Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 223: Jon Kabat-Zinn | Meditation as a Love Affair

Episode Date: January 22, 2020

Jon Kabat-Zinn has been a key player bringing mindfulness meditation to the mainstream. In 1979, he introduced the now world-renowned Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, a meditation therapy used to treat a variety of illnesses. In this episode, Kabat-Zinn talks about the importance of awareness and why now, more than ever, having awareness and being present in each moment is vital. He says meditation doesn't end when you get off the cushion. Rather, we should view every moment in life as a meditative practice. Plug Zone Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Website: https://www.mindfulnesscds.com/ Books: https://www.mindfulnesscds.com/pages/books-by-jon-kabat-zinn Previous podcast: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jon-kabat-zinn-75 Podcast References Spaceship Earth by Buckminster-Fuller: https://www.amazon.com/Operating-Manual-Spaceship-Buckminster-Fuller/dp/3037781262 Calmer Choice on Cape Cod: https://calmerchoice.org/ MIT Study of mindfulness with middle school children: http://news.mit.edu/2019/mindfulness-mental-health-benefits-students-0826 Jon Kabat-Zinn Forward for “Current Opinion in Psychology”: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X19300211?via%3Dihub Ram Dass: https://www.ramdass.org/ Ten Percent Happier Podcast Insiders Feedback Group: https://10percenthappier.typeform.com/to/vHz4q4 Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail: 646-883-8326 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. For ABC, to baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, we're in the middle of our big January blow up, Bonanza, New Year, New You thing. And it's not over yet, January is not over yet. And in that spirit, I know a lot of you have made the resolution to meditate.

If that's still in process, we've got a special offer over at the 10% happier app, an extended free trial period. If you want to check it out, you can go to 10%.com slash 30 days to get started with the trial and check it out. We're very proud of what we do on the app, so we'd love to have you join us. Big episode this week. Big episode with a massive figure in the world of meditation,

especially in the West, I think it's safe to say that I would not have gotten interested in in meditation where it not for John Kabatzen, who came out of a scientific background at MIT and had a long history of studying meditation as well, and then came up with a way to combine the two through mindfulness-based stress reduction, which was a way to teach meditation without the religious overtones or metaphysical claims, and that created a situation in which creating this standardized protocol for teaching meditation over the course of eight weeks, this MBSR training, meant that all these scientists could swoop in and test it on different populations in a

replicable way, and that has created the explosion of scientific research. We've seen around meditation, and without that, aforementioned explosion of research, I wouldn't have been able to get over the hump to do it. I don't imagine. John is a huge figure for me personally, and if you're interested in meditation by the transit of property, he's a big, big figure for you,

even if you haven't heard of him before. His official title, he's the founding executive director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He's written a few huge books, one's called Full Catastrophe Living. Another is called Wherever You Go. There you are, which is one of the first books I ever read about meditation was in fact the book I was reading when I first gave it a try many, many years ago. That's just a short list of his books. He's written many of them.

And as you're about to hear, he is basically impossible to interview, but in the best possible way, in that he very kindly and enthusiastically and repeatedly derails the interview. But stay with it because I promise that even though there appear to be loose threads throughout the course of the interview, but stay with it because I promise that even though there appear to be loose threads throughout the course of the interview, I think we went back and tied them all up. Anyway, his style is really, really fun to listen to and to be with, and so I think you're going to get a lot out of this. Here he is, John Capazin. It's great to see you again. Good to be here. Always great to see you. Thanks, Dan. Thanks. As you know, I spent some time with your son recently. Yes, amazing. He's fantastic. Apple doesn't fall far.

It must be, I mean, just to have a, having a son myself for you to have a son with whom you can talk Dharma. That must be, I mean, I can talk. We also have Marvel characters. We really do a treat together. Yes, you guys have a real connection over this. Yeah, so that's a kind of condition that's very hard to even put into words how it feels for me as a father to do that. So what's on your, how old do you know? I'm 75.

75. 75. Yeah. You've been at this both practicing and my term not yours, but sort of evangelizing or spreading the word. Definitely. I know. I know. You would not use that word, but spreading the word.

I didn't even put it that way if you don't mind my playing around with this. It's like, you know, the way I see my karmic assignment on the planet, which is evolved over time is one to I found the cultivation of mindfulness through Buddhist meditative practices and traditions to be the most profound thing that I've ever encountered in my life. And even in my first 21 years or so before I discovered that, I was deeply involved in science and all sorts of other things of tremendous interest. But being exposed to the wisdom that the Buddhist traditions somehow offers through meditative awareness really put

clear lights on everything else that I was interested in the world and kind of made sense of it and connected different elements like say art and science and music and poetry and a deep understanding of the nature of the mind and the body and so forth from a kind of first person experiential level almost as if, you know, since I'm a laboratory scientist, trained as a laboratory scientist, we've got one more laboratory that none of us ever really recognizes such and that is the body. And life itself, emerging out of momentary experience, embodied in this body. So that kind of was a unifying and very revealing moment for me when I began to experience that within the originally the Zen meditation tradition.

And so what you're calling evangelizing or spreading the word or something is really the way I see it is that this kind of Capacity that human beings have is like a hidden dimension like what quantum physicists or String theorists or cosmologists would call hidden dimension of space-time or reality and we have hidden dimensions galore being human that we never pay any attention to, but they're right here. And if we were able to occupy them, we're aware ourselves of them. Then without anything having to change life would be very different. And the biggest hidden dimension is awareness itself. And until

recently in schools, we never got any training and awareness. We got teachers wanted us to pay attention as best we could, but they never taught us how. So a lot of times I'm a product of the New York public schools. I mean, we were yelled at to pay attention, which doesn't exactly help people who have a hard time focusing to actually get better at that. And then over time, it became obvious that this would be something focusing to actually get better at that. And then over time, it became obvious that this would be something that would be more

important for me to devote my life to articulating in ways that regular people, all of us, could understand that without doing anything, all of a sudden you have a whole extra dimension of wisdom to actually draw on that doesn't require moving to the Himalayas, moving into some cave, and meditating or any kind of cliche about what meditation would bring you 50 years after very hard practice. So these whole notions that wakefulness is something that you have to strive for and ultimately if you exercise the muscle long enough, you'll wake up, okay? And sometimes that's the e-word associated with that. Enlightenment.

Enlightenment, and then everybody wants to be enlightened. But if you're in darkened, your concept of enlightened is not going to be very, you know, accurate because the in darkenness is going to have all these filters that, you know, make whatever you think you're striving for, inconceivable, with the thinking mind. Okay, but that doesn't mean it's not instantly available if you drop underneath your thinking mind, which is all we're taught in school is how to think, but not how to awareness. So this is this sort of missing piece of our humanity, so to speak. And I like to talk about it that way, because we gave ourselves the name as a species, homo sapiens, sapiens, from the Latin separie, which means to taste or to know.

But it's not an intellectual knowing, like, looking something up in the dictionary and thinking about it, is the direct perceptual knowing that comes with wakefulness, with awareness, with direct contact. Through attention, you get comprehensive seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. It's like, that's part of our humanity, but we're never really encouraged to exercise that muscle so that we can drop in on this moment and live

fully. Now, as opposed to striving, striving, forcing, doing, doing to get to some better moment at some future time, that we idealize or romanticize as the way I really should be if I was really myself, enlightened, compassionate, kind, never angry, always keeping my voice calm, all I've never stressed, knowing how to deal with every conceivable kind of emotional or physical pain, and that's like just one more narrative of thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, and when you realize that in any given moment, which means basically making it real, then you're already okay, there's no place to go, as it says in the heart to trip, in the progenoparamita teachings, in the supreme Mahayana teachings, there's no place to go, nothing to do, and nothing, no special, something to attain.

