TED Radio Hour - Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris: How to Start A Meditation Practice

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

In the interest of New Year's resolutions, we're bringing you this bonus episode from our friends at the Ten Percent Happier podcast. Host Dan Harris speaks with meditation expert Jon Kabat-Zinn about starting a practice and being more mindful in our everyday lives.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, it's Manoche, and in the spirit of New Year's resolutions, we want to share some wisdom from our friends over at the 10% happier podcast, which is, of course, hosted by Dan Harris, who was on the show recently. So this is part of their series called Non-negotiables for the New Year. And in this episode, Dan talks to meditation expert John Cabot-Zinn about starting a practice and being more present and mindful in our day-to-day lives. I hope you enjoy it. This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings, how we doing? If in this new year you are looking to start or restart your meditation habit or if you're already meditating but you want to up your game,

we have recruited a true ringer for you, a legend. Perhaps more than any other single person, John Cabot-Zinn, is responsible for the explosion of interest in meditation over the last decade. or two. He invented something called mindfulness-based stress reduction, which took meditation out of a Buddhist context and made it secular and replicable. In other words, he invented a repeatable eight-week protocol which allowed scientists to begin studying what happens when regular people learn how to meditate. And that is in large measure why we now have all the scientific evidence that strongly suggests that short daily doses of meditation can confer a long list of tantalizing

health benefits. John has written many books, including full catastrophe living, wherever you go, there you are, which was first published 30 years ago, and his latest mindfulness meditation for pain relief. We cover, among many other things, the nitty gritty practicalities of starting a practice, how he's learned to be more relaxed about his own practice, including advocating for meditating in bed, how to practice being fully present with no agenda, how investigating your motivations, something most people don't actually do can help you be more mindful and how to practice letting go of the story of me.

This is the third episode in our New Year's series, the non-negotiables, where we ask smart people what their must-have practices and life principles are. If you missed it, last week we spoke to Esther Perel and Bill Hader. This week, it's John Cabot-Zinn, then Pema Choddron, then Ryan Stevenson. Enjoy this one. I find that talking to great meditation teachers

gives me a kind of contact high. I suspect you may find the same. John Cabotzin, welcome back to the show. My pleasure to be here. Happy to have you. Happy New Year. Thank you. Thank you. So it is a new year, and we are, as you know, doing this special series that we're calling the non-negotiables. And so I'm curious for you, do you have a non-negotiable

practice or philosophy or precept that you're putting into place every day or daily? I would say so, but I don't think of it as non-negotiable because that gives me the sense inwardly that I'm fighting with myself or negotiating with myself or trying to set it up so I will succeed in a certain way. And I don't relate to the practice that way. So in terms of my own life and practice, as we've said in earlier conversations, I see the formal engagement with meditation as a kind of love affair and something that is so common-sensical and fundamental to living life fully and not missing one's moments and the richness of the opportunity to be alive. that for decades it hasn't been a kind of burden or some kind of discipline or yes i get up in the

morning at this particular time and i sit no matter what on my cushion which was still a love affair but getting older i sort of have somehow moved into a space where it's much less rigid in a certain kind of way but in a certain way more disciplined but as a kind of effortless discipline it's like love. And if the meditation practice isn't life itself, at least in all waking moments, then I don't think there's much point in keeping your rear end on the cushion for extended periods of time unless it translates off the cushion. So in that sense, my meditation practice is really living life as if it mattered moment

by moment by moment. and trying to in some sense show up or even giving up the trying, but simply living one's way into the present moment and realizing that whatever is unfolding is the curriculum at that moment. And that is true, of course, even on the cushion, because, you know, there's no telling what's going to come up once you park your body in one way or another. And I'm using the cushion metaphorically to include all sorts of formal meditation practices,

including lying down meditations and even lying down meditations in bed, which is something I never would have advocated my 20s, 30s or 40s. But in my late 70s, I don't think I've gotten any less rigorous in my connection to the practice. But, you know, if any moment really is a good moment, then you don't need to necessarily jump out of bed to wake up. In fact, we always say we're waking up, you know. I woke up this morning, but is it really true? So it might be actually instrumental to encourage oneself to lie in bed, say, in the corpse pose for a few minutes or 15 minutes or half an hour, and ask yourself whether that's really true.

And if not, then why not finish the job in a certain way with, you know, sort of formal engagement in attending to the body and to awareness itself? I've made a habit in recent years of when I wake up in the morning. I get up and go to the bathroom because I'm not in my late 70s, but I'm in my early 50s, and that seems imperative when I wake up and going to the bathroom, that is. And then I get back into bed and just meditate for whatever length of time feels right and then go about my day. But I'm curious, if somebody is listening to this, it's early in the year and they've got it in their head that they want to start a meditation practice. when you sit to meditate, what are you actually doing? What is your practice? What does it entail? What does it involve?

