Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Mindfulness is a Radical Act of Sanity | Jon Kabat-Zinn

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where in 1995, he founded the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society and in 1979, its world-renowned Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Clinic.  Jon’s research between 1979 and 2002 focused on mind/body interactions for healing, on various clinical applications of mindfulness meditation training for people with chronic pain and/or stress-related disorders, on the effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) on the brain and how it processes emotions, particularly under stress.He is the author of 14 books, including the bestsellers Full Catastrophe Living, Wherever You Go, There You Are, and Mindfulness for Beginners. His books and guided meditation programs describe meditation practice in such commonsensical, relevant, and compelling terms that mindfulness meditation practice has become a way of life for thousands of people. Jon’s work has contributed to a growing movement of mindfulness into mainstream institutions such as medicine, psychology, health care, neuroscience, schools, higher education, business, social justice, criminal justice, prisons, the law, technology, government, and professional sports. Over 700 hospitals and medical centers around the world now offer MBSR. Jon lectures and leads mindfulness workshops and retreats around the world. I’ve been fortunate enough to attend several of them, and I can’t even begin to express the impact Jon has had on my life.Not only does he teach and guide in a special way, he is a special human being. I’m excited for you all to hear what he has to share._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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that will make you feel better, reduce your stress. It's really maybe the critical factor in whether we survive as a species in any kind of recognizable way. Okay, welcome. This is the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm Dr. Michael Gervais. By trade and training, a sport and performance psychologist. And I am fortunate to work with some of the most extraordinary

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It's with Jon Kabat-Zinn. I'm fortunate to know him in a way that it feels really rich. There's a depth to this man that is profound. If you're not familiar with his work, he's a professor of medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where in 1995, he founded the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare, and Society. And then in 1979, it's world-renowned mindfulness-based stress reduction, MBSR Clinic. His research between 1979 and 2002 focused on mind-body interactions for healing, on various clinical applications of mindfulness meditation training for people with chronic pain and or stress-related disorders, on the effects

of mindfulness-based stress reduction, MBSR, on the brain and how it processes emotions, particularly under stress. He's the author of 14 books, including the bestsellers, Full Catastrophe Living, Wherever You Go, There You Are, and Mindfulness for Beginners. So his books and guided meditation programs describe meditation practice in this very commonsensical, relevant, and compelling way that mindfulness meditation practice has become a way of life for thousands of people. And he's contributed through his introduction to mindfulness to the West into mainstream institutions like medicine, psychology, healthcare, neuroscience, schools, higher education, business, social justice, criminal justice, prisons, the law, technology, government, professional sports even.

Over 700 hospitals and medical centers around the world now offer MBSR. Think about it. MIT, deep educational experience, studied under Thich Nhat Hanh, you know, came back with some insights to the West, introduced this way of thinking about how the mind-body relationship works, and then put it to a program and like change the world, literally has changed definitely the Western world. I mean, he changes every room he's in. How about that? Every room he's in, there's an alignment that he has that is undeniable between his mind and his heart. And that alignment is expressed through words.

And I hope you can feel it. And with that, let's get right into this week's conversation with a legend, Jon Kabat-Zinn. Jon, how are you? I am fine. It's wonderful to be here with you. There is so much weight behind even the simple answer that you give. And it's complicated, isn't it, to say I'm fine in a world that is upside down. Yeah, I'm fine with not being fine. And also, my heart is, you know, torn apart, in many ways, given that we're two or three days into the abomination of what Russia is attempting to do with Ukraine and the amazing response of, you know, democracies around the world and human beings around the world, including in Russia and, you know, the populace of Russia.

So fine is always like a shorthand for like, it's complicated, right? But that's in some sense, part of the subject matter, I guess we'll get into is how are we in relationship to experience of any kind, including really, really difficult experience? what's possible in the world in the direction of well-being and ethical behavior and non-harming and minimize all of the madness and violent impulses that human beings sometimes have to other people that don't, you know, relate in the way they relate or look the way they look and create levels of madness and sometimes violence and often huge injustice that, you know, really I'm feeling the way the earth is going that we can't countenance this anymore, that we have to reset the default mode of humanity towards minimizing ignorance and greed and hatred and optimizing love and caring and compassion and that we can do it all, that there's enough for all. And we know that in a way we didn't even 30 or 40 years ago, nevermind 100 or 1,000 years ago.

And I want to drill right into the center, which is our relationship with experience. Yeah. So the center of your life work to be able to have the insights, the deep insights that you just shared is first and foremost, your relationship with experience and then being able to help others to do the same. And is that how you frame the human experience from the inside out is building an understanding of the relationship that we have with experience? Yeah, experience is a huge mystery. Nobody understands how we experience, how we get, have, understand experience. I mean, it's one of the biggest philosophical conundra, and it's also in neuroscience, like, you know, awareness and experience are like two gigantic black holes. Like, we know that we are conscious, that we can be aware, and that we have experiences, but we really don't understand how that comes about.

And so we're busy in some sense thinking that we're the doer of our own experience, as opposed to in some sense being in a very reciprocal interconnected dance with reality, all of reality, a lot of which you can't see, hear, smell, taste, or touch, because there are all sorts of invisible forces also going on. And the beauty of this kind of orientation and the fact that it can be infectious, just like COVID, that it has the potential to be a meme that will spread through the entirety of the human population, is that it optimizes our capacity to feel at home in our own skin, even under extremely difficult or stressful circumstances sometime. And at those particular times, when the proverbial stuff is hitting the proverbial fan,

that's the most important moment to not lose your mind. But that's the moment where you're most likely to lose your mind because most of the time, our understanding of life is, you know, we're very reactive to what we like or don't like. If we like it, we approach it. If we don't like it, we reject it. And so from that point of view, we're always off balance. And when awareness can not restore the balance, but actually show you how unbalanced you are. And then the interesting thing about experience is it's self-balancing. And so we can find a new kind of equilibrium that we never knew we had.

And a lot of people say who take the eight-week MBSR program, mindfulness-based stress reduction in a hospital or something, because they're referred by their doctor for one kind of chronic medical condition or another, wind up saying, you know, I felt this kind of sense of belonging, this kind of experience of being really who I am and being in my own skin. I remember this from when I was four or five years old. And then I forgot it. Now I'm 70 years old or whatever. And all of a sudden I said, holy cow, what happened to my life? I love this for two reasons I want to share with you. And this is, you're talking about the arc

from like five to 70, and then returning back to home from a psychological standpoint. And as you're talking, one, I have great respect for how you have bridged the practice of wisdom and humanity with science. And so in so many ways, John, you are a mentor of mine on how you conduct you and how you've been able to, oh yeah, for sure. And how you have created a canvas to, to share it with so many, like, and we'll get into the, some of your, your teachings and your practices in a minute, but, but here, here's the,

the thing I wanted to share with you is that early in my career, I would talk about the psychology of excellence. And I still say that language now, but there's a difference in the way that I think about it because the psychology of excellence really feels metallic, shiny, right? Like extraordinary from a podium or a gold medal or like some metallic, I think is the right word that I think about. And I was sitting down with a world's best in business, like a true global thinker in business. He goes, Mike, I'm so attracted to that. But you know, for me,

it feels like the psychology of excellence is being at home with myself. I said, me too. He says, so do you think you change that language or just add to it? And I was like, oh, yeah. Okay. So what is the language? And so much of the science turned to art is like getting the language in a way that feels precise and also has space in that precision. And it's that duality. But can you riff on that for just a moment? That's so beautiful because, you know, we started out with the mystery of human experience.

There's also the mystery of human language that no one understands, you know, not even Chomsky. And Chomsky is very clear that there are certain elements of being human that may remain mysterious forever, that no amount of science is going to ever completely clarify, just like in some sense, the uncertainty principle, that there may be limits to the, because of the way the human brain is wired, that we will not understand. So for instance, right now, I know there's a podcast so people are listening, okay?

But what they're listening to is you and then me in turn, moving our lips, moving air out of our lungs and over the vocal cords and in concert with the lips moving and the tongue moving and the entire structure of the mouth, words are coming out that are actually vibrating through the air, going into a microphone, vibrating the microphone, becoming electronic signals, and going out to some kind of receiver that then reverses the process. And the air vibrates, and they vibrate the tympanic membranes inside the listener's ear. And then those auditory nerves carry it to the auditory sort of cortex where it's decoded.

And you're following this sentence, which is getting longer and longer. And it's absolutely grammatical. And how do we do that? I mean, it's like none of us know. And when you watch a two-year-old acquire language, as I'm doing with three and a, three, three and a half now, but with my youngest grandchild, everybody should be like dropping whatever they're doing and just

letting their jaw hang in awe of how that happens. And the child can all of a sudden start articulating thoughts and emotions and so forth, that a memory, a recall, that is staggering. So the long and the short of it is, I mean, again, from a neuroscientific point of view, if we look at the brain, you know, and now we have this telescope that we just sent out into orbit out past the moon, called the James Webb telescope, which is going to take like another six months to completely unfurl, but it's like these gold plated mirrors that all have to be in alignment to one, like, gazillionth of an inch. And when it's ready, it's going to look further into space, which means further back in time to the Big Bang than anything that humanity has been able to do before. And

we're listening through that kind of apparatus. We're attending to experience. And we're also attending to experience through our eyes, our ears, our nose, our mouth, our capacity for touch. And the most important in some way, awareness is like a sense because you can, you know, someone can touch you. And we've all had this experience of being hugged by somebody who's doing it mechanically. It doesn't feel like a hug. You're aware of that, but they're not aware of it. And it's like the worst feeling in the world to be touched in a mindless way, a mechanical way.

And so, and everybody's had the experience of like somebody who you really love saying to you, well, you never listened to me because you shut down at certain points because you know what they're going to say. You know, we don't accord them a certain kind of honoring or sovereignty because of habit of one kind or another. So when you cultivate mindfulness or awareness, which is a synonym for mindfulness, then all of a sudden you see what you're doing

and you no longer have to be trapped in it. And you can see the miracle and the beauty of what's unfolding and the mystery of it, whether it's the gigantic universe or the fact that underneath the vault of our skulls, we have the most complex arrangement of matter in the known universe. I mean, it's so complex. I mean, it's like, you know, they say north of 100 billion neurons just in the head alone and that are continually talking to each other through trillions and trillions of synaptic connections, many of which are changing constantly on the basis of what came before and experience

and training and all sorts of things like that. And, you know, so the fact that we would feel lost or out of sorts or depressed in a certain way or anxious, it's like, wait a minute, we're not honoring in a certain way what the full repertoire of our humanity is offering to us. And it's only offering it to us at one moment. And that moment's called now. It's the only moment we can ever apprehend experience, the mystery of experience, and who's apprehending it. So the mystery of the experiencer. And there is no experiencer. There's just experiencing. There's just attending. And when we fall into this subject-object dualism, and there's a me who's having my experiences, there's a certain degree of self-delusion associated with that, because we don't understand the nature of self. And so that's then, of course, we think that our narrative is who we really are. And we want to optimize our narrative, optimize our bank account, optimize our happiness quotient,

or whatever it is, at the expense of the rest of the world, because we think of ourselves as separate, which is the most profound delusion of all, which is why in the meditative traditions, the question, who am I, becomes the question par excellence. It's like taking a can opener to your head and opening it up and actually realizing that we're not who we think we are. We're not who we say we are.

We're infinitely bigger than the stories we generate for ourselves. Thank you for that. That was a lot. I realized that was a lot, but it's kind of riffing on what you were saying about experience. You took me for a ride. I mean, like all of it. And you scientifically wax poetically in a way that I'm able to follow.

I see them as, you know, completely intersecting the science and poetry, art. They're all different ways of knowing or understanding the fundamental question. Why did they send that telescope up? I mean, billions of dollars out there past the moon. Why'd they do that? To understand what it means to be human and where our place is in the universe. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be

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Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. This is going to tie into the, the fundamental question of who am I? And then also add it to some of the brain structure you're talking about to get to the place of the science that I am enthralled with the jaw dropping part.

The beauty of the science of psychology is that bit where we're able to make sense of something. So we take in all of this information, and then it's got to get filtered through in a way that the experience is sense-making for us. We have the ability to say, oh, that is this, or that is something else, or I like this, I don't like that, which is, this is where we start to get in trouble

because of like an Occam, what's it called? Occam Razors? occam's razor which is just trying to make the most obvious definition of what happened but it's so complicated so when we go into that place of awareness to experience and in the awareness-making that opens up the aperture to understand the experience in a more accurate way or a more profound way. Or to realize that you don't understand the experience, an awareness of not understanding, which is really important because from a science point of view i'm not an engineer so it would be different for engineers because things got to work but from a scientific point of view the greatest scientists are the ones that realize how little they know and they know that they don't

know it and therefore they put their energy into pondering that interface, like right where we go up to everything that we know. And then you just stay here. It's like a meditation practice. You just stay with what one Zen master I trained with called don't know mind or not knowing mind. But that's not a function of ignorance. It's a function of wakefulness and openness. And then the brain is so beautiful in organ, or the human being is such a beautiful entity, that the not knowing, but contemplating the space of not knowing, all of a sudden, what arises often,

and this is as much a miracle as seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, is an insight that before you didn't, the moment before you didn't have, and then all of a sudden you saw a connection. Scientists have this experience rarely, but it's very powerful, where for a brief moment, they know something that no one else on the planet knows, because they put two and two together and came up with four for the first time. And that's really, but that's a capacity that we all have. You know, if we're talking about children, if we're talking about spouses, if we're talking about partners, it's like we live with the conceit that we know who we're living with. We don't know who we're living with. We don't even know who we are,

never mind who you're sleeping with or your children or anything else. We put everybody in a kind of a box of a certain kind. And it's very reassuring when they respond more or less the way we hope they will, and then everybody's happy. But what if they don't? So it's really, I think, a profound opportunity to exercise this muscle, so to speak, of not knowing mind, of a kind of awareness that doesn't believe its own propaganda, which is what is most important in science, is you don't believe own your own theories you have to put them to the most rigorous of tests and so you know that's what really um where the rubber meets the road in science is uh having incontrovertible evidence that something is as it is. And then it's still only relative. Even Newton had to make way for Einstein once the world had evolved a little bit more.

And even Newton, they couldn't figure out. I mean, Newton knew that what he was saying was like absolute nonsense. I mean, that they just couldn't figure out even the law of gravitation, you know, gravitational attraction. What conceivable energy would pull two masses together? And they just couldn't figure it out. I mean, God was the only appropriate answer,

but that wasn't very satisfying. And it took until Einstein to actually realize that it's not a force gravity, it's like the way the universe space itself, space time is shaped by mass and bent by mass so that things fall into orbits, so to speak, or of attraction. John, how do you study? Because you're one of the rares that can go across many disciplines and not lose the sophistication of those verticals. And so this is a life journey, I understand. But it might be important for people to understand a quick flyover for you, like the chapters of your life, and to know that you're classically trained and then, and then,

and then you kept going. And so I do want to understand how you have, let me tell you a story. Somebody pulls up in a Ferrari and you know, it's like an oppressive car and somebody, one person could walk up and say, wow, where'd you buy that car? Another person could walk up and say, how'd you make the money to buy that car? Another person could walk up and say, how'd you make the money to buy that car? Another person can come up and say, what fascinates you? Right? So I'm interested in what fascinates you and trying to understand underneath, like, how do you generate the insights that you have? And I know you're going to say mindfulness for a long time. No, I'm not. But can we do two parts? It's a long question, which is quick flyover, like the chapters of

your life or important phases of your life. And then, and we'll be relatively brief there to get to the question of how you're able to study and develop insights. Well, to go backwards, I mean, we don't know how insight develops. It requires patience. It requires interest, curiosity, like, why is it this way and not some other way? And then like pondering that kind of thing. So that's, I think, a human characteristic. I have to tell you that I am not a big fan of creating some kind of narrative arc of my own life and being the receiver of various projections or narratives

about how this I am or how that I am of any kind, because they're toxic to me. I've had enough experience of it to realize that the more I get those kinds of projections, the more I have to develop my, like in Star Wars, you know, kind of like a repelling shield, you know, I don't remember exactly what they called it, but kind of a shield to repel those kinds of forces, because I'm not really the interesting subject, even though we're having this podcast and so forth. The reason we're having this podcast, I would say, not ever having had a conversation with you about it, is because of the listeners. Okay, so it's not so much like, oh, can I be, or you or anybody else that we want to sort of elevate, be an inspiration to

other people. It's more like when we are in conversation like this and people are listening, they begin, some subset of them who haven't already tuned us out for something else that might be on their mind. They begin to resonate with something inside themselves that is very, very powerful, that often is just that way. Like, you know, when I was five, I had this feeling, and now I'm 78 or whatever it is, and I haven't felt that way since, and they attribute it to the meditation practice. But what they're really attributing it, what is really the source of it is our willingness to recognize each other's beauty, to recognize each other's whether we're movie stars or whether we're big shots or whether we're sports heroes or, but to just realize like, because all of those are just kind of like two dimensional narratives that, you know, nobody knows who Tom Brady really is. The question is, does Tom Brady know who Tom Brady really is? Or anybody else that, you know, is the hero of the moment? So for me, all of my work, and the reason we're having this podcast from my point of view is because if we're putting out through these mysterious airwaves for other people, airwaves for other people's ears to resonate with, it's like, it's not just the ear

that resonates. And I'm interested in if anything is resonating someplace in the heart or in the bones of our listeners and a kind of recognition that, you know, I could be more in touch with who I really, really, really, really am instead of the narrative, good, bad, or ugly, that part of my mind is continually putting out there that says, I'm not good enough, or I'm like, you know, in order for me to be happy, everybody else has to be and fill in the blank of what it is. And that is a liberative invitation. It's like, hey, why don't we wake up and free ourselves from all the sources of suffering that actually, for the most part, we blame or project out there on other people or circumstances, but ultimately we're to blame because we're not taking responsibility for

our beauty and then cultivating it, watering the seeds of our own human dignity, embodied wakefulness, the mystery of experience that you were pointing out, and the power of this function that we don't have to acquire, that we're born with, but never get any schooling in how to inhabit, and that is awareness, human awareness. And so you don't have to improve on yourself. All you need to do is recognize that there's no improving on yourself if you're willing to drop in to awareness and let things be as they are, and then let the curriculum do you. I don't know if that makes any sense to the listener, but that's kind of my response to like the chapters of my life, so to speak, because I think that that would be in some sense a kind of

you know, sort of an inappropriate detour given the urgency of what humanity is facing on the planet in so many different ways. Thank you for gracefully saying that. Okay. You bring up something really important, which is the I'm not okay. You also have mapped very clearly that there is the mystery of the unknown. And if you don't work with the mystery of the unknown, it's a fast train to anxiety. If you don't work with that nagging voice and that feeling that you're not good enough, we end up finding ourselves with self-doubt. We end up finding a smallness that we can never truly express the gifts that we already possess and so I've got an axiom I live

by which is that everything you need is already inside you exactly right so let's go to work including the stuff that you don't want because people you know everybody's different and some of us are born with challenges that others of us never experience. And so we can always look around and say, I want to be that person. But that's not really a choice that any of us get. So the question is, how do I be this person in my fullness? One of my heroes is Stephen Hawking. I mean, when he was in his early 20s, he got amyotropic lateral sclerosis. And for the rest of his life, he was in a wheelchair and then ultimately lost even speech and had to be electronically amplified and everything else.

He was one of the greatest physicists that ever lived. And he actually went and experienced zero gravity in some plane trip around the world where they can create zero gravity to train astronauts and so forth. And he did that experiencing zero gravity in his wheelchair, which the zero gravity is not an impediment. And he was one of the greatest physicists since Einstein to interrogate the nature of the universe, black holes, you know, all sorts of things. just like killed myself. I mean, there's no, how could I live like that? He found a way. And he said, well, then he's special. He's like, you know, he's not like everybody else. He must have been some genius. My point is, everybody's a genius. To a first approximation, those 100

billion, you know, neurons inside your head and another 100 billion glial cells, and nobody really knows what they're doing. And everything, your entire mean like we're all walking miracles and the more we actually honor it without generating some big ego trip around it and you say well okay i'm you may be the center of the universe but so is everybody else then we can have a very interesting way of dealing with global warming and all of the problems that humanity and the human mind, when it doesn't know itself, is creating on the planet. And I see this as a kind of distributive movement. It's not about like heroes or saints or particular people who like, you know, have transcended in one way or another and become, you know, sort of put on other people's pedestals, but exactly the opposite,

that we're all capable of learning, growing, healing, and transformation in the direction of wakefulness, of before we die, waking up, as Thoreau was saying, to the actuality of who we are, to experience, as you started out saying. And I love that. And in my experience, I'm not deluded. I may sound deluded as we have this conversation, like, you know, who talks like this? But I don't think I'm deluded at all, because I've seen thousands and thousands of people come in depressed, anxious, in chronic pain, in all sorts of like, you know, stress around relationship disintegration and meaningless and everything else. And then in a few short weeks of cultivating intimacy with one's own embodied awareness through a discipline. I mean, it like does take a certain kind of interior work and then bringing it out into the world. So there's

no inside or outside that people will say things after eight weeks of MBSR practice, like, you know, you saved my life or things like that. I mean, by the thousands. And I say, that's really good to hear, but I didn't save your life. You saved your life by waking up to aspects of dimensions of your own experience that you weren't paying attention to. And then, of course, we need support. This is not something one person can do by themselves, but this is becoming a global movement. The science of mindfulness is like following the same curve as COVID follows. It's an exponential curve, only we're not trying to damp it down. We're trying to accelerate it even more.

And I think that everything that's happening geopolitically is in some sense reminding us, okay, you want to have a nuclear war now over Russia or over Ukraine? What are we thinking? How could that possibly be worth anything at all? We need to wake up to our own madness in a certain way and let everybody live and maximize the and, yes, have laws that actually prevent a certain kind of, you know, institutionalized injustice, whether it's on the nation level or on the, you know, sort of international level, where we minimize, you know, institutional injustice and othering and maximize homeostasis, homeostatic well-being, also with the planet, because we've given it a fever and it's getting worse and worse and worse. And the, you know, huge numbers of human beings live in very, very vulnerable places, but more and more of us are, you know, soon nobody's going to be privileged in that regard. So what's getting lost in this exponential curve that you're talking about of mindfulness? What is getting lost in

the popularization of this beautiful ancient practice? I don't know, because I don't pay that much attention to the popularization of it. You know, it's true that it is being popularized, but that's because, you know, there are people who will try to take advantage of or maximize their own sort of position with whatever other people find interesting when it reaches a certain kind of level in society. So yeah, there's a lot of hyping of mindfulness

and people talking about it and maybe even teaching it who can't even spell the word mindfulness. of hyping of mindfulness and people talking about it and maybe even teaching it to, you know, can't even spell the word mindfulness. That's the way I joke about it. But the fact is that there's so many serious people out there teaching mindfulness in hospitals and medical centers and clinics and now schools and in the political arena and everything else, that it's kind of like has the potential to put us back in touch or perhaps put us in touch for the very first time with the name that we gave ourselves as a species,

Homo sapiens sapiens from the Latin sapere, which means to taste or to know. So we're the species that knows and knows that it knows, which means not cognition and metacognition, but awareness and meta-awareness. So we're the species that is aware and is capable of being aware that we are aware, and then therefore making really wise choices. And we haven't quite lived our way into that yet. So I see this as kind of an evolutionary arc, that there's no guarantee we're going to make it because the forces of darkness inside the human psyche, when it doesn't know itself, and we've seen what it did to Europe, you know, in start taking care of the body politic, not just

of the planet, but of how we're all going to live together on this planet in a way that optimizes just what I said before, you know, a sense of being at home in your own skin and in your own country and in your own culture in a way that you don't have to go to war with the rest of the world in order to do. So I would say that I sometimes use the analogy of the blood supply, that in your body, which is in the classical Buddhist teachings of mindfulness, mindfulness of the body is called the first foundation of mindfulness, okay? We pay attention to the body, including the breathing. The counterpart of that is the body politic. We need to hold the body politic in awareness. So we need to actually recognize that, say, in your body,

every cell of your body, and there are hundreds of trillions, thousands of trillions of cells in the body, every cell needs blood supply. Every cell needs a blood supply. Well, on the planet, every human being needs an equivalent blood supply, enough to be able to live in a way that furthers human dignity, safety, well-being, connectedness, belonging, and then we'll work out the rest. But if we're privileging certain people or races or countries or continents and raping or pillaging or exploiting others, including Antarctica, which doesn't have anybody to protect it.

We need to take care of Antarctica because that glacial ice sheet is really important, and the same with Greenland. So how about we put our heads together and put our hearts together and figure out how to take care of everybody on the planet and not just the humans, because we need the animals. We need the insects, the pollinators. We need the plants. We need, why can't we wake up to that? I would say that that's the medical equivalent of taking care of people with chronic pain or heart disease. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding,

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That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. I'll add to the analogy and tell you why I think that's the case, is that if I want to oxygenate, bring blood and the appropriate oxygen to my body, I might work out, I might hydrate, I might eat a nutrition that is going to promote that. And so there's lots of things that I might do to be able to promote that more healthy internal ecosystem. But those become difficult to do if I am unable to meet the demands of the environment, a la I am chronically stressed, a la I don't have the psychological skills to be able to meet those demands because I never was taught how to develop those psychological skills. And the demands of the modern world are fast and real. And then I'll add one more layer of complexity is that most of us will have experiences in

our life that are traumatic. Matter of fact, I think that we're all going through this world with either small T or big T, right? So there's a high likelihood that somebody is going to have an acute stressor in their life and there's also a likelihood that there'll be chronic stress that is above the threshold of health and that is because we don't have the internal skills to work with the external environment now so why am i bringing this up because or or there's just the you know the the inevitability of things that are beyond our control, like say war and bombing and loss and all of that. And the reason I bring that up is because if I am in survival mode,

I am not going to spend the time to say, how do we help Antarctica? As the corollary, meaning how am I going to help my community if I can't feed my family? How am I going to help the Antarctic if I can't quite even get my neighborhood together? And so I think that there's layers to it, which I know you're incredibly sensitive to where would you start people like that you say wherever you are on the spectrum if you're suffering if you're struggling or you're thriving wherever you might be how would you nudge them to take some action towards enhancing awareness building the relationship with experience to get to insight and eventually to wisdom and to work from wisdom and, you know, to be a global citizen, making a positive impact in as many places as we can go. So how would you just nudge those? And I think our community, our listeners are on it.

Like there's, and they already value mindfulness, but sometimes it's hard to make a case for it when I'm so busy. I'm not saying me like it's, you know, it's a foundational commitment in my life, but sometimes it's hard for me too. You know? So like, there's a couple of things in there for you to hopefully to respond to is one is making the case, but more prior to that is like, where do you how do you nudge people to get started in a direction? One basic principle is you start where you are.

So and that's huge. embrace your own experience as it is with the ultimate aim of living life fully and having it presumably be fulfilling. That's the biggest step of all. The rest is detail. The other thing that's really important to emphasize is that the meditation practice is not when your ass is on the cushion in a full lotus posture, sitting like a Buddha or a statue of the Buddha in a museum or a temple someplace. The real meditation practice is how we live our lives moment by moment by moment by moment. When the proverbial stuff is hitting the proverbial fan, when you're anxious, when you're depressed, when you're lonely, when you're in despair, those are all part of the curriculum. And every single one of those moments is a door in to wakefulness and awareness. And when you understand that that's what meditation

is, rather than trying to get to some special woo-woo state where everything is like copacetic, because that can set you back 30 or 40 or 100 years if you're always trying to get someplace else, instead of, oh, wait a minute, I got it completely wrong. The idea is to be where you already are completely, even if it's miserable. And then you can ask very interesting questions. You can become like a scientist of it. It's like, is my awareness of my pain or suffering or trauma or misery actually miserable? And you can discover in a second that, no, it's not. And we're not talking about dissociation.

If anything, we're talking about recognizing that there are hidden dimensions of our own being that are so big and so wise, and we're talking now about experience and awareness, that they're not suffering, even if the narrative is that you're suffering, I'm suffering, I can't stand this anymore. Whatever the narrative is. The other piece is that we need each other. I mean, we talked about it a little bit, because we're having a podcast, we're not having a podcast, just for you and me to talk. We don't need to do that on a podcast. We can just do that. But people are listening in. And so those of you who are listening in, if anything of this is resonating, then this is the meditation practice. This conversation is a part of the meditation practice. The fact that you haven't already tuned us out and gone someplace else. It's like, why is that? What's touching in

you? And how can you nurture that? How can you feed it? Just as if you were like, you know, feeding a cat or a dog or whatever. Feed your own aspiration to live the life that's yours to live, starting where you're at. Now, another thing you'll need, and a podcast won't cut this one at all, you'll need a friend. You need at least one friend that you can talk with about your meditation practice, about your fear, about how bad a meditator you are, which is just a thought. There's no moment that's not an absolutely wonderful moment to actually wake up and then see what might be possible, even in the midst of depression. Depression, as people who are, you know, great cognitive researchers who develop mindfulness-based

cognitive therapy have shown, depression is a disease of dysregulated thought. When you're completely self-centered and it's all about me and what's wrong with me and why they don't like me and everything else, this is not the reality of anything. These are just thoughts, but they're thoughts that if you don't know their thoughts and you suspect they are the reality of things, I mean, you know, you can be imprisoned by those thoughts and the horrible feelings, the black hole of depression for your entire life. So the stakes are incredibly high for us to actually reclaim our full humanity. And there's, I just want to emphasize one more thing about the formal meditation practice. There's no one right way to do it. It's not like, oh, just get a hold of my app or my CDs or my guided meditations. And that's the door in. No, there are an infinite number of doors in. The door in is actually your

heart, is actually your body, is actually your breath, is actually, if you have a friend on the planet, it's that. If you have somebody who really loves you and that you are really in love with, wonderful. And if you don't, love yourself, not by inflating yourself into something you're not, but by recognizing your own beauty, your own internal beauty. You were beautiful as a child. What makes you think that you've somehow outgrown that? That's the one thing you don't actually outgrow, but you can ignore it. And if you ignore it long enough, it atrophies. Access to awareness atrophies. Access to your own beauty in your own heart atrophies. The good news is it comes right back as soon as you don't take your

narrative of yourself too seriously. So I'll finish this little riff by saying mindfulness is far too serious to take too seriously. And I'm serious about that because we really do need to approach this whole thing with a major dose of a sense of humor and a recognition that we're all in this together. And if it's not one crazy notion or another, that, yeah, we're all kind of a little bit nuts and attached to our own way and despising this, that, and the other thing, if it doesn't accord with our own way. But when we drill down to where we started with just bare experience, awareness itself, open-hearted wakefulness, and you have at least one friend on the planet who sees that in you and can support it, and maybe meditate together formally, or at least talk about your meditation practice. And in that context, everything that's going wrong in your

life, no problem with things going wrong in your life. Welcome to the club. That's part of what the humanity is. It's like some things go wrong for a while, but it's all impermanent. It's impermanent. It's not going to last that long. So the point is much more rather than attaching to outcome, which is a big mistake in the meditation practice to actually be the knowing that your awareness already is always has been and always will be, including the knowing of how much we don't know. And that is liberating, right? At the very first moment, in the middle of your meditation practice or your life, and the very first moment in the middle of your meditation practice or your life and the very last moment too so it's good in the beginning good in the middle good in the end and there are an infinite number

of doors into it so you you have to find your own way with a capital w i might say uh the word the word way yeah john um i i could is this making any sense yeah no no no no it's super grounded i mean we could talk like this for hours hours i know i really appreciate uh our you know interactions along these lines and the kinds of probes and questions that you're that you're uh inviting uh but it really is um the adventure of a lifetime or or i've even you know in recent years the older i get i could say it's i'm losing my mind but i don't think so i think i'm actually discovering my heart in a certain way that maybe I didn't when I was younger and tougher and more, you know, sort of just energized in

certain go-getter type of ways. That what this meditation practice is, or what mindfulness really is, it's a love affair with reality. And reality is unforgiving. You know, it's like, it's not forever. So if we're all going to die, although the scientists are working to hack that one so that, you know, ultimately, we'll all be immortal. But can you imagine, with the kinds of problems we have, if we were mortal, how annoying we would be to everybody. But for now, at least, it's impermanent. Life is impermanent. Everything is impermanent. Even stars are born, they have a lifetime and they die, the universe itself, you know, it's like, so if everything's impermanent, fundamentally, then that question about who I am becomes really important because we only have this moment. And this moment, ironically, when you step out of time is infinite. So if you were living more in the now, then you've got resources and dimensions to call upon, hidden dimensions, actually, of our

own humanity that are intrinsically wise, that are intrinsically insightful, that are intrinsically compassionate, that care about other people. And so rather than making ourselves the center of the universe, if we cared more and acted more out of the caring for others, we would actually be infinitely happier than just putting ourselves first all the time and then trying to maximize our own small-minded happiness when we're much bigger than who we think we are. Much, much bigger than the narratives we generate about ourselves. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset. It's not about avoiding poor health. This is about creating the conditions for growth. Now, hair health is one of those areas that often gets overlooked until your hair starts to change. That's when people pay attention. Now, that's why I've been loving iRestore Elite. It's a hands-free red light therapy device that helps stimulate dormant hair follicles, helps to support regrowth. It's a clinical grade

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Well, we're managing to mess that up too, actually, from an ecological point of view. Maybe. Yeah, I know. Okay, so just a couple more questions to honor your time. No worries. Okay. One is, to honor your time one worries okay one is you said something really important about the dysregulated conversations we have with ourself in in context of depression and this might feel like a non sequitur but I'm I am fascinated with this storyline that we have that's sometimes conscious, but most of the time non-conscious, where we're trying to sort out if we're okay relative to what others think of us. Yeah. And it's a very dangerous proposition to externalize our self-esteem, our self-worth, our self-value, our sense of self to the collective them. What does that person think of me? And it's pervasive. So I'm in the

science, I'm in the interrogation part of trying to understand that right now. But can you just think about, why do you think we're so concerned with what other people think of us? I think it's cultural. I really don't think that it's that way in all cultures, you know. In, you know, in many cultures, the we is more important than the me. And the tribe or the collective or the, you know, is really more important than your particular, you know, place in it. On the other hand, ironically, in those kinds of cultures, you have a profound sense of belonging because, you know, the we is, you know, made up of individuals. I really feel like, you know, as I said, depression is a kind of disease of thinking. And it's also a disease of perception, thinking and perception, of course,

are very closely related. So, you know, it's partly like the interpretation of things, you know, somebody walks by you on the street or in the corridor at work, and they don't say hello to you. And, you know, and this is an example that the mindfulness based cognitive therapy people use a lot. It's like, and then, you know, there are a lot of different interpretations of somebody, you know, and like didn't say hello to you. And if you tend to be a depressive person, you'll make up like a

gigantic drama about how they were angry at me because of something I did or thought, or even how would anybody know what you thought. And then you amplify it over and over and over again in your own mind. And you just, the black hole sort of a vortex of depression that you fall into. It really is a disease of thought. Awareness is like a finger touching a soap bubble. If the disease of thought is the soap bubble that we've manufactured by blowing air into soap, but or hot air into our own story about how that person doesn't like us. And they don't like us for a good reason, because we're so unlikable. That's like you just fabricated a soap bubble, which you're calling the reality, which completely diminishes your value as a human

being. And then you compound that. You know what a finger does to a soap bubble? Soap bubble's flying in the air, and for a while, it's just going to be fine until, and if you touch it with your finger, there's only one thing that ever happens to a soap bubble, and that is it pops. The Tibetans would use a slightly different language for that when they're talking about thought bubbles okay as opposed to soap bubbles they self-liberate like bubbles coming off the bottom of a pot of boiling water they nucleate at the bottom little bubble they get bigger as they come to the top and then they go poof But if you want to make something of it, that the content of that thought, then you can drive yourself down into that black hole of depression, but you're

doing it to yourself. As soon as you see it, for that moment, you're liberated. And if you do it moment by moment by moment, liberated, liberated, liberated, liberated, it becomes like an exercise. You have to practice because the thought bubbles are going to come like constantly because we're so addicted to our own thinking that we actually believe that that's the reality. Whereas they're just thoughts. No neuroscientist even knows what a thought is. And yet when we habituate to them and we start to believe their content, they can be like nails in the coffin. Einstein, I think, was famous for having said, you know, if you have one good thought in your lifetime, and he probably

had more than one, you're ahead of the curve. And I tend to agree with him, you know, that a lot of our thoughts, when you start to watch them, they're at best hugely inaccurate. And they're unbelievably self-centered. And since we talked about how who we think we are has virtually very little to do with who we actually are and what our full potential is, then the kind of awareness that liberates them, you already have that. It's not like you have to get it. It's not like, oh, now I have to go to school and get a degree in awareness. No, you were born with that human capacity for awareness.

What we need to actually exercise and what we do in formal meditation practice or informal where life itself is the meditation practice, is just reminding ourselves over and over again that it's access to the awareness that's obscured. Because we're lost in thought all the time. As soon as you're aware that you're lost, you're not lost anymore because the awareness is there. And that awareness is the awareness. There's only one. So it's liberative of all those

soap bubbles. And those soap bubbles are coming more frequently than the text bubbles in a comic book. So it's not that complicated. That's the beauty of this is that, yeah, you, I mean, there's profound, you know, philosophies and, you know, sort of contemplative phenomenology and Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and all sorts of ways of kind of understanding some of the deep structure of how we relate through language and through experience and through the senses and so forth. But this is kind of commonsensical. It's like we all have the repertoire. Genetically, we have the repertoire for wakefulness because that's our true nature. That's why Linnaeus called us homo sapiens sapiens. It's our true nature. We need to, in some sense, get back to it.

And now maybe it's good to end on this note that this is an all hands on deck moment on planet Earth. This is not like, well, I'll just like keep doing my own like, no, the world needs absolutely all of us to tilt things in the direction of greater sanity, sustainability, justice rather than injustice, modulating our behavior and our use of energy so that we actually make the planet habitable for other species and for our own children, grandchildren, and on there. So it's like, we couldn't have been, we couldn't have asked for a better time in which to be alive. This is the first time on the planet where we have enough technology to feel completely interconnected.

And yeah, it's true that there are a lot of like people out there that are like in a different alternate universe where truth is, I mean, like with George Orwell, truth is fiction, freedom is slavery, and there are people in the Congress and all throughout the government that are actually drinking that Kool-Aid. But that Kool-Aid ultimately is the Kool-Aid of death and the Kool-Aid of suffering and also of greed, hatred, delusion, and harm. And so this is a real

moment, a real, you know, sort of unique moment, I would say, for us to wake up as a species and take care of what needs taking care of while we have the chance because the window of opportunity is not going to stay open forever. Of all of your writings and books, right now, which one would you hope if somebody is new to your work that you would say, you know, I think this one would be a good place for them to start? Like I really like what I did in this book for now in the context of what's happening right now. Yeah, I guess it would be mindfulness for all the fourth book in the coming to our senses series, because the first part of that book, each book has of these four books has two parts. And the first part of that book is called Healing the Body Politic. body politic. And I think at this particular moment, we have to understand that mindfulness is not some kind of dime store relaxation technique that will make you feel better,

reduce your stress. It's really maybe the critical factor in whether we survive as a species in any kind of recognizable way. So I would say that. And then the second half of it is much more poetic and has to do with science and biology and our place in the world. And then the second half of it is much more poetic and has to do with science and biology and our place in the world. And then if you get interested in that, you go back to the other four that actually teach you how to meditate and talk more about why. But the real meditation practice, I just want to say it again for the listeners, is not necessarily a daily, rigorous, formal meditation practice, which I've been doing that for close to 60 years. And I highly recommend it. But the real meditation practice is how you live your life moment by

moment. I hear you say that. And I go in and out over the course of the 20 years that I've been practicing, like in phases. and I can recognize I'm sharper when I'm formally trained. Oh, no question about it. I'm better at that secondary or primary practice, as you're calling, which is living awareness. It's like I'm out of fitness. You know, like when I train my body,

like I can respond in a more agile. Exactly, but you know, it's hard to sit there because it feels a lot in the beginning, like you're doing nothing. And there's a big difference between doing nothing and non-doing. So you're practicing non-doing and like, you know,

that sounds very Chinese and Taoist and so forth, but it's actually any kind of elite athlete would understand non-doing, because what do we do a lot of the time? We get in our own way. And then it's not like, you know, our competitors that are beating us, we're beating ourselves by not actually recruiting the full dimensionality of our capabilities. So this is something like a muscle, you can exercise it. And so I say what I say about the real meditation practice is your life, but my ass is on the cushion a lot. Not just once during the day, but for at least once for an extended stretch of time. And also to

practice mindful hatha yoga, because you've got to take care of the physical body too, because this is a marathon to, you know, coin a cliche. This is a marathon, not a sprint. And, you know, your health really requires moving of a certain kind. We used to all like run around for dinner or squat and dig roots or whatever. And we still have that biology. We have to actually move the body a lot. And when you do it mindfully, that just becomes part of your meditation practice. Digging roots. I haven't thought about that. Yeah, that is great. Okay, John, not to be a reductionist, but in just one word, is there a word that you understand most? Well, first, wouldn't we have to establish what it is that I understand most? Well, first, wouldn't we have to establish what it is that I understand most?

And that's the essence of the question. Like if we were to be a reductionist- I would say if we were distilling down this conversation, if that's what you're asking, into one word. And maybe I didn't say this. I can't even remember that taking your seat, as we were talking about in formal meditation practice, is in a certain way taking a stand in this life, in the only moment we ever have, which is this one. So taking a seat is taking a stand. I would say for myself that when I take my seat in meditation formally, it's a radical act. And it's a radical act of sanity.

And it's a radical act of love. So if there was one word that you're asking for to describe the whole thing, this is extremely easy to misunderstand, but the nature of wakefulness, because of the first thing you recognize when you drop into awareness is the interconnectedness of everything and your own belonging within it, that the nature of that is love, but it's not self-centered. It's distributive, and that we share each other's hearts in infinite number of different ways. And that's what we're doing on this program through the auditory function that people will be listening. And I'd be really curious in 20 or 30 years, you people out there listening to this, write us and let us know, because we'll still be around, of course, write us and let us know what this conversation generated in yourself and how it worked out over the next 20 or 30 years.

John, if the word inspiration means to breathe life into. Yeah, it does. Yeah, you breathe life into me every time that we engage and I read your work. Well, it's only because of you and the questions and the heart that you bring to it. That's, again, why I really feel like it's never been about me for the arc of my own life. It's all about we and what we can do together. And so I really want to thank

you for, you know, first of all, the interest in actually having a conversation of this kind, and then shaping the conversation in the ways that you have. And it's a true honor to have it with, be in conversation with you, and also to know that you're out there doing what it is that you're doing to contribute to moving the bell curve of humanity towards greater sanity.

Amen. Thank you, brother. So good. And I cherish, amen thank you brother so good and um i i cherish um i cherish our relationship the experience that i have um with you and uh how you always remind me about how simple things are and how the magnitude at the same time so that that tension between the two is a gift. And the other thing which I mentioned was that it's like it really is critical to have one friend that you can talk to about your practice, your life, who you are. If it's somebody that you're married to and love or in some kind of relationship. But we all need at least one person that knows who we are in a way that even we don't know who we are. And sometimes they reflect it back to us.

You're going to make me a better partner. Thank you, brother. Okay, big hug. Okay. Talk to you soon. See you soon. Okay. All right.

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