at this point and take a few questions. We have some time for questions and then, and then we’ll stop for the evening. obviously you could see that, I’ve just gotten started. I hope you’ve just gotten started. I’m not joking because this doesn’t stop.
It’s called your life. And it’s all really more than magnificent. And if you can get into that implicational, meaning of the poems, the poetry, then there’s the potential to actually live your life as if it really mattered moment by moment. And it turns out that that’s recruiting and morphing brain pathways that when you’re depressed and you’re into depressive rumination, it’s not about shutting that stuff off that kind of toxic thoughts, dream, but actually learning how to hold it differently. And then you don’t take it personally. And then you actually don’t fall into depression. You don’t relapse into depression and I’m talking about a major depressive disorder. And so, and that affects your telomeres. And that affects actual gene expression in your body. Up-regulating and down-regulating hundreds of genes that have to do with cancer and that have to do with inflammatory responses. So if your whole body is really plastic and the more you tune the mind and the body together, the more you participate in your own health and wellbeing.
I like to call the medicine of the future, where the medicine to the present is actually participatory medicine. That’s what, because there’s not enough money to fund, to fund medicine. If we just use the auto mechanics model. So we need to all participate. And isn’t it interesting that in order to participate, the greatest evidence is suggesting we need to go back to ancient ancient practices from very, very old traditions that are mostly not from this side of the planet, but that it turns out have deep, deep connections with our culture and with our nervous system and with our love. So, I’ll leave it at that. I want to thank you for your attention. And I mean, I’m open to having a few questions. Thank you.
Thank you for your attention. And, it’s six o’clock.
Does it go? We understand it’s six o’clock.
There is a book signing following outside the auditorium after the question and answer period, just so, and, so why don’t we, okay, so you’ve got it. Why don’t you line up with that microphone behind the guy who has it, and we’ve got another one over here. So go ahead. Are you, you’re not actually asking a question. You’re just offering them, we’ll give it to her.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate those tacos. Fascinating. one question I had was actually from your biography that was provided, which was just talking about you and your wife’s interest in supporting initiatives that further mindfulness in K through 12 education. Yes. I wondered if you could just provide some examples of what exactly that can look like, in public education and beyond.
Okay. thank you for that question. I alluded to it, but obviously, you know, the subject of mindfulness is so vast and to do it in a way that isn’t just throwing facts, I to a, would take actually multiple occasions, or you can remember what we touched on today and then find out more for yourself, which is really the best part. But, in the book that my wife and I Myla and I wrote together on mindful parenting, which is a whole other story. There’s a chapter in there about, fifth, fourth and fifth grade teacher from a Utah, public school who herself experienced mindfulness and MBSR for medical reasons, health reasons, and then brought it into her classroom against all of my advice in Mormon, Utah, and it transformed the entire school. So you could start there. You can also Google mindfulness and education.
You’ll find out. There are groups of teachers in lots of different places that are doing this. And if you want to take a trip up, 89 to South Burlington, Vermont, I was just there a couple of weeks ago, and they are doing amazing things in that school system, the superintendent, and one of the principals actually came to a day-long mindfulness retreat that I did for, the teachers. And there are hundreds of teachers bringing mindfulness into their curriculum at every age. So there’s a lot to be said about it. I think it’s one of the best things to happen in modern education. And it’s really inspiring the teachers because, nowadays it’s so challenging and there’s so much stress in that profession. And so many of the kids come and they’re not ready to learn. So they need to learn how to tune the instrument before you play it, so to speak. And, and this is a way to actually, allow that to happen. And in the way that I’ve been in classrooms like this in Oakland and in Manhattan, New York city, public schools, unbelievable, I mean, and one teacher in South Burlington called it pin drop moment. You could hear a pin drop in these classes where a lot of the kids are ordinary all over the place, but they have learned how to actually drop in. It’s valuable for attention deficit disorder, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder. And it’s also valuable for the teachers.
Thank you.