Why? Because you're already in a saintly special, and virtually every conceivable way, even if the narrative you tell yourself is that, and then you fill in the blanks about what's wrong with you, or why the world is, you know, as it didn't for you, or why you'll never succeed, or you're too old, or you're too big, or you're too little, or you're too old or too big or you're too little

or you're too this or too that, which is all just more narrative, more thinking. So the way I approach everything is trying to channel not everything, because the way I approach much of my work of, I'll say evangelizing, you don't like that. Now, you're good at it. Someone's got to do it. I don't know if I'm good at it, but I'm certainly committed to it. One of the things I always try to do is

to channel the mind of a skeptic who knows very little about any of this. And so if I'm listening to you and I've had very little exposure to this and I'm hearing you use words like awareness and wakefulness and talking about dropping below thoughts, but you don't have to do anything. Sounds crazy. What does it? What does that even mean on the most granular level?

Well, if people are listening to this thing, this podcast, there's listening going on, this podcast, there's listening going on, which is the intention to actually follow and apprehend and hear what's being said. So in your case, since you're also listening to me, you're trying to decode for yourself and for the entire listening audience, to whom this may all sound like aability book. What where the there is, you know, where the here is, what's really underneath this. So awareness is just a regular American word, English word. But we hardly ever like put it on the microscope

and investigate, well, what a gift it is. I mean, there are neurological disorders where you lose touch, say, with the proprioception, the sense that we never, ever knew we had that you're in your body, that you know where your body is, that you don't have to see your hands, and you can put your mind right in your hands, you know exactly where they are. And I don't mean in knowing like a sketch in your mind of a picture of where your hands are, but you can feel your hands. We take that totally for granted, but you know, there are neurological disorders, very rare

thank goodness, where and all of our sacks described several of them in some of his books, where you lose touch with this sense of proprioception. And then, even to put food in your mouth, you have to actually see your arm and your hand and force through thought, your hand to get up to. So, but when we eat, for instance, we could be aware of eating. When we are hearing, we could be aware of not just listening, but actually hearing what's going on, and not just the hearing of, say, my words at the moment, but actually the space between the words, the you that's listening and decoding what I'm being said and open to the next thing that hasn't been said yet.

And this is all like chomsky spent his entire life trying to understand how we can actually wag our tongues in this way and concert with the mouth and the lips and the air coming out of our lungs and make a sentence that I can make go on as long as you like and will still be grammatical. And your ears are decoding at moment by moment by moment and we take that for granted. It's totally miraculous. And that's just the hearing, what about seeing? What about tasting, what about touching, what about loving touch, what about feeling the air on your skin.

So this is not some kind of abstraction. It's like, right, kind of contacting elements of our moment to moment human experience that we usually tune out because, and we have language for it, we say, usually tune out because, and we have language for it, we say we're out to launch or we're lost in thought. We're lost in thought. And you know what, it turns out to be true and you can lose yourself for your decades at a time and all sorts of thoughts that I'm trying to get

someplace else and be successful or whatever and then you wake up and you're the same old same old at the end of that, and then you die. So I like to sometimes say, look, get it over with, die now to the future, to the past, or at least as an exercise, as a practice, and live your way into this breath coming into the body, this breath leaving the body with no agenda for what should happen the next moment. And all of a sudden these New dimensions including the five senses only they're more like eight of them including awareness

Which is described as a sense in the in the Buddhist tradition Because without awareness you can't hear anything you can't see anything you can't smell anything you can't taste your food So it's not that big a leap to actually clarify that if we're going to be evangelizing or encouraging people to do this kind of thing, that there's value to it that's not about you being better than you think you are, but realizing how beautiful and whole the WHOLE you are already. I mean, and I sometimes like to joke, well, when was the last time you thanked your liver for what it's doing? You know, we can go through like 70, 80, or 90 years of life and never appreciate the complexity of the liver. Never mind the brain and what it does or the heart. And again, the brain is the most complex,

the human brain is the most complex arrangement of matter in the universe. And it's not out there in the Andromeda galaxy. It's right here in inside our little old heads. And if we were to appreciate that, then we would maybe deal with stress and anxiety and depression and even emotional pain, if not physical pain in very, very different ways, not by suppressing any of that, but by having one more

dimension to embrace it in ways that would be healing and in some sense, recognizing how deeply interconnected we are as people so that it's not all about my suffering, but it's in some sense about our humanity. And now on the planet, you know, I'm, you know, one of the things that I devote myself to is dealing with the kind of challenges that are not, don't seem to be going away for us as a species that are really up there like the global warming and the environmental changes that we're experiencing. And we need in some sense all hands on deck as humans to deal with what's coming in the next 10 to 100 years. The scientists are now going from 100 years down to 10 in terms of like the rate at which the ice sheets are melting and stuff like that and sea level rise.

And maybe the most privileged 10% or 1% or 0.01% of people won't have to deal with the consequences, the sort of global consequences of global warming, but or could escape them temporarily, but our children and our grandchildren are not going to be able to escape this, and people on the planet and other less fortunate places are not going to be able to escape our ignorance. So again, waking up is not like some remote metaphor. It's like, hey, we need to wake up. I've been thinking about Buckminster Fuller, who a long time ago, who I met when I was a student at MIT, and he wrote a book called Spaceship Earth, a long, long time ago, I think in the 60s. No one thought about that, but you know, it might have even been before we went to the moon and looked back and took the photograph of Earth sitting in the blackness of space, all when it's a beautiful planet, but we don't have a planet B, you know, if we screw this one up. And we're screwing it up because of our clever, we are as human beings,

how industrious, and how much we can heat the atmosphere, and then Brazil is burning the rainforest on purpose. I mean, for, you know, sort of its own capitalist purposes, which are understandable. And it's like, hey, you want to like destroy your lungs, the planet's lungs. So if it's true that we are on one, this spaceship Earth of Buckminster Fuller, then maybe in an emergency of this magnitude, we need all hands on deck, all hands on deck,

not Republicans, Democrats, or Americans, or, you know, sort of anybody else, but all humans need to, in some sense, wake up to that name we gave ourselves as a species home with sapiens, sapiens, which means basically the species that is aware and is aware that it is aware. That gives us this kind of freedom to heal, this freedom to realize what we need to do and let the doing come out of wisdom out of a kind of being that is part of our nature. So that's the way I talk about it, and I agree with you that it's really important. So whatever verb you use to sort of want to spread the notion that mindfulness could be incredibly valuable or compassion or dharma or these kinds of meditative practices that

enhance our capacity to wake up, I'm totally on board with that. It's just that sometimes I'm also aware of how easy it is to give people the impression that there's some place else to get and when you get that, then everything will be better. This is kind of like a dualistic perspective on meditation, which is part of our problem as human beings is that we always see this But we never see that and so we need to understand the unity inside of obvious dualisms and that's what Dharma is is non-dual Practice, they're about 75 things I want to follow up from yeah, I'm talking to my no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no my no no no no no no that you told me to so I did I did before you started rolling I said don't don't drop the little editor in the back of your mind when I say this 70 when I throw it in a random number like 75 it's it's a compliment but you say there's

nothing to do or there's there's this you try to get people to get away from the idea that it's something we've got to do a ton of work and then we'll get there quote unquote. Yeah, but You're also saying we need to wake up And and it's kind of an emergency that we wake up, but one has to do something to wake up right? This is the non-dual perspective really by non-dual. Okay. This is where it really comes in and why I quoted from There's no place to go nothing to do in that. So I was suggesting it before, your ears already work, right? You can't improve on your hearing except to pay attention, because if you're not paying