There are a lot of different ways to approach that question. And if people are brand new to the practice, you do need certain kind of handholds or kind of structural indicators so that you don't just throw up your hands in despair and say, well, this is like not doing anything. for me. If you actually approached it in a paradoxical way that nobody's saying this should do anything for you, that we do this for reasons that are much larger than the kind of instrumental desire to and then fill in the blank, be a better person, be more relaxed, be more compassionate, be more mindful, be more whatever you want. But to actually reframe it as, you're to just be or to fall awake, then the way to describe it is that you're not trying to do anything at all. You're simply opening to the actuality of the momentary experience of that particular moment

moment and recognizing it. And sometimes I'll use the language of being the knowing that your awareness is. So you're not trying to get relaxed. You're not trying to wipe thoughts from your mind or have a deep, warm, compassionate feeling in your chest or anything like that, or feeling like I'm cultivating relaxation and then that's going to translate through the rest of my day in some way. Those are all kind of what I would call instrumental practices, and I'm not knocking them by any stretch of the imagination. But if you're asking me about how I practice, I try to sit in a posture that embody. body's wakefulness and dignity. And I am a very strong proponent of sitting on the floor if it's possible for your body.

And if it's not not to worry about it, you could do the whole thing in bed or standing on your head or, you know, any yoga posture or on a chair, you know, straight back chair rather than a big fluffy armchair that you disappear into. but the most important thing is the interior posture, which includes the attitude of why would I wake up early, and I'm a big advocate of starting the day this way, just like we're starting the year with various intentions. Sometimes like to say, you know, even the greatest musicians, say violinists in a symphony orchestra or whatever, with the greatest stratavarius violins or whatever instruments and playing the greatest music with the greatest conductors and the greatest. greatest talkers is this, they still all tune their instrument before they play in the program. They tuned their instruments, first their own instrument, and then they tune to each other. And if you think about taking your seat as a kind of tuning your instrument, then it's sort of

almost commonsensical that to do it first thing in the morning would be really good before you take it down the road and play it in various conditions at work or even making breakfast or getting the kids off to school or whatever it is, because the instrument is best, is most functional when it is tuned. And when it's not tuned, the problem is that you can very easily fall into domains of thought and emotion that actually screen your ability to be fully present

with whatever is happening. And of course, your children will be the first. first ones to tell you that you're not fully present because they have fantastic presence detectors. Actually, all human beings are incredibly highly tuned presence detectors for other people. I work a lot with doctors and I kind of remind them that they've probably also had the experience of going to a physician's for their own health care and then knowing that the doctor is not, is somewhat distracted and is not giving them their full attention. We register that almost instantly and we feel it at the level of the body and at the level of the heart and a sense of harm or

rejection from something like that. So that's a muscle we can exercise. We can practice being fully present with no agenda, not to get more relaxed or to be a, you know, sort of clearer person or a less emotionally reactive person, all those things can happen from the meditation practice, but to just revel in being alive and marvel, I would say, revel and marvel at the actuality of being alive in that moment with no agenda, not to get to some better place, with no agenda other than to be fully awake. And then take what comes as part of the curriculum of that moment without saying, well, I'd have a better meditation if it weren't for the pain in my back or the thought in my mind

or the emotion in my heart. But to realize, no, those are just thoughts. And the real practice is simply being present and seeing what happens. And it turns out that if you cultivate that and integrated into your life in that kind of way, it does over days, weeks, months, and decades, actually change and in some sense, I would say, transform how you live and how you are in relationship to other people and to virtually everything else, inwardly and outwardly. And it all comes from, you know, to come back to your original sort of question here, it all comes from basically taking your seat as a love affair with the present moment and not introducing a whole lot of instrumental things that should come out of your sacrificing a half an hour with your ass on the

cushion, for instance, if you think that it's a sacrifice rather than a sacrament. I think for many of us, we attempt to meditate and we notice how wild the mind is. And then a voice in our head tells us a whole story about how we are uniquely distractible. We probably have undiagnosed ADHD. Oh, no, by the way, I need to mow the lawn. and I forgot to send that email and I'm out. I'm over. It's over.

I'm done. Do you at this point in your meditation career need to start your practice with tuning up the muscle of attention in your mind by focusing, say, on the breath? And then every time you get distracted, you start again and again and again. Do you do that before you move into the love affair with the present moment? Yes. A lot of the time I do. I mean, you know, when I sit down in the morning at first, I bring full awareness to the body sitting. And I sit in a posture that, as I said, for me, embodies wakefulness and dignity.

And that means, of course, I've been practicing yoga, you know, for almost 60 years and martial arts for, you know, decades and so forth. So I have a particular kind of relationship with my body that, you know, knows, so to speak, when it's, say, resting on its ligaments but is erect and dignified, but not forcing anything. So the idea is, you know, for a beginner would be not falling forward, not falling backwards, not listing from side to side. And also with a kind of forward-facing lordotic curve in the spine. If you're sitting on a Zafu and the Zabaton, that is helped by not sitting on the sort of center of the Zafu, but on the forward part of it. And that naturally tilts the pelvis forward.

My knees go to the floor, to the Zabaton, but depending on your body configuration, your knees may not. And it may cause a whole range of different kinds of unpleasant sensations to sit. in a posture that you're not used to over some period of time. I started this practice when I was 21 years old. So, you know, my body was really flexible already because of just being young. But if you really want to sit in this kind of way, most people over, say, a year or two, can shape the body so that it does that. It's like getting your body into shape for any particular the kind of, you know, a sport or performance or anything else. Yeah, at first you can't run 20 feet and then, you know, sooner or later you can run 20 minutes.

And then sooner or later, if you keep practicing, you run 20 miles. But it all starts with the willingness to just be where you are. So sitting on a chair is absolutely fine if it's tortured to be on the floor. The important thing is what we sometimes call mind sitting, not body sitting. body posture is very important, but it's really the kind of platform for opening to and learning how to take up residency in awareness. And that's really the invitation, as I see it, of mindfulness meditation, is to take up residency in awareness. And then it doesn't matter what the objects of attention are. It could be the breath sensations in the body and the sense of the body as a whole, sitting and breathing in an erect and dignified posture.

with the vertebrae, you know, sort of aligning themselves in that natural way from the pelvis right up through the top of the head. But it can also be in any other posture where you bring full awareness to the body. And as you know, I mean, the first foundation of mindfulness in the classical Buddhist teachings is mindfulness of the body. And the breath is an extremely important part of it. So yeah, when I take my seat, I greet the breath and the body. I'm kind of not with words, but I just kind of welcome the infinite mystery of the fact that I get one more breath, you know, it's always this moment. So like, no one cares about the last breath or the next breath. It's only this breath. It's important. And if you were drowning or underwater, that's the

only thing you would care about is this breath. Yet we take it so much for granted. So it's very helpful for people at the beginning of the meditation practice. I'm assuming beginning of what might be intentionally thought of as a lifetime of meditation going forward in both formal and informal ways to really befriend the breath sensations in the body. But keeping in mind that it's never the object of attention that's most important, whether it's the breath in the belly or the breath at the nostrils or anything else that you want to attend to. It's the attending. That is what's most important. And that is the function of awareness, is to just be present with whatever's arising, what we sometimes call, and Krishna-Murti called choiceless awareness.

And there are various names for it in the different Buddhist traditions, Shikantaza and the Soto Zen, you know, tradition and Zopchen, the great natural perfection in the Bajrayana tradition. And these were all, in some sense, they do a first approximation, different doors into the same room. And so for beginners again, beginning at the beginning of the year, or beginning again, because it's always beginning again. It's like this breath is gone. Now it's this breath and that's gone. And so it's always right here right now that it's not trying to get anywhere else. As I said, it's about being where you actually are and opening to it.

And you're not trying to get awareness because everybody has it. It's like our default mode is awareness. We're all born with it. And so what's the problem? Well, the problem is access to it because we're so distracted and lost in thought and emotions and, you know, sort of the story of me. going on constantly in the mind, the story of me meditating now, the story of my new year, 2024, and whatever it is,

that prevents access to establishing ourselves in awareness as our kind of home base. Like, this is where we live, in awareness, and then everything else is, like, held in awareness. And an interesting thing about awareness, if you either stop and think about it or investigate it in the laboratory of formal meditation, is that if you try to find the center of your awareness, I don't think you're going to find it.

You know, it's almost like it doesn't make any sense. The question itself doesn't make any sense. If you try to find the outer edge or the circumference or the periphery of your awareness, I don't think you'll find that either. Of course, people shouldn't take my word for it, but try for yourself. But what is that most like in, you know,

the realm of human experience, what is that like when there's a kind of domain where there's no center and no periphery. The only thing I know, of course, I'm trained as a scientist, so I might know this and other people might not think about it quite that way. But the only thing that I know that's character, that is space, space itself. The boundless spaciousness of the universe where they're literally, it's expanding not from one point outward, but from all points all the time. So there's no center to the universe, nor is there any circumference to it. And it's really hard for the conceptual mind to grok that. And we don't have to go into all these questions about, you know, sort of dark energy and dark matter and like the amazing evolution of the universe.

And we can't go into it because it's so much fun to think that your body, aside from the hydrogen, which came out of the Big Bang, virtually all the atoms in your body came out of the nucleus of stars. And the heavier ones like the iron that's in our hemoglobin and the calcium that's in our bones, even stars aren't hot enough. So the stars had to explode in supernova to create that kind of heat to make iron and calcium atoms. And then lo and behold, they show up in us. And so, you know, Carl Sagan commented on it, you know, decades ago that we really are the stuff of stars or star dust or however you want to put it. But my point is that when you take

your seat in the morning, you are a totally miraculous appearance in the universe. And it's impermanent. You're not for all that long compared to a star, which has like a lifetime of tens of billions of years, maybe even more for some stars. We get a very, very short human lifespan. And the real question and why one might meditate for life, not for like two or three months and then you're on to something else, is to not miss the beauty of it in the only moments we have, and they are numbered.

But there were also an infinite number to a first approximation. So that's where the love affair comes in. Like, yeah, let's see what this constellation of atoms that's created the body and the natural world that we inhabit on planet Earth and that we're despoiling, let's see what this could do if it really woke up to its true nature. And that's not to like become something else at some future moment

when we get really good at meditating. It's like there's no improving on this moment. You're already whole, W-H-O-L-E, no matter what you think is wrong with you, you're perfect, including all the imperfections. And when you sit in that kind of a way, it has an effect on how your days going to unfold and how much trouble you're going to make, good trouble versus bad trouble, or how much you're going to contribute to optimizing well-being in the world, your own and other people and the planets, and minimizing harm.

A lot of it unintentional but totally unconscious. So there's a lot riding on it in a certain way. It's not just like one more thing to have. a little less stress in your life or to be a little bit of a better person is to realize you are already a better person. So there's no becoming some, you know, sort of fictitious, perfect self, but more like understanding the nature of what we think of as self or myself and realizing that the narratives we tell ourselves are pathetic. They're pitiful compared to the true nature of our being on any level or scale you want to think about. And that that's actually,

something that's in some sense not just a personal act of yeah i meditate and i do yoga and i eat well and stuff like that for my own personal health but it's actually because you're one cell in the body politic of the planet in a certain way in a humanity this is also in a certain way important for the well-being of the world this world our world going forward and i take that very seriously too so when i sit in the morning. I don't think about it in those terms, but, you know, the world is different because I've taken my seat and you've taken your seat and millions of other people doing this. That wasn't so much the case. It was more or less isolated monasteries on mountaintops in Korea and China and all sorts of places in Asia, but not so much globally. And now something is happening where mindfulness

with however you want to understand it, and compassion practices, which are not really separate from mindfulness or heartfulness, are moving into the mainstream of societies globally. And I would argue that none too soon, because, you know, if we don't wake up to our true nature as compassionate, wakeful beings, we're liable to despoil the planet in ways that will be irreversible

for even our children, never mind our grandchildren and future generations. and also other species. Let me just get back to something I asked about before. I'm just thinking about this mythical person that I've invented that you and I are both speaking to in some ways who's either trying to start a meditation practice or restart one and who might keep bumping up against this story.

You referenced the fact that we tell ourselves pitiful stories, a very common story among meditators, especially at the beginning. And I know you hear this all the time. is I can't do this. My mind's too busy. I can't clear my mind. I keep getting distracted. How do you talk to people who have that concern? Well, it's a misunderstanding of the root instructions. The idea is not to clear your mind. The part of you that knows that your mind is unclear or agitated or turbulent, investigate that part because that part is called awareness

and it's not turbulent or, you know, unclear. So we just haven't been taught this in school that we sort of selectively pay attention, but we don't really know how to attend to our attending. So we don't know how to bring awareness to the full dimensionality of awareness itself. And so this is kind of new in our culture. And actually, I think it's new in Asian cultures as well, because a lot of the ancient practices within the kind of more religious context really didn't have to do so much with liberation as they had to do with other more cultural aspects of Buddhism, say, or something like that. And there were very few people who were actually doing the deep, you know, work that Dogan was doing and that, you know, sort of the great meditators in the various.

traditions we're doing. And it's funny to even use the word doing in that case because it's really a being. It's not a doing at all. And, you know, so I don't know what else to say about it, except that it's a radical shift to actually let go of the domain of doing altogether intentionally during periods of formal meditation practice and just drive. into being. And what I mean when they say that is being awake or aware. And then learning how to inhabit that as if it was an apartment or a mansion or, you know, just that kind of beach or the world where you're simply at home.

And there's no curriculum for what's supposed to happen. It's like you're not improving on yourself. You're understanding that even the word that we use, when we use the word self, is kind of a construct that has no essential validity, enduring validity. So whether it's your name or your age or whatever it is, the stories that we generate around the personal pronouns, especially I and me and mine, very often are so limited and limiting that once we create, that once we create, them, then we are imprisoned by them. And to recognize that when, again, coming back to the formal meditation practice, when you take your seat in the morning and just let that stuff play out without believing it or getting sucked into it or seeing that, yeah, you're going to get sucked into it over and

over and over again. But then the discipline is, sooner or later, you're going to notice you're sucked into it. That's the awareness. and then you're back. And so more and more what happens over time, it's not that your thinking mind is ever going to shut down or you're ever going to be like totally free of emotions, but they will not necessarily control you in the same way as they before.

Or if they do, you'll catch it more quickly and write yourself a restraining order or simply wake up and, you know, move in the direction that, again, as I said, optimizes clarity and kindness and well-being, not just for yourself, but for whoever you might be blaming for what you make me so angry. I mean, how many people say that all the time? You make me so angry. That's giving somebody else an enormous amount of power over you and you're taking virtually no responsibility for the fact that, hey, wait a minute, I took the bait. I took it personally. I believed that I was being thwarted in some way and I can't.

stand, you can feel the energy of what I'm saying, even as I'm saying it. And that's like, that's all technically called the poncha. They're kind of proliferations of thoughts and emotion in the mind that have no substance whatsoever, like dreams. And what we're learning is how to wake up and be embodied and not lost in thought or emotions, emotional reactivity, to such an extent that we dream our way into our grave without having really ever woken up and maybe even seeing who we're married to with clarity or who our children or our grandchildren because we're seeing our thoughts and narratives and emotional memories and stuff like that about them rather than in this moment fresh.

In a certain way we imprison not just ourselves but each other in our concepts about who everybody is. So it really is about a certain kind of freedom that's available, not after 30 or 40 or 50 years of heavy-duty meditation training in monasteries or whatever. But right here, right now, today, in this moment, and it turns out this moment's every moment because it's always this moment. So there's something about that that's, I don't know, I just have the sense that more and more people are finding their way to it,

because of a certain kind of emptiness associated with living on autopilot, even if it's a very successful narratives that you wind up, yeah, everybody else thinks you're terrific and you have all these titles and you have all this prestige and money or whatever it is, but you're a little bit distant from yourself. That's not a good feeling. So it's almost like a win-win situation to balance all the doing with, being and know who's doing all the doing. And that's the love affair.

Is this making any sense to you, Dan, as I talk like this? It is. I don't want it to sound like pie in the sky. This is something that's like I engage in a certain kind of way without all this talk every single day and not just for the hour that, or half hour, 45 minutes or however long it is that I'm sitting. And that's to say nothing of the yoga, mindful yoga, which is like a huge part of my life. and just the different door into the same room of awareness.

I mean, I'm a big advocate of practicing mindful yoga, especially over the decades as the body ages. But those formal practices are only the beginning. Life is the real meditation practice. So every moment is really the curriculum, so to speak. You know, the cliche is when you're washing dishes, wash the dishes, or when you're making love, are you even there for it?

But it's true for everything when you're hugging your child, you know. Whatever it is, can you drop underneath your, you know, sort of narrative about it all and be with the actual apprehending of it beyond all description, beyond words in a certain way? That's where Thoreau's quote about going to Walden comes in, you know, where he said someplace in Walden. And I went to the, which is all about it's a kind of rhapsody about mindfulness. He said, I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what they had to teach. And not when I came to die, you know, that moment right before you die when you really wake up,

discover that I hadn't lived. That's the challenge. So, and I like to say, you know, again, coming back to yoga and the corpse pose, which is said to be the most difficult of all the yoga poses. Why is it called a corpse pose? It's not like an accident while we just like had to call it something. It's called a corpse pose because the invitation is to actually die to the figments of your imagination that are constantly creating narrative

and instead wake up to being in the body in this moment. So you're dying to the past and memory and narrative in that way. and to the future and worrying and anticipation and planning and all that stuff. Not that it's all fine, but if it squeezes the present moment, then you're never alive. And if you inhabit the present moment, as far as I know, that's the only way to transform the world because it's the only way to transform the future. Because if you show up in this moment fully and not caught in the story of me or the story of us, whatever it is, then the next moment's going to be different because you were present in this one.

And that is like a virus. It's like COVID. It's like a meme that is infectious. And if you've ever encountered somebody who is really present, we have a very fine game detector for that. We know it immediately with somebody's more present than we are. And it's deeply, deeply attractive. because they don't have a selfing agenda. So it's not all about me. And all of a sudden you feel seen in a certain way that you don't. If whoever's seeing you is seeing you through the lens of either their story or your story or how much you could help me or how much I could help you or whatever that is.

I mean, all of that is fine on the instrumental level. But what we're really talking about is this, what it's sometimes called the non-instrumental level, where there's no place to go when you practice. There's no place to go. There's nothing to do. And there's no special state. There is no one mindful state. There are just gazillions of different states and awareness can hold all of them.

But it's not any of them. And it's a mystery. No neuroscientists know how we generate sentience out of billions of neurons in the brain and gazillions of trillions of synaptic connections which are changing all the time. And all of a sudden, like, you get sentience. And now we're worried about that with general AI. Because, you know, the thought is like by the fifth or sixth iteration of these machines training themselves for the next generation, maybe they'll become sentient.

And, you know, I mean, serious people think about that. And I don't know what the odds are around that. but maybe human beings need to wake up to being sentient in our fullness before the machines get the upper hand, so to speak, because we've been asleep at the wheel. This is a lot of fun for me. I enjoy listening to you talk. And yeah, I mean, I spend my days interviewing great meditation teachers. And there are at least two common denominators that I've noticed. One is they tend not to take themselves very seriously. the great ones. I think you would qualify. In my mind,

you probably wouldn't refer to yourself as great, but I will. And the second is, there's a kind of contact high that I, as a listener, get when I'm talking to somebody who's done a lot of meditation. Right.

Yeah, well, I think there's something to be explored in that because what is a contact high? Except, again, now I'm sort of riffing on my own experience, not yours so much, but a sense, of like recognition of something important that's kind of below the surface of ordinary awareness

and all of a sudden you see like, oh, that person kind of embodies it. You know, that's a projection, of course, because you don't really know that person, even if the Dalai Lama or whoever, you know, put on a pedestal, it's a human, real human being. But people who have done a lot of work on themselves in the kind of way that we're talking about. I agree there, you know, without. idealizing anybody or reifying some kind of perfect wisdom or anything like that because we're still mortal human beings and totally fallible that there is this sort of sense that at least they're not so self-centered that nothing else really matters it's just the universe according to me

and the movie is you know the story of me starring me the greatest thing to ever hit reality or the planet. And I think that's the opposite of compassion and the sort of recognition that for all the narratives around the personal pronouns, selflessness, the recognition of how profoundly spacious we are. Because as we said, if awareness is boundless, then you don't need to worry about who you are.

Because you're the entire universe, and you can embrace the other and simply be in a way that doesn't have to do with optimizing anything from a me because there's no self-centered ambition or attachment to something happening. And I feel like if we all related to each other with that kind of deep appreciation for the intrinsic beauty of being alive, then we could govern ourselves differently. I mean, really govern ourselves in our own life, even how we use the 24 hours, you know, and getting up in the morning to meditate, it's kind of governing yourself. And getting out of bed that's even more challenging than just practicing in bed.

It's not better, but there's something to be said about actually getting out of bed and, you know, sitting or lying down or doing whatever one's formal practices are. And I've been thinking about this more and more because the word Dharma, which is the word that's used to describe the Buddha's teachings. And the Buddha himself said that mindfulness is the heart of the practice. It's a direct path to liberation. So the word Dharma with a capital D is often used to describe the Buddha's teachings. And they are manifold. They're just like huge numbers of teachings over the 45 years or so that he taught. But the word Dharma with a small d means lawfulness.

It's kind of like the Tao in Chinese. And so lawfulness is like if we are in tune with the profound Tao or Dharma of the world, then non-harming becomes virtually axiomatic. and mindfulness will show you how much you may be drifting away from that because of othering, for instance, and you start harming people just in your thoughts. You start diminishing or devaluating some people and taking sides with other people and creating a kind of a situation that is in some sense very human and in another sense, and I think one that humanity has to really rise to and learn how to govern ourselves.

differently to minimize war and killing and genocide and suffering is to recognize that we're all fundamentally the same underneath all the labels and the selfing and stuff like that. And so there's something about that word, Dharma, both as the teachings of liberation from the point of view of meditative awareness and how we govern ourselves in our own lives. You know, like Buddhists take precepts, you know. Monastics take hundreds of precepts, but regular people when they practice in a Buddhist tradition will often for a retreat, say a two-a-week retreat or something like that.

Take five precepts, you know, one of which is, you know, not killing or not harming or not biving intoxicants and stuff like that. You know, we need to govern ourselves in a way that's not just on retreat, but for the entire arc of a human life. And that now we need to develop. new levels of governance in the world. Again, to minimize harm and to maximize good without it being warped or shaped, like space is warped by gravity by like very large galactic masses. What we need is to

jump to an entirely new level of being human on this planet and outlawing, in terms of governance, outlawing certain kinds of behavior, whether it's on the port of corporations, or whether it's on the part of religious warriors, or whether it's on the part of any agency that would seek their own benefit over the greater good of, let's say, the entire earth, not just humans. And of course, nobody knows how to do that, and it sounds like utopic, but that may be the curriculum of the moment if we're going to. to actually move to some kind of new level of being on this planet, given what I said about machine learning and next levels of artificial general intelligence. And what is the purpose of humans anymore? In this new world that we created and with the suffering that we have created as human beings, a lot of it totally gratuitous. And, you know, so there's a political, in some sense, or a body politic element to this that I think has always been there. I mean, we

transform ourselves. We've already transformed the world in a certain way. In our remaining time, I wonder if I could ask a few more practical questions about starting a meditation habit. Absolutely. First of all, I wouldn't call a habit. Okay. Why not? The word habit has, you know, a lot of downside to it because, you know, there's so many negative habits. Smoking is a habit, you know. Gambling is a habit. I don't want to turn meditation into a habit. What I think we want is to offer it as a way with a capital W, actually, a way of being. Because we're being anyway. We're going through our lives. We're going to die. The question isn't, and Oprah once asked me this, I don't know if I've mentioned this to you in other podcasts or something,

but I was once talking with Oprah. She was filming away, and she had a whole list of questions that she was going to ask. And at a certain point, she just, you know, out of nowhere, asked her next question, which was, John, what do you think about life after death? And I said to her, Oprah, I had virtually no interest in the question of life after death. I'm interested in the question of whether there's life before death. And I was deadly serious. Sorry for the pun, serious about it, because what often passes for life is just kind of like a driven automaticity that disregards your own beauty, never mind the beauty of others and of nature. And what this is about, coming back to the word habit, is really that it's a way of rebooting yourself.

It's like starting over. You know, it's just like cancel that. Let it be what it was. We're not denying any of what was in the past moment. But this moment, this breath, new beginning. This out breath, complete, letting go. And simply, sometimes I'll use the word awarenessing, just being awareness with no agenda other than to wake up. And this is the way to wake up is to just be awake, be aware.

We all have it already, as I said, so it's not like we have to get good at this or be good at it. It's just stringing moments together in a kind of disciplined way. And then, yes, of course, it is transformative in healing and in profound ways over time. but it's also about not having to get anywhere else in this moment or be a better person but actually recognize that you're already whole and already beautiful and with the years you know you're only going to get older but it's never going to be better than in this moment so it's a perfect moment for practice and then just let it spill out so let's go with what you're suggesting and sort of zero in on all of the kind of nitty-gritty questions of practice that maybe you want to

review or ask. Yeah. So instead of habit, let's say start a meditation practice. Yeah. A formal meditation practice. Yeah. Is there a time of day, a length of practice, a flavor of practice, all of these nitty-gritty questions that people have?

I know what my answers are generally, but I'm curious how you answer it. You know, you mentioned meditating in the morning. Is that like the time that one really should do it? Well, you know, I don't know what other people's lives are, but MBSR, mindfulness-based stress reduction, was designed to teach meditation to people who ordinarily would never cross paths with it at all. But when they're referred by their doctors

for one kind of medical condition or another, a lot of it often associated with pain of one kind or another and suffering, they actually engage in practice. And people often ask me, well, why? Why did you establish like 45 minutes a day, six days a week as the kind of core practice of MBSR? And the answer was like, well, if I made it 15 minutes or 20 minutes, it might not be long enough for people to get bored or for discomfort to set in or for anxiety or anui to set in. And of course, if those mind states don't have time to appear, you won't have time to, you know, you won't have the. opportunity to actually see how to be in wiser relationship with them through the lens of practice.

So 45 minutes a day, six days a week was like the foundation of MBSR. And that was in 1979. Now it's like 44 years later. And for the vast majority of MBSR programs, they're still doing 45 minutes a day, six days a week. So there are arguments for that. On the other hand, if you're not doing MBSR in a hospital with a really good teacher and you're just trying on your own with an app or with guided meditations or just on your own with

the no guidance. Time doesn't really matter. What matters is the love. What matters is the intention. And if your intention is not to get better or to improve on yourself or to become a great meditator, but to simply drop into your life and live it in moments where you're not filling it with doing, but just experiencing being, then time a day doesn't really matter, or how long you practice doesn't matter either. Play with it, experiment, be the kind of a scientist of your own motivation. And motivation is extremely important here. I mean, people who decide hearing this podcast or some of your other guests or whatever,

they may get motivated to practice. How long that lasts, you know, New Year's resolutions and everything. we know how long that lasts. And His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, is very, very powerful on this point. Motivation is everything. So you have to inquire in a certain way, what is my deep motivation for doing this? Is it just self-improvement or a little relaxation or a little less or anger management or something like that?

Or is it that I have a feeling that I'm actually missing some essential element in my life that maybe I remember from when I was three or four or five years old and somehow it got squashed, whether it was in school or not recognized by my parents or whatever and bullied or whatever it was in my social engagement. And I kind of got onto a trajectory where some of me got left behind. Robert Bly talks about it in a very beautiful way 30 years ago when Robert Bly was doing his stuff, the great poet Robert Bly, where he said, you know, we're all born with a sort of a bag that we have over our, left shoulder, he said. And over time when you want into social situations where people shame you or they blame you or one way or another, you feel bad about yourself, you take what you did and

your real self and you stuff it into this bag. And by the time you're 30 years old, the bag is like, you know, a mile long and getting caught in elevators when you get into the elevator. And you're kind of like you've stuffed some of the most beautiful aspects of yourself because you didn't realized that that beauty was not to be denied. And you tried to sort of make yourself socially acceptable or whatever it is, which is never a good strategy for being yourself. And so I think there's a way when you devote yourself or come to the idea that you want to live a more mindful life, live a more heartful life,

because the words mind and heart are the same word, in pretty much all Asian languages, I'm told. And so if you hear mindfulness and you're not hearing compassion or heartfulness, you're not really understanding what this is. That's why I'd say it really is a love affair, but not a love affair that's self-centered, you know, like me, I'm the star, but the exact opposite of inquiring into how empty those personal pronouns are, that you don't know who you are.

And that not knowing is part of awareness and is beautiful, absolutely beautiful. So to start a meditation practice, presumably the people were listening to this, maybe something that you or I are saying is resonating with them and it's saying, you know what, this is speaking to some aspect to me that's like actually very old. It's been around as long as I can remember, but I've never accorded it any time or energy. So let me kind of give it a certain kind of nurturance with a formal time that I'm going to actually devote to this, whether it's... It's pleasant or unpleasant doesn't matter or neutral.

Whether I have a good meditation in quotes or bad meditation, there's no such thing. As I was saying earlier, awareness is awareness. So awareness of good feelings, fine. Awareness of bad feelings equally fine. Awareness of anger or awareness of murderous rage, whatever it is, it's all fine because it's the awareness that is what's most important. And when you can bring awareness to rage or to,

feelings of self-loathing or anything like that, you can do this powerful experiment or pain in the body. Ask yourself, is my awareness of this loathing or pain or whatever it is actually experiencing that? And the answer will be no, that your awareness is just simply bigger. And it can see all those thoughts and emotions as like waves on the surface of the ocean. They come, they go, and we don't have to take them personally. And when we don't take them personally, then we discover a totally new dimension of our own humanity. And that can become the place out of which we live and act and operate and love. Everybody will do it differently.

It's not like everybody will look like they belong to some mindfulness cult. No, there is no mindfulness cult. I certainly hope there's no mindfulness cult and not devotee to great teachers or anything like that. the devotion needs to be to awareness itself. It's completely impersonal. And we can be incredibly grateful and express that gratitude for however it was that we encountered the practice and it started us on our own journey. And I know everybody who has ever meditated extensively in their lives actually remembers the moment that they really knew this was not some gimmicky. thing that they were going to take up for a moment and then let pass. They remember the moment when

they knew, this is it for me. This is it. This is for life in a certain way. And I love that. And I've asked hundreds of people that nobody doesn't know when that moment happened. And it evokes certain feelings and emotions and memories about what one's apprehension was what one saw and what one felt. again, that's another way of saying that my motivation for doing this myself to have this conversation with you at the turning point in the year is that if this program and all your other guests can be instrumental in tilting things in the direction of greater authenticity that we're living the lives that are ours to live rather than some fiction that we make up driven by either fear or insecurity or unexamined ambition that's actually aggression expressing itself in some way or other.

The world just instantly different because we're transforming what it means to be human or reclaiming, I would say, what it means to be human in the form of you. One last question for me. There are so many flavors. You referenced this earlier. There's so many flavors of meditation. You can meditate on the breath. You can do a body scan.

You can do sitting up, lying down. You can do loving, kindness, meditation, compassion meditation, sympathetic joy meditation, open awareness, Zen meditation, Tibetan, Vadriana, Zok Chan meditation. How do we even begin to figure out which style is for us? Not to mention the Vedic and Transcendental Meditation. This is just, as Richie Davidson, our mutual friend, likes to say the word meditation is kind of like the word sports.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. my moniker of the moment is many doors, same room. Doesn't matter what door you enter. You don't stand in the doorway and say, wow, this doorway is beautiful. And all the other doorways are like, you know, just can't compare to my doorway, you know, or my teacher or my tradition. The problem isn't the doorway or the teacher or the tradition, but the my is a big problem.

That's self-identifying. So to a first approximation, all the doorways, of course, are different. If you have a big hall and you've got 20 doorways, yeah, we all know. Every doorway is unique, right? Because it's located where it is and it's not where some of the doorway is. So the view is different inwardly and outwardly. But once you enter the room, it doesn't matter which door you came in. And the room is the room of the human heart.

when it is willing to put the welcome that out to itself. I don't know why it's just, I know why it just popped into my mind of that famous poem, which I've probably recited for you in other programs by Derek Walcott called Love After Love, because it's talking about just that when you will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine, give bread, give back your heart to yourself to the stranger who has loved you. all your life who you have ignored for another who knows you by heart.

And then he says, take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes. So that's like your whole story of me, the whole history, take down the love letters, the photographs, the desperate notes, the full, you know, catastrophe of the story of me. Peel your own image from the mirror. And then the last words of the poem, sit. feast on your life. So here's somebody who, you know, didn't do Buddhist meditation or any other kind of meditation

as far as I know. He got to it. However, he got to it. And when he says sit, I don't think he actually means sit like, you know, Zen monk or something like that or none. But just beyond any tradition, take your seat in your life. show up, be awake and aware, and love again, the stranger who was yourself. That means reclaim all your narratives and then be the knowing and the not knowing of what the whole thing is all about. And when I say the knowing and the not knowing, that's what awareness is. I mean, we need to be aware of how much we don't know, but think we do and have opinions

about. And so, yeah, it's important to be aware of what it is that we know. and feel in our values and our, you know, ethical foundation, which is absolutely key to this practice, non-harming. But we also have to, just like every great scientist, what we know can be profoundly blinding and oppressive because it, in some sense, creates some kind of barricade to what is right over the horizon that we may not know yet. And there we're like an insight into the nature of things would produce a new view. Like all of a sudden an aha moment. I mean, scientists, you know, know this, because, you know, this moment of discovery where you're the only person

on the planet that has realized this thing, whether you're Albert Einstein and, you know, general relativity or special relativity or, you know, whoever, that not knowing is really important. And so awareness, mindfulness is both being the knowing. It's an invitation to actually live in that space of knowing and the knowing of not knowing. And that's really pregnant, fecund with possibility for insight and for, say, an appreciation of people you may not have appreciated in the past or see how you write some people off or some things off. or you get caught in, you know, sort of one thing or another with only partial information about it. And to find a way to live with integrity and then take stands, become, you know, an activist, so to speak, of mindfulness, where you take stands, but really deeply informed stands that might help contribute to the kind of governance I've been pointing to where we create balance.

boundaries that make it less allowable to cause harm in all the infinite number of ways we're so good at and actually make unbelievable fortunes causing harm as much of corporate America does. So minimizing the harm in whatever ways we can and maximizing benefit and well-being and peace and health. you know, it's not a rocket science. It's something where the Congress would benefit enormously from being more mindful and practicing together, sitting together before making decisions, you know. Of course, there's a long way before we can reach a point like that.

But it's also true that things happen very fast when they happen. 50 years ago, nobody would have predicted that millions and millions of Americans would be meditating and that the end. my age would be funding millions and millions, scores of millions of dollars every year to fund meditation research and mindfulness research in particular, that would have been considered the heart of insanity and yet it's come to pass. And so I, for one, really want to stay in a kind of non-deluded but really open-hearted kind of appreciation of possibility. and that every one of us is in some sense an exponent of that.

Emily Degen said, I dwell in possibility, a fairer house than prose. And prose is that kind of linear thinking that carries you away from your meditation practice. And then possibility is the awareness that just opens to, oh, that's the mind just doing itself. And I don't have to get caught up at it. And when you exercise that muscle over days, weeks, months, years, decades, it's right into your grave as far as I can see in a certain way you're contributing as best you can to not only your own life but the life of the world in ways that are non-trivial and going to be more and more essential in the coming decades. John Cabot-Zinn, always a tremendous pleasure

to talk to you and thank you for your time. I really, really appreciate it. I love talking with you, Dan, and I love our connection over so many years. and may it be a benefit and a deep bow to you for everything that you're doing to curate in some sense the kind of interface between this sort of ordinary world and the world of possibility that mindfulness or whatever you want to call it can offer to people. And I just bow to you for the work that you do and the position you take in the world in that kind of a way. It's like really beautiful. Thank you. That was the 10% Happier podcast hosted by our friend Dan Harris with John Cabot Zen.

I hope you enjoyed it. On Friday, by the way, we have a brand new TED Radio Hour episode coming out with even more wisdom to help you navigate 2024. It's going to be a doozy. So stay tuned for that.