Hello. I was just wondering what your general advice would be when we’re China, you know, live it moment by moment, but we’re faced with moments where we have to make decisions. And I know we have to make like dozens of decisions everyday. And sometimes there are big decisions regarding our futures or personal relationships. And my friends are always telling me like, don’t overthink it, but I mean, don’t overthink it. Yeah. But, I know that’s really difficult. So that’s a great question.
Now you want an answer. Yeah. I realized that’s the reason why I decided to come.
Oh, wonderful. Wonderful. you’re probably gonna overthink it, but you can hold that in awareness, the overthinking and the awareness will actually take care of you. A lot of times, let’s say if it’s relationships, you mentioned relationships, is that right And it’s very complicated. And, you know, mindfulness is all about relationships. We start with the body. What’s my relationship with my body? It’s pretty weird even to say, I have a relationship with my body. Who’s talking,
Oh, you’re not your body. but you have a body. Oh yeah. So there’s something even there that we don’t know a lot more than we let on. Okay. Then you have a relationship with your mind and your heart in all Asian languages, as you may know the word for mind and word for heart as the same word. So when you hear the word mindfulness, if you’re not hearing heartfulness, you’re not hearing, you’re not really understanding it. It’s got an, it’s got this tenor of spaciousness of heart. Okay. So, and, and inside of that, a certain kind of trust and trust in what, how about your own beauty Okay. So when you start to know yourself in that kind of non-conceptual way, not with thinking, but through embodied awareness of sensation and of, you know, hearing and smelling and tasting, and of your thoughts that are overthinking who to be in relationship with, or who to break off a relationship with or whatever it is.
And you’re not judging that whole thing, your deeper intuition and wisdom is trustworthy. And when it gets into trouble, that’s trustworthy too, because you see, Oh, I see I made this kind of decision. I over-thought it to this degree. And I wound up whammo, you know, in some place I don’t want to be, that’s important information. That’s useful data. Then you’ll learn from that. And the next time, if you’re really, really, really, really mindful, you won’t repeat the same pattern, but mostly what we do is repeat the same old pattern over and over and over again, because we’re attracted to just those people who are not so healthy for us. If you’ve read the power of now at which I recommend you read for these kinds of things, he talks about a kind of construct called the pain body. So a lot of falling in love is like, if you start to look at it as like my pain body, what’s, what’s all knotted up and painful and hurt in me, recognizes what’s all knotted up and painful and hurting you and those pain bodies fall in love.
Meanwhile, not a good idea because it’s what you call a dysfunctional relationship from this doc, you know but the awareness can see that and it can save you. I have a friend at MIT, one of the graduate students with me in my lab. And he said, and he decided to get married at one point. And I did the only time I’ve ever done this, I gave somebody advice about who they wanted to marry. And I said, don’t do it. I was young and arrogant. So I said, don’t do it. He got, he did it. Anyway, of course, he got married three years later, they got divorced. And he said to me later, he said, you know, how come it took you three seconds to see what it took me three years to see And I say, well, that’s because, you know, I wasn’t in it to see it when you’re in it. That requires a whole different rotation in consciousness, but it is trustworthy. So there’s no answer to your question, it’s life unfolding. And whether it’s your relationship to another person or with choosing courses or a career path or anything like that, trust your love. And as, what’s his name, Joseph Campbell said, and, and you know, this is a really good piece of advice. Follow your bliss, follow your bliss. And it will teach you everything you need to know, including how sometimes following your bliss needs to be modulated a little bit.
I hope that helps me cause I don’t have anything else to say. Thank you.
People are saying that life is more complicated and more stressful now. And I will believe it. I don’t have anything to measure it against, but, and also the same with war, people go to war and they come back having experienced things that they might not have lived through. And, there are scientists working on PTSD and, and trying to, help people heal from those things that they might not have lived through. And so sometimes I think about how we’re like, if the world is becoming more stressful or complicated and our answer is change yourself, change your relationship with that stress. It seems, I’m not sure. It seems, I don’t know how to say it, but yeah. That’s the other half of my talk.
Thank you for bringing that up. So let me just very quickly say this. Isn’t about changing yourself. It’s about recognizing it’s exactly the opposite of changing yourself. It’s recognizing the beauty in yourself already. No change necessary. Now imagine if the Congress actually were mindful.
Okay.
Actually, there is a Congressman in the Congress now, Tim Ryan from the 17th district in Ohio, who is doing, he can to bring mindfulness into the mainstream in political and neck and economic circles. Okay. you’ll see his name around from time to time, fifth term Congressman, but the much larger thing. And I wrote a hundred pages about mindful politics and coming to our senses, this is not about forgetting about social change or transformation, but in order to really have profound social change, that’s in alignment with humanity and with kindness, we have to look at our own minds because even the social change agents are driven by greed, hatred and delusion, just like all the rest of us. Okay. So until we learn how to sort of at least recognize the toxic or the sort of acquisitive aggressive, violent aspects in yourself, then we can do all.
We want to transform the institutions and even the laws, but, human beings being what they are, what we need to do is transform the species. Or I wouldn’t say transform the species. I would say, have the species come into its own because we call ourselves homosapien sapiens in Latin superiors, the verb to taste or to know KNOW. So homosapien savings is a species that knows and knows that it knows in other words, awareness yes. And Mehta awareness, awareness of awareness. Now, if we really, that would be wisdom if we actually were wise, then we would see what war does to societies. We would understand that, that we, you know, with the kind of precocity and weapons and firepower and everything, we need to find other ways of resolving human conflict, but where’s that gonna come from It’s going to come out of the same human heart and the same human mind and, and, of corporations, which after all mean bodies, okay. The Corpus or the body politic, and that’s made up of human beings. So we do need to sort of tune the instrument on lots of different levels, including the law and jurisprudence in order to actually privilege awareness over, a kind of dualistic adversarial condition where it’s really, winners and losers and a huge amount of harm and social injustice gets done. And then we learn to sort of tolerate it thinking, well, a hundred years from now, it’ll be better. So this is not going to happen overnight. I have a very long horizon. Like I like to say one Zen master put it this way, never forget the thousand year view. I actually haven’t pretty much in the thousand year view. Then if it happens in a hundred so much the better even where we would cite nuclear power plants, if we were building nuclear power plants in Northern Japan, for instance, where would you cite them? Knowing the geology, the Pacific rim in Northern Japan Oh, maybe not too close to the water. I don’t know. You need an awful lot of mindfulness to actually, you know, come up with something like that.
So it has an infinite number of implications. And I apologize for actually not having spent more time on this talk, going there. It’s, it is all in coming to our senses and, and there’s an awful lot happening in the world nowadays around that. So we’ll take one more and then we’ll stop. So, or two more, if two people are standing up, I’ll take, are you standing up for a question? You are the, just the microphone holder. Do you want to sing or something or just like you got, this is your moment. I mean, American idols, I can make it free.
This’ll be something you want to sing. So I’m hoping I’m a resident at the hospital, here. And, I know you’re getting involved with trying to bring this into, you know, more mainstream medicine and I’m hoping it’s not going to be like a hundred.
Oh no, no, it’s already, it’s already in mainstream medicine.
Although the thing, well, do I want it to ask you about it? Is that right So I, I mean, it’s definitely not encouraged for us to take care of ourselves and the amount of stress and appointments and phone calls. And now EDH at our new computer system. And I worried about that. And 30 minutes, you know, I’m in psychiatry in 30 minutes to like, you know, adjust meds. And also the person wants to talk to me and all of that. And, you know, it completely stresses me out, but I can only imagine, and I have pretty great attendings and good, you know, a great faculty. But if I were to say, you know what, I’m going to go to Shambala, to meditate. Cause I, I do meditation in Shambala and I’ve read a lot on Bala mountain center and well, there’s one in white river junction, there’s one. but I’ve, you know, taken courses in like level one and level two. And, and, but if I were to say that, like, you know what, I’m going to go for lunch and we’re not really doing anything. I’m going to go meditate for an hour. And then I’m going to be so much more there for my patients. it probably even with these kinds of, you know, good mentors, it’s not going to fly. And I’m, I, I advise my patients on these things, but still the medical professionals are supposed to be these super human people that I’m not, you know, in a, in a talk like this, I can, in some sense, only point to how deeply the penetration has gone. However, what you’re saying is not deep enough by any stretch of the imagination. And it takes a long, long time to shift a culture that has its own. Self-interest for a long time. So why it’s like, I’m sure it takes a long time for these people to get to your clinic because I know the chronic pain patients we’re seeing, we’re not advising like any of the records, you know, what would well, yeah, but you could set up an MBSR. I mean maybe there isn’t, is there an MBSR clinic well, that’s not that radical to do. Are you in psychiatry Yes. Yeah. Well, it’s not that radical to do. Maybe medicine should do it. If psychiatry has an aversion to the mind, body connection, I even know gastroenterologists who are trained, who are working with, veterans, who have PTSD and pulmonologists. And you know, I mean, this is, this goes, transcends specialty.
There are some, and you would hope psychiatry would be the most open to it. I don’t know if I would hope. If you hope for it, then make it happen. You see psychiatry, the future. Where, where does it lie, well, where does it lie I’m being serious with you now.
Well, I think in, you know, in neurosciences and, I’m looking for something much simpler, it lies with you, Oh, it lies with that impulse to have come to this talk. It lies with that impulse to go to the Shambala center and clear your mind, and then be more present. If you want the medicine and the future to be different, or the psychiatry, the future to be different, don’t look around for someone else to do it. Right You do it. When will you be good enough? Never because part of your mind will tell you, you don’t have enough power. You don’t have enough influence. You don’t have enough. This, you got plenty as a medical resident, as a psychiatry resident, you got plenty. And if people don’t want to do it, that’s too bad, but you can take the initiative and I’m not joking. I mean, we’re really talking about a rotation in consciousness here, and the institutions change when people are willing to actually own how you take it. And you’ve had enough medical training to actually be able to make cogent arguments that a lot of the way the healthcare system is set up. I’m guessing just from what you said is toxic to the people that you’re most trying to help. What kind of a setup is that Even if you have better medical records, oh, okay. This’ll be the last one then.
No, there’s somebody really ahead of me. I just wanted to let people know that we do have upper Valley mindfulness associates. we’re psychotherapists and we are in our sixth year of offering mindfulness based cognitive therapy. Wonderful. Yeah.
The thing I didn’t really get to talk about too much mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, but yeah, I mean, there are, I’m sure there are resources in this area. Lots of them like the Shambala center. Are there any MBSR teachers here in the community near you who go, say, oh, wait a minute. Someone just said, no, there’s nothing at Dartmouth Hitchcock, but MBSR is at Dartmouth Hitchcock. Well, you see the doctor doesn’t.
So, I mean, between the two of you, you have an insurrection. If there are, how many else, how many other people are here with that How many hours Oh, so now you have a revolution. I mean, listen, that’s how institutions change. And you can do it with tremendous intelligence, with tremendous propriety, with tremendous, intentionality and kindness so that it’s not like you’re going to go and just sort of be obnoxious and tell everybody else what they’re doing wrong, but to actually offer a new option that I’m not joking folks, people that are dying for people are dying for it metaphorically. And literally, and if, and there’s never been more scientific evidence in favor of moving in this direction. So in some sense, what I’m saying is the responsibility for the future of not only medicine, but our society is a distributor of responsibility. And as I like to say, the world needs all its flowers.
And you’re one, whether your mind says in his like depressive rumination, he means everybody else in the room, but not me. No I’m in you. And so if you don’t recognize the flower that you are and the genius that you are in the beauty that you are and take it and some place where it can eliminate some tiny little corner that may be insignificant, but isn’t you think it is, but it isn’t and just apply what you care most deeply about there. That’s how health, that’s, how the care gets back into health care. We’re not talking about health insurance reform. We’re talking about health care reform. And we haven’t seen the beginning of healthcare reform. And when we do it will be a participatory medicine. It will be recruiting the interior, dimensionality and resources that every single human being by virtue of being born, a human being has to one degree or another. And that degree is huge. And we need to learn how to recruit it because anything else will just be technology. And it will be all doing based than not none of it being based. And, we’re not called human doings. We’re called human beings. So at that, I’m going to stop it because again, it’s late, but thank you very much for you.