attention, people can say things to you, you don't even hear them, because your mind is someplace else. The same with your eyes, the same with touch, the same with digestion, the liver, the lungs, the heart, the brain. So in a certain way, we're already miraculous beings. Let's take to a first approximation. Could you be improved upon, yes, of course. We can all, we all can learn to be more generous, less self-centered, all sorts of things like

that. But the basic wholeness, WHOLE and ESl-e, and e-s-s, which is the root meaning of the word health and healing, it's already ours. And so we're not as broken as we think we are. And if we can inhabit even for one in-breath and one out-breath, that sense, I'm okay enough as I am,

in my own skin, then how you will be in relationship to the next moment is totally different. So if you want to change the future, the only leverage, the only Archimedes fulcrum that you have available is this moment. As soon as you are inhabiting this larger dimension of this moment, then the next moment is different by virtue of you being a little bit less self-centered and self-preoccupied by we're getting someplace else in this moment than the future is already different.

Then you can see differently, you can feel different. But I'm plenty self-centered in the present moment. I know. Me too. Everybody is. I mean, that's in some sense the default mode. If you put somebody in a scanner and I think we've talked about this before, and you ask them to do nothing,

it turns out that there's a whole network in the brain in the middle line of the cortex that just goes wild, you know, with activity. And it's basically generating narrative. It's generating the story of me, and my past, my future, my successes, my failure, my pain, my stress. And yeah, my failure, my pain, my stress. And yeah, so, and that's what we pay most attention to.

But there's this all this other stuff that I said is questioning who the my is. We use these personal pronouns all the time, but we don't actually know, you know, if you're not your name and you're not really your age and you're not even your gender, I mean, you know, who are you when you boil it all down? Well, that becomes a kind of really interesting question, not to answer, but to actually continue to ask. Because then you can ask, you know, questions like, you know, what are my relationships? So, what is my true work? Who are these children? And then you may find that that will help you to be in wiser relationship to them on an emotional level never mind on a cognitive or conceptual level

and then navigate your life a slightly differently because You've got your fingers on the controls as opposed to just letting it all happen and kind of going along for the ride Which we often do that's what auto pilot is all about on the control, says, opposed to just letting it all happen and kind of going along for the ride, which we often do. That's what auto-pilot is all about. But I hear a contradiction here because you're saying there's nothing to do, but there is something to do. There are practices to do. Well, the beauty of mindfulness is that when the doing, our doing comes out of awareness, comes out of, let's say, being a timeless element to the present moment, like it's always now.

So there's a certain way in which like we're driven by the clock and we've got to get this done by then, and of course if you're in the media it's even worse. And it's not that that's not true, It's just not the only thing that's true. It's also that, hey, you're going to die at some point. And then however driven ABC is, it's not going to involve you. So we can make everything sort of personal and the world centered on me and my deadlines and everything else. But then it comes to the questions like, yeah, but who am I? And this is kind of a profound, this is the most important thing about meditative awareness is to ask, who am I or what am I? And then not try to fill it in with dime store responses or automatic responses,

but like, wonder, well, what is this precious human life that we have? And how could we use it, so to speak, to best advantage, moment by moment by moment, because that's all we have is this moment. And there is a way in which it's timeless, and everybody who's listening to this has had that experience of time falling away for at least a moment, and you're just like, who you are and you're complete, and it's without words. So it is very much underneath thinking. And then all of a sudden what happens, and you're complete and it's without words. So it is very much underneath thinking. And then all of a sudden what happens, and we now have electronic equipment

that can show this happening in real time. And my colleague, Judd Brewer, has done this with EEG feedback, neurofeedback. All of a sudden you have this silent wakefulness. That's part of our constitution. It's not that special. And then I was like, wow, this is it. I'm enlightened or whatever it is. And then all of a sudden, on the brain scans, everything goes in the other direction because the very fact that you've now put words to it kills it. And we've had that experience constantly in the family. You open your mouth and,

man, you've ruptured a perfect moment because you had to say something. I mean, I certainly, that's true for me. I mean, like, you know, idiotically say something that, like, names something that would be better left unnamed, but just, like, really felt. It could be with children, it could be with your partner or spouse, but whatever it is, that we just kind of conceptualize a little too much because we're in the habit of it. So that's a moment of liberation. We're talking about these meditative practices are about freedom. Freedom from the tyranny of our own minds when they get into these ruts of not liking ourselves or liking ourselves too much

and having these narratives of who we are or who we're not, without really the direct embodied, not even inquiry, but just apprehension of this moment, the hands, the feelings, and the sensations in the body, the eye contact, whatever it is. And I use the vocabulary of love around this, that this is really a love affair, not narcissistic love, but a direct experiential love affair with the miracle that in this moment we're alive. And that we're actually talking you and I, and that we're sitting across from each other, we're making eye contact them. To some degree, we're on the same wavelength

and to other degrees, we're trying to sort of parse, well, how to unpack this whole conversation so that it makes maximal sense to the people who are listening. My only purpose in doing this, frankly, except for the fun of talking with you, is that if people are listening to this, my one aim is that they'll actually,

sometimes I put it this way, get your own cushion or a chair, and actually not listen to anything, including a podcast, and just drop into, say, the feeling of the breath moving into the night of your body moment by moment by moment. And if you're in the car or listening to this in the car, with your eyes open, okay? Because you're breathing even if you're driving, but don't get absorbed in one thing when you need to be looking out the windshield, that's looking out the windshield meditations. It's absolutely critical.

But when you are willing to actually befriend yourself in that way, it really is a love affair with the beauty of life. And I would say the miracle of life, the miracle of our body, more atoms in our body than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. And yet, at the same time, if you take a physicist's perspective, we're almost entirely empty space. No one knows how a constellation of atoms, you know, from the periodic table, which all either came out of the big bang, if it was hydrogen we're talking about, or the explosion of supernovae a long time ago that spread higher weight atoms around the universe. Nobody knows how you go from a constellation of atoms to awareness. What's called sentience, how you get this brain or nervous system or body to actually

be aware. The way it's defined in the sort of philosophical domain of what's called the mind-body problem is that it's something to be like you, that there's something like something. The experience of you is something like an experience. So we do not understand experience and how that comes out of what they often say is three pounds of meat in the head. Nobody knows. There's no neuroscience, there's no philosophers. We're just, like, it's a giant mystery. And that's probably the love of fear too. It's like, we are miraculous

beings. And we need to wake up to that to what, say, the Buddhist might call our true nature or Buddha nature, because anything else is kind of a prescription for suffering. And we can take that on the individual level of just your own health and mental health and well-being and anxiety and stress and depression, where there's a huge amount of scientific research now that mindfulness can have a very saludatory effect on all of those elements, but then on a more global planetary level, same thing. In terms of waking up and healing, say, the body politic, and you don't have to look far to see how much pain the body politic of the United States is in,

the body politic of the world, and how much the mind and greed hatred and delusion contribute to that. And that's all coming out of humans that don't know who they are. Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court.

I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears.

When Britney's fans formed the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App. As I understood it, you were saying something to the effect of there is something in this process of waking up that can lead inextravely, almost to a more helpful role in your orbit, in your community, in your country, on the planet.

And yet I think back to my daily experience of meditation and how often it is that I sit there and do exactly what you're describing, which is just notice that there's all this awareness happening. You know, I'm aware of my breath coming in and going out, I'm aware of the sounds and I'm aware that I have nothing, I, the small eye, a little me, my ego,

I have nothing to do with this. This awareness is already here. You don't have to conjure it. I don't have to manage it. I don't have to do anything. It's already right here. I can have that experience several times in the course of meditation.

And I can get up and send an asked email. And so for me, I have this question about how inexorable is the process of waking up to being a better- And I asked your question- In the human race, yes. Okay, so between the- what you were just describing and the nasty email, you use the words I can get up and then send a nasty email. Okay, so when you're getting up Is there awareness there often no the bell goes off and okay see because this is this is why we're having this conversation Part because you think okay the meditation is over Yeah, and now you're gonna do the email. Yes, okay What if the email were part of the meditation?

What if getting up was the... What if life was the meditation and not what you think of as sitting in a particular posture, following your breath, looking at your watch to see how long it's going to take and then having some good awareness experiences but having it be part of this thing you're calling my meditation practice and then there's like the nasty email and everything else that you have to deal with during the day. What if you actually intentionally experimented with the possibility that what the meditation practice really is, is every moment, no matter what is on your to-do agenda.

Then life itself becomes the meditation practice. And then you would still have all those feelings, just the way when you're meditating most of the time, you're not meditating, you're trying to meditate, trying to bring your mind back to your breath or whatever it is, and watching all your thoughts that drive you crazy and in thinking, I'm the worst meditator in the world and the real meditation practice is realizing, you know what, that's all okay. You don't have to make any of that go away. It's absolutely fine because you know it and the knowing that it's happening is not

thinking, it's awareness. So what we're learning is how to actually trust that aspect of experience. And it's already, you just prove that it's already here for you. The question is, do we shut it off and then go into autopilot and send the email, or do we actually bring it with us, or ride the waves of that, just like we're still breathing. But if we're not aware of our breathing while we're getting stressed, then we don't have that extra degree of freedom to modulate that. You say, oh, this person is driving me crazy. That's my meditation teacher of the moment. That's my meditation practice. And you know what? It's okay to fail miserably over and over and

over again. This is not about perfection, but it's about realizing even, oh, I blew that one. I pushed sand before I actually reread the email. And so how aggressive it is, how wrong it is, how all sorts of things, like, why don't you see that before you push sand? Well, we've all done that, of course. We all just push sand because email is so automatic and life is so automatic. So we're trying in some sense to haul it back in,

reel our lives back in so that we're not so imprisoned by our autopilot that even if we think of ourselves as like trying to be a good meditator, in the end, it's just one more thing that we have to put into our already too busy day. And then the mind is so unruly, I'm never going to actually get anywhere. And the irony of it is that you're already exactly where you need to be and your awareness is like the best friend you will ever have. And it will not let you imprison yourself in a small-minded, I-me-in-mind, ultimately. Now does that take sometimes years of having a

rick on the question? Yeah, I'm not saying like, okay, first time experiencing the mind in that kind of a way that you're gonna all of a sudden realize everything that my words are pointing to, they're just pointers. But since you're breathing anyway, and since we're living anyway, and since awareness doesn't take any time or actually much effort

There's a certain way in which this is so easy that we make it too difficult for ourselves And now it's being taught in the schools I might say on a very very comprehensive level and just to switch topics slightly a recent study out of MIT's McGovern Brain Sciences Institute in the Boston Public Schools, in the charter school, in the inner city Boston, with a very highly diverse population of kids, did a control between offering kids a coding class, okay? So they actually learn coding,

which is like a very attractive thing for getting high-paying jobs in the future, versus an eight-week mindfulness curriculum that some people on Cape Cod had developed called Karma Choice. And they put this to the test and actually found that the kids who took the eight-week mindfulness program had far fewer behavioral encounters of, you know, that had to do with problematic behaviors in the school. Then they, then the kids in the coding class, they were just kind of like the way they always were. And then when they took a subset of those kids and put them in the FMRI scanner and showed them faces with angry expressions and stuff

like that. The kids who were in the mindfulness class in eight weeks had a much more reduced amygdala activation on the right side, which is the amygdala, as you know, is kind of a center that involves stress reactivity and emotional reactivity and anxiety and things like that. So this is kind of MIT, studying mindfulness in school children in the inner city and showing that this has applications that are exactly what you want. If you were the principal of a school, let you want your kids to actually be in less kind of conflict with, you know, the social environments they're in, and actually less emotionally reactive,

and because those are the conditions for optimal learning, and for learning how to actually carry what you learn in eighth grade, out into high school, and then contributing in some way in the world. So, mindfulness is now moving into, you know, primary and secondary education in ways that are extraordinary because then the teachers don't have to yell at the kids to pay attention. They can collaborate together in resonating in that space of awareness without having to fill the mind with a curriculum. Then the mind stabilizes and guess what?

The curriculum actually becomes more interesting because you can actually see that whatever the subject matter is, it's kind of fun to learn, but only if you've prepared the ground. And it's the same, say, with emotional reactivity in the family or at home or parenting or in work setting that when you're actually letting life be the meditation practice then every moment is great practice and

So this moment that you and I are sitting across from each other in a studio at ABC and we have these people who at some future moment are going to be listening to this in real time and it will be now then too for them it is in real time, and it will be now then too. For them, that we're actually attuning not only our brains, but our hearts in a certain way to this inquiry as to how to live a life of integrity, of sort of ethical kind of dimension of of realism that recruits all of our potential human intelligences. And we have far more than just thinking. I mean, we have somatic, emotional, social, interpersonal, and I would say, you know, I mean, just endless, proprioceptive intelligences. And if it was important in the last 2600 years to do this and some small number of people on the planet

were doing this mostly in Buddhist temples in various countries, now I would say it's absolutely critical for us as a species to engage in this kind of thing, not as Buddhism or as any kind of other sort of religious practice, but as something that wisdom dimension that really comes out of all cultures and traditions. Yeah, you wrote an article recently, you talked about us being at a key inflection point for the species. I'll put a link to your article in the show notes. But let me pick up on everything you've just been saying.

I've learned recently how to say yes and instead of yes but. So it's beautiful. Yes, it's everything you just said. And the question still remains for me that, given that I think have maybe conceded isn't the right point, but you have agreed or acknowledged that there is some doing in the non-doing here.

Totally. There's a practice. Totally. I've not just conceded that. I'm an advocate of that kind of doing. And so somebody like me who's on your side, you know, your work had a huge role in my changing my own life a decade ago to embrace this practice, a huge part of that. I think you're the sort of prerequisite in many ways to my being what I am now. And I am-

I'm very touched by that by the way. It is irre your refutably true i'm glad to hear you say that but it is deeply true and i am deeply flawed and uh... still have a chain the capacity to be uh... moron in many many ways and so i'm you know you're a very lovable moron because you're willing to say it uh... it turns out that everybody's more or less that way, but very few people are actually so undefended that they're willing to not only say it, but they actually use it in the service of waking up of wisdom. Well, how can you, I mean, even if you get 10% of infinite, is 10% of infinity is infinity. And you know, so I've always had this certain kind of issue with the 10% happier because like, you know, it's not all about happiness even

it's about it's about being who you are. And sometimes there'll be happiness present. And other times there will be tremendous grief and happiness will not be appropriate even, but the kind of wisdom that we're talking about can hold happiness and unhappiness, not all self-centered as me as the only important person in the universe. And that's And that's what we could call wisdom that's not separate from a compassion that doesn't need to even be voiced as a thought because it is completely recognized as the nature of human reality. Okay, so I had a question I was building toward for a second, but now I'm going to react to that and then I promise listeners I'm going to get back to the question.

You may not even care, but anyway on the 10% happier thing. I agree with you. Everything you just said the 10% happier is a joke And I put it on the title of the book because it was a quote from the actual book and that indicates kind of I'm going to make a audacious comparison now between me and the Buddha, which I don't I'm not doing in with much seriousness, but I have deeply influenced by the work of insights of and approach taken by the Buddha. And his approach was to speak in a way he modulated and modified his message given the audience he was in front of. So if he was in front of fire worshipers, he talked about our relationship to the

senses in terms of fire. And he presented his four noble truths in the way in which physicians at that time presented their diagnosis. Right. So he really, and he used a lot of agrarian analogies because he was talking to you. Cultivation, cultivation. Or cutting open a sack full of beans. He would, or the aggregates of our experience were named after heaps like heaps you might see in a field. Yeah. So anyway, I chose that name not because I thought it was all encompassing in its accuracy, but because I thought it was the type of thing that might hook people who otherwise would reject this stuff.

And very wise that you did that. Of course, you know, I'm just teasing you. I know, I know. But also to make a point about like non-striving and non-doing. And this is the hardest thing for us to wrap our thinking minds around because we can't. And that is that you're already okay. And this is also fundamentally part of that Buddhist teaching. It's more elaborated in the Mahayana teachings rather than in the and in the early Buddhist teachings, the teachings that are

now thought to be closer to those teachings than technically speaking, the teravod and teachings. Okay, so everything is colored with a certain kind of cultural lenses, or through cultural lenses, that we don't necessarily understand. So I'm all for tongue in cheek and a sense of humor and everything else, because what we're really talking about is too serious to take too seriously. Seriously. I mean, it really is. I mean, this is we're talking life and death stuff. And so humor is incredibly important. And humor that is really grounded in what we keep coming back to or what I keep coming back to is this kind

of non-dual perspective that rather than think that we're going to get better, that there's no improving on who you really, really are, but it's not who you think you are. So that's the space between the narrative and the actuality of you. So when you put someone in a scanner, what you're measuring when you see that network light up, that what's called the default mode network, because people default to thinking and the story of me and the narrative of me and my success and my failure when you tell them not to do anything.

But what if we were to shift through exercising the muscle, through regular meditation practice, which is like going to the gym, only you have to gym. You are the gym, but you have to use it on a regular basis. So it does involve discipline, it does involve work, it does involve a certain kind of doing, the doing of non-doing, the doing of being. And that's like hard for us to wrap our minds around, but that's why we keep doing this stuff is keep talking blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I said people can't and oh, I finally

get it. I'm okay as I am. And when you wake up to that, then all of a sudden, what I think is happening, and you know, I have to wait 20 years for the neuroscientists to either dispute it or confirm it, that we're actually shifting the default mode network. We're shifting the default mode from mindless reactivity and self-preoccupation, me, me, me, I, I, my pain, my suffering, my success, my failure, to a much larger perspective of we, rather than me, so to speak, that an interconnected, inter-being to use Technat Hans' word, where we may be dissentered in the universe, but we also are acutely aware that everybody else is too, and therefore compassion arises naturally because we, as he says, inter-ar. So it's very hard to find any vocabulary. I don't actually use that vocabulary of his,

because I've developed my own. But at a certain point, words come to an end, which is where, in some sense, the beauty of poetry and of just silence comes into it. And so when we take our seats, say in the morning, which I recommend to everybody who's listening to this, is to sort of when you wake up in the morning, you don't even have to take your seat. Don't even get out of bed. And it struck me that I should say this to you because of what you said about my work in the past having had some kind of profound influence on you. So when I'm saying this more and more because I was so hard core about the meditation practice, I wake up at 4 in the morning and sit for an hour or five or whenever I could make the time when my kids weren't awake in the morning.

But now I've sort of, as I've gotten older, I say, well, why bother even getting out of bed? Why don't when you wake up? Because if we all say, hey, I woke up and I got going with my day, okay? Before we wake up and before we get out of bed in the morning, why don't we just sort of lie on our backs in what's called the corpse pose in yoga for a while? Just lie on our backs and finish the job. If we're going to say, we wake up, why don't we just wake up right there? And check, am I awake?

So one way to do that is like, put your mind in your feet. And just see if you can feel your feet. We talked about this earlier in the conversation. And now put your mind in your hands. Can you feel like your hands? And the answer will be, yes, I can. Do I ever do this? Probably not.

Unless my hand hurts or something like that. So you can feel your hands. That's awareness. If you want to, you can feel your feet. You're shifting your attention. And then all of a sudden, voila, the feet are there and they light up a little bit. Now can you feel your whole body line here? Can you feel the envelope of your skin?

Can you feel yourself breathing? Do you know that you're actually awake? Can you drop underneath your thoughts for, say, just one in breath, one out breath, give yourself over to like total wakeful silence and then get out of bed. I always just have to pee so badly. Yeah, well, you can then be aware of having to pee so badly. And it's amazing how, and you've, of course, everybody's experienced, one minute you have to pee so badly, next moment, that's not a problem.

Yeah, that's right. Without having to pee. Yes. So, or you get out of bed. I mean, there's no way to fail at this because it's every moment is the meditation practice. But those moments before you wake up, usually our feet hit the floor. We're running on autopilot before we know it. But we say we woke up.

It's not true. It's a narrative we're telling ourselves. I woke up and this happened. You woke up and you were on autopilot before you were even brushing your teeth. We've played with the shower thing before. We're in the shower and we don't even know we're in the shower. We're in our whole, our home, first meeting of the days in the shower with us. Because we're not actually present in our minds.

So from that point of view, it's all just play. It's fun. If it isn't fun, do something else, go into investment banking or something, whatever. But that's what I mean about the practice in some sense, being a love affair. And also, there's no one right way to do it. It's not like have to do it.

The Dan Harris way or the John Kebets in way or whoever your guru of the moment is, in fact, the only way that this can really be valuable is if you find your own way. And I would say way with a capital W, kind of in the Chinese sort of frame of, uh, Dow, you know, the way of a being that is larger than the narrative of who we think we are. Is this making any sense to you as we talk? Because you know, he's like, we can always scrap this podcast. We can just push a race as far as I'm concerned, too. And it may be a silent podcast for an hour would be like the ultimate, you know, the food at once gave a talk like that.

We did he hold them a flower. He at the end of three hours. So, you know. The Bruno once gave a talk like that. We did he hold them a flower or something like that. At the end of three hours. So, you know, you had to wait. Some guy got enlightened in the audience. Many people did. Mahakasha, no, only one. Well, the story is that he did actually, you know, he gave talks all the time.

And everybody came and they sat. And on hard ground, it wasn't in kind of like, you know, David Gethenhall or something like that. He sat on hard ground. And he would kind of like, you know, David Gettenhall or something like that. He sat on hard ground, and he would give these amazing talks and people. This is apocryphal, I wasn't there. So one day the story goes, he was sitting and everybody's expecting him to talk

with 10,000 people there, one hour goes by. Remember, sitting on hard ground, okay, not on comfy meditation cushions, you're sitting nothing, the Buddha's not talking to you. Two hours go by. Three hours go by. And then he reaches over and he picks up a flower from some vase that's nearby and he holds it up to the audience. And it was said that there are like 9,999 puzzled faces

and one smile. And that smile is said to be, of course, this was all made up by the Chinese Zen people, the original moment of Zen transmission to Mahakashapa, is one of his students, our hearts, that kind of, what they call direct transmission outside the sutras, outside the teachings. It's like mind to mind transmission, like hold up a flower. Well, I thought he was going to give a talk.

Why do we have to wait for three hours in my body's aching and you know, I'm like, you're not ready for anything. And now he's holding up a flower. I mean what's this all about? So that's all thinking right. But the smile is yeah we don't need to say a word. You see the beauty. You see the irony. You see the wholeness and the smile you don't he didn't need to say anything just. You see the wholeness and the smile, you know, he didn't need to say anything just There's like a joke you get the joke you can't explain a joke so it's that kind of

Moment to moment thing that's the non-dual Dimension of it and yes, the irony is we need to do a lot of talking We need to do a lot of doing but if the doing is not coming out of being then it's going to be We're using the meditation is not coming out of being then it's going to be we're using the meditation as a certain kind of aggression and a certain way to get to some special place where we will be different when the whole point is you don't have to be different because you're already good enough, you're already whole as you are. And the only thing that's going to happen with more time is you're going to get older.

That's pretty much guaranteed. But what if you're good enough for now? And then we learn how to rest in this adequacy, wakefulness, out underneath thought or outside of thought. And then the next moment is just another moment of either we're going to react and push send on the email or we're going to respond and catch that we like we're actually don't want to send this email because our better nature or our awareness actually really understands

so we're into connectedness that it's causing harm, not just that a person, there's gonna get the email from me myself. So that's the spirit in which I see it. And if we're, if this conversation in some senses, and we haven't talked at all about social justice or, I was trying to build an racial justice, I know that you have my colleague and friend,

Ronda McGee coming in. Yes. So, but I want to just say that what we are talking about, if it is not grounded in ethics and not grounded in a certain kind of integrity, then it's not mindfulness, it's not heartfulness. And also that given the complexity of our society nowadays and how much diversity there is and how much human suffering is historically baked into our lives from, you know, ice ages ago,

but also from, you know, the Native American genocide and 400 years of slavery and oppression of human beings, of African descent, and all sorts of other stuff that's going on, we need each other to mirror for us what we don't even know, we don't know. Let me just have a second, okay, because you've delivered me

to what I was trying to get to before, but we had a lot of very useful digressions along the way. All the doing of non-doing that I think you and I both agree is a very healthy thing to do or not do. And yet we remain flawed. And yet you're talking about this wakefulness, mindfulness being potentially a really, I think what's the phrase you're using the article? The seeds of a necessary global renaissance in the making. Given the depth and breadth of the historical issues around race, inequality, violence, sexism, tribalism, and given, so that's what that's the pattern. Genocide's a side genocide and given the

Gravity if what this if you believe the scientists and I happen to believe the scientists of of the climate crisis that's both here and coming down the pike at us how and given the fact that this is the the waking up process is slow and one step forward and two step back and the waking up process is slow and one step forward and two step back and nasty emails and et cetera, et cetera. How can, how can, little old mindfulness play a part of the seeds of a global renaissance in the face of all of the problems that you and I both agree are here and to come? Beautiful. And thank you for articulating it that way and pulling all these threads together.

And the answer, the short answer is I don't know, but we have to collectively find a way. I am not advocating a savior. Okay, some one person that's going to make this all like a Buddha, you know, who'd come and then everybody will follow that person. I think we have gone beyond that in sort of our own evolution as a species that we need to really understand interconnectivity and understand that in a certain way with that image of interest net that the wisdom is a distributive function that we all have it or have access to it. And we need to all make our various contributions to it.

I'll answer the question that you just asked through what I was saying about racism and the inheritance that we have because we need each other to show us what we don't know, we don't know. And so then we can learn from each other. And in terms of this potentially being a Renaissance, well, if you look at New York City now, and I walked up through Times Square, and you know, it's like, it's like,

you know, we're living in the future. I mean, I grew up here. I mean, like all the billboards with the television screens that are like, you know, 40 stories to all. Most inocalyptic. And it is like a post-apocalyptic world and it's all being run by a global capitalism, you know, of a certain kind, surveillance capitalism that has our, you know, our number, I mean, is like, knows everything about us that we have digitized

and given away our information. So we think we're actually the the customer of you know Google search engines and stuff like that. But we're actually a product. We're being sold. Our data is all being sold. So this is a giant challenge that we're facing that we haven't talked about with algorithms running everything now at days, and what can happen with the people, what's going to happen with work when everything becomes automated, like trucking and airplanes and everything else. And then there's racism and the history of global warfare. Well you've put your finger on the magnitude of the problem, but at the same time, you know, here you are at ABC, and you're, you know, a recognized anchor at ABC, and you're a meditation practitioner, and everybody in the world knows it.

From the perspective of 30 years ago, that would be considered impossible and insane. And that's happening over and over and over again. I mentioned one study out of MIT of neuroscience, but there's an entire field of neuroscience of mindfulness. 40 years ago, that would have been considered insane. Of that medicine and meditation are completely linked now throughout the world. 40 years ago, that would have been considered insane.

It's happening. So if you look with a certain kind of lens, you will see that actually there's a flourishing, a flowering, and a kind of unfolding of remarkably unthinkable things that are bringing these universal Dharma wisdom elements together with science, with commerce, with this and that, how it's all going to unfold and with politics and with social justice issues and racial justice issues. We don't know how it's all going to unfold, but the fact is that at least we're taking responsibility for a certain kind of agency in putting our bodies and our hearts on the line and doing podcasts and putting out books and teaching and

doing workshops for different kinds of organizations from, you know, sort of all over the world kinds of organizations from all over the world that have the potential to actually either using our metaphor, wake up and align themselves with what's deepest and best and most beautiful, most beautiful, or about just kind of succumbing to neoliberal capitalism as some people accuse us of falling into, and just having this be the next kind of denaturing of Dharma as opposed to re-birthing of Dharma. And I think the jury's out on that score. I mean, we're dealing with incredibly huge negative forces on the planet, forces that are really driven by what the Buddha diagnosed.

You mentioned the four noble truths and and there's a diagnosis and ideology, a prognosis and a treatment plan. And what he really diagnosed is the greed hatred and delusion leading to the suffering of humanity. And greed hatred and delusion is something that we generate, and we can actually heal that. And when we do, then we can lead with love, we can lead with kindness, we can lead with clarity,

we can lead with the certainty, not the cerebral concept of interconnectedness, and therefore not be so self-centered that we shame and harm other people who are less fortunate than ourselves, but in fact, restructure things so that the world can move forward in a way that would actually put the Renaissance, the European Renaissance of Leonardo and sort of Botticelli into the shade because the level of artistry,

the level of beauty that's coming out of humanity at the moment, is on that par, but we need to wake up in order to have it be adequate to the diagnosis that we're facing now as a planner. So you're not sure it's going to happen fast enough? No, I used to say, I mean, I've written that I hold a thousand year view. I wrote that in 2011. Okay. because a Japanese Zen Master, after 9-11, gave me an Enzo poster, a calligraphy circle, and underneath it said, never forget the 1000-year view. And I've always had that 1000-year view that I wasn't doing MBSR, bringing mindfulness into medicine, just to have a nice clinical therapy or something like that, not a therapy, but to move the bell curve of medicine and humanity.

I mean, that was my original intention. And I thought, well, just going to take generations because it has to grow into it. And we're very slow learners. And maybe the children will get a little bit more if we can embody it. Maybe they're children, but we may not have a thousand years. be the children world, get it a little bit more if we can embody it, maybe their children and on and on, but we may not have a thousand years. And according to New York Times and the scientists, the study global warming, we may not even have a hundred years.

And so we're talking about our children, we're talking about our children's children. And then what is our responsibility as the generation that's old enough to listen to this podcast? What is our individual responsibility in this regard? And it's not just to optimize my own well-being at the expense of everything else on the planet. So we need kind of a quantum leap, so to speak, of wakefulness. And that's why I came in to do this with you, and I'm sure that's why you wake up in the morning as well. That there's a certain way, which is, this is not just one more fad or one more thing to sort of put on your resume as like, oh, and he's also a meditator. It's got nothing to do with it.

It's like a love affair with what's deepest and best and most potentially possible for us as human beings. And if we blow it all to pieces or we create nightmare dystopias that you don't have to look for it to see nightmare dystopias right now in this country that were unthinkable even and conceivable a couple of years ago. And if you lived in Nazi Germany, I mean, it looks a lot like, you know, the free Nazi Germany. This, this kind of a unimaginable things are possible. So the stakes are actually very high for us to, as I said, bring all hands onto the deck in spaceship Earth.

And for us, each of us to ask what small thing can I do? So I don't just drive myself crazy, but one small way that I can contribute to the well-being of, say, the world, the well-being of others. I'm glad you said that thing at the end, because it's not necessarily the case that we wake up and then there's a lot of string music

and all of our lives are dedicated to top down solving the whole problem of modern industrialization, et cetera, et cetera. It's about just, Joseph Goldstein always likes to talk about Ramdas, the great meditation spiritual teacher from the 60s and 70s still alive living in Hawaii wrote a book with a co-author many years ago with the title How Can I Help? Yeah, really? So that kind of attitude is what I think you're getting at. But let me key in on something else. You said that you're talking about intention. You got into this line of work

Low these many years with the intention of with a thousand year view shifting the bell curve And you said thanks for picking up on that because that's the kind of working definition of public health Shifting the moving the car. Yes, but then you talked about my intention and said, you know, that I'm sure that's why you get out of bed too. And I, you know, this is intention, motivation. I was speaking to the deepest part of you. Well, because that's what I want to get at because I think about this a lot. I'm actually in the middle of writing a book about, yeah, for lack of a better word, love

or, and or kindness, probably the same thing. And I think about intention, motivation, quite a bit in this context. And when I look at my own intentions, I see a lot there that I don't necessarily want on the front page in the New York Times, but I'll be honest about it. There's definitely not an absence of ego.

And so I'm just wondering, in your case, you talked about in the 1970s, when you were developing MBSR, you had this thousand year view. Did you also have the view that, wow, this could be an interesting career path for me? And or I could make a name for myself and have a mark. And did you have that then? Do you have it now? Is that kind of ego radical?

You're asking. Thanks for asking the question. Okay, so the short answer is,, I mean as a you know young man I mean you know You know in the 60s is like what is my Path, you know what is what is mine to do in the world? What's so that I'm true to myself rather than true to say what my parents wanted me to be or whatever You know what my teachers wanted me to be what my Nobel laureate thesis advisor at MIT wanted me to be or whatever. You know what my teachers wanted me to be. What my Nobel laureate thesis advisor

at MIT wanted me to be when I left molecular biology to go into meditation and he thought I was losing my mind. And then 40 years later he asked me to teach him how to meditate when he was ahead of the MIT Cancer Center. And there was a science of meditation that was inconceivable when I And there was a science of meditation that was inconceivable when I left science. So these things are non-linear and you never know how it's going to work. And I really appreciate you're asking about, like, yeah, you know, there's this kind of part of the problem with this whole question of the personal pronouns is yes, okay, so maybe this would be a way with a capital W for me to earn a living because we have to actually earn a living and to be successful to the degree that maybe you were programmed or I was programmed to want to actually

make a difference and to be recognized for making that difference and to be successful. And that itself is a double-edged sword. So success itself can really become its own prison at a certain point. Because then, well, when is enough success? So when do you have to just be driven by more and more and more? And there are people like, you know, never going to be able to spend the amount of money that they only amount the wealth that they have, but they keep wanting to get more of it. And so this is kind of a disease. And then there's also the ethics of how much you concentrate, you know, wealth and power before you're, you use the word ego. It's just the personal pronoun in Latin. When they translated Freud into English, the English, when they did it in England and the UK, they translated Freud's das ich into the I.

But when they did it in America, America's psychiatrist translated it as the ego because the I wasn't good enough. So they had to use the Latin pronoun. Then they pumped it up to make a big ego thing. But whether you just see it as that personal pronoun doing it like the verb selfing, you know, it's just doing it's selfing thing. But the question is, what is this self? Who is this self? So what if you become like famous and then you die and then after a while people forget about you anyway? And it's true no matter how famous you are.

It's true no matter how famous you are. I give an example, we're on 66th Street, renamed Peter Jennings Way, my mentor, Peter Jennings. And no one knows who Peter Jennings is. Well, I give talks to young people, and I show his picture, and nobody knows who he is. Right. And there you have it. So like the people who are now the glitterati, the famous or the whatever, this is where the rubber really meets the road because you are not your story, you're not your narrative, no matter how big your poster is or your face on the screen

and time square. So if you know that in your 30s, you're ahead of the curve because it doesn't matter how successful you are, you won't identify with that success. Then maybe you could use whatever comes to you in a way that contributes to the all-hands on deck benefit to the world and not more, more, more for me. So that becomes your meditation practice. And if you only learn that at 40, well, better than at 50, but if you learn it at 50, fantastic. If you learn it at 60. I'm of my 40s, I'm wrestling with this lesson, but I have a, you know, a part of me says, wait, I have a kid, I got to send him to school and we have a, why rent I need to pay?

Of course. Well, that's why you earn money. And that's why you want to be successful about it. And but there's a little, but there's also a voice in your head that says, like, you know, but you never know what's going to happen. So you have to have a lot of resources because, you know, there's unexpected stuff that comes up. A lot of people, of course, have zero resources. And, you know, some of the most famous people came out of families that, you know, were

nightmare families with no resources whatsoever. So it's also not linear or guaranteed. And a lot of people who have very wealthy families or whatever they, those kids have a terrible time often finding their own way with a capital W because so much was given to them that who they were wasn't actually left the space and the freedom to like it for yourself, and have the good feeling that comes out of failure, failure, failure, and then finally some kind of success. So these are all part of the curriculum.

Let me, let's just finish with this if we are ever going to finish because I'm fine with just keep going. But you know, whatever arises in your mind or in your life, from the perspective of the meditation practice becomes the curriculum. It's here, okay, now how am I going to deal with it? So, insecurity around money or wealth or children or fame or anything like that, or this is all part of the curriculum. And then you see, you can ask the same question about, is my awareness of my fame caught in my, some kind of ego trip?

To the degree that you think you're famous because it doesn't matter again, it doesn't matter how famous you are, like you're just the same old, let you always wear it in a certain way. So you get caught in some of the stuff? I recognize it, but I do not get caught in it. I see it as toxic. I get lots and lots of projections in the domains that I travel in. Okay, if I walk

down the street in New York, very few projections, okay, on occasion. If you walk down the street in New York, everybody sees your face. They know they so sow more projections. But my experiences and people will come up to me, many, many people and I honor this enormously and say, you know, you save my life. I mean, that's basically what they say. You save my life. And I am deeply, deeply touched by it. And very happy that I wrote those books or do the guided meditations or whatever it was that got people into this pan. But the fact is that I collaborated with them and saving their life in some way, that really they saved their own life. They found out about it before they knew it, they didn't know it, and so they had to come

to it in whatever way that they did. So if anything, we put this stuff out just the way we're putting out this podcast, but whether people are going to listen and really hear it or just say, well, not interested in this and switch to some of the subject, that's entirely up to them. And that's part of the freedom and uncertainty of how we put anything out and how it's going to influence things in the world. But ultimately, it boils down to even the questions you were asking about, the security of our children or our own reputations or all of that kind of stuff,

that fundamentally you have to live with yourself, I think, and feel comfortable with that. And then, or to not feel comfortable with it and be aware that you're not comfortable with it, and then so we continue to learn and grow. And that's probably more the default mode than anything else. It's like, I don't feel like I have any answers, and I have lots of uncertainty, and sometimes I feel like I'm not articulating things in the best way, or maybe I'm not even being honest with myself, but then I'm aware of that, and then I can use that as the curriculum of the moment

to actually push send on the email without awareness or to actually reel it back in and hold it and just let it teach me what I need to know. And then not just me, but other people teach me what I need to know. You have energy for one more question? No, sure. What I love about it, one of the many things I love about interviewing you is

one can, I could come in with a plan, but it's not going to survive the first 15 seconds because you have such, you have an energy and an acuity that, so I'm going to, I'm going to try to ask for it. And can I just say one thing? I mean, I didn't come in with a plan, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to ask for it. And can I just say one thing? I mean, I didn't come in with a plan, as I'm sure you know, but to just say, you know, that, or that's the ultimate plan is to come in without a plan and to just be present. So that doesn't mean that you haven't prepared, you know, I mean, in a sense, your whole life up to this point is the preparation for a conversation like this or forgetting your own the question and just dropping into silence

i i was a good boy and had a whole long with the questions that i didn't get to any of them this actually happened to me last night i was doing a public event with Joseph gold and i typed up all the questions i got to none of them because that's the preparation yes and that's important when you get into the situation but i'm going to hazard i'm going to attempt to Ask the first question. I was attempting to ask but then we got off on some interesting stuff Which was a question I want to give a hat tip to my colleague Jay Michaelson Who's this incredible author and teacher and many other things who works at the 10% happier company who recommended I asked this question when I have

works at the 10% happier company who recommended I ask this question when I have very experienced Dharma teachers in the room and so I'm going to ask it of you but we were actually we've kind of touched on a little bit but I was asking you how old you are you're 75 I'm just curious after all these years of practice what is the edge for you now what is the what is the hardest place the trickiest place to apply the teachings in your own personal life? I think my biggest growing edge we touched on it earlier is realizing how much I don't know, I don't know, about other people's lives and experiences that I've kind of lived my life more or less in a very elite environment. I went to like the best schools I trained with, you know, the best people I, you know, sort of traveled in circles where I meet certain kinds of people, I enjoy certain kinds of

interactions and I, but I also grew up on the streets of New York. So I kind of like, which was not exactly what you call it, and I'll elite things. So I have grew up on the streets in New York, which was not exactly what you call it, the elite thing. I have this dualism in my own life. My father was a professor at Columbia Medical School, but I was out on the streets there in a way that was very, very, very different universe. I know how to navigate those streets and that language and the roughness of it and everything else. But I would say that my biggest edge right now is to try to navigate the interfaces around people whose lives are very different from my own and

around issues of social and racial justice. That, you know, I'm learning a new language around that kind of thing. Five years ago, I had never heard or even a year ago. I don't think I had ever heard the term whiteness. Never mind white privilege, but just now it turns out there are actually studies and a whole fields in academia on whiteness and cultural criticism, you know, because white people have a certain kind of default mode that we don't have to think about certain things because the whole society was built around this. Now if you are an ancestor of an enslaved African, I couldn't pretend to think I would know what that feels like now. Never mind what it felt like to be brought to this country in chains and sold, along with

my children being sold elsewhere. So even though I can have a cognitive framework for this, it's still conceptualized within my white, privileged, elitist kind of framework, I need other people to be able to point out to me, not only what I don't know, I don't know. But how big the distance is in terms of interfacing with the world where you are not the majority default color or elite and you have to make a living, you have to get through the day, you have

to find a place to live. I mean, we have an enormous homeless population in this country. The wealthiest country not just on the planet, the wealthiest country that has ever been ever on the planet. And we have humans who we can easily dehumanize or talk about like how inadequate they are, but they are humans. They were once babies and they're sleeping on the streets and panhandling or begging. I mean, that's really diagnostic of something that is horrible, and that bothers me. That really is something that I'm trying to understand how to hold that in a way that has integrity, and then to not turn away from it, and to realize that this is not something

that like one person is going to solve that kind of thing or even TAN economists, but Those kinds of things are up for me at the moment and one of the reasons that Ron Denai are doing the kinds of things that we're doing together this evening and tomorrow We're on to McGee with whom you have been working on issues related to this I feel slightly guilty that I asked that question because we're not going to have the time to...

It is worthy of its own 1 million-part podcast series. This issue is huge. But we, I will say, we do quite a bit on it on this podcast, so... And I bow to you for that. And I just want to say that it's part of the curriculum. It's a much a part of the curriculum of mindfulness and of wisdom and compassion as anything else.

Because if mindfulness is the opposite of blindness, then there's nothing like diversity issues and social justice issues. And racial justice is to point out just exactly how blind all us meditators can be. I'm so glad you said that because it can come off as a niche concern or a tangential,

a side discussion or an interesting discussion that in some ways isn't entirely relevant to my life right here and now, but just as you said, you wanna get a sense, you wanna hold up a mirror on your blind spots on all the little pro, neurotic programs that are running in you, and I was speaking from the perspective of a white person, that are running in you that were implanted by the culture of your parents, you know, before you were even aware that you were a human, try doing diversity work and try handling your own shame or anger or resentment or fear or whatever.

Yeah, this is a crucible in which you can really work on your practice. Well, I bow to you for saying that, Dan. I really do. And this is in some sense, the beauty of this work too, is that we can be honest with ourselves and with each other about our blindness or inadequacy or lack of frames for understanding certain things. But also, if we are into learning and growing, which I see as like fundamental to being human, why do we go to school, we go to school to learn, and why do we go to learn anything, why will we learn anything so we can grow? So in a sense, this discomfort is growing pain. It's like realizing that the narratives we tell ourselves are like really highly conditioned

ourselves, I like really highly conditioned by our skin color or the families we were born into or whatever it is. And that ultimately if we're talking about liberation, if we're really talking about human freedom and the depth of the possibility of human freedom, then you can't turn away from this dimension. This is like where the rubber meets the road. This is in some sense the curriculum of the moment for us. Beautiful. Thanks for coming in. Hey, always good to see you. Two quick notes after the fact here. One is that you heard us reference Ram Das during that conversation. We had that conversation when Ram Das was still alive, but he died on December 22nd. Ram Das was a true, true giant in the history of Western contemplation. If you don't know much about him, I would check out Ramdas.org, R-A-M-D-A-S-S-S-D. Or we'll put a link in the show notes, but short story is that he was born Richard

Alpert in in the Boston area and went on to be a controversial Harvard professor and ultimately landed over in India where he got interested in Hindu meditation and then took on the name Ram Das and he was a teacher for many of the folks who have gone on to be the many of the biggest meditation teachers in the West, including Mark Epstein, and Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzburg, et cetera, et cetera. And if you're also, another way to learn more about him is to check out there are some documentaries on him on Netflix. Great stuff.

The other little thing I just want to say is I give a hat tip in the course of that interview to my colleague, Jay Michelson, who had suggested that instead of always asking teachers about how they got interested in meditation in the first place and having them tell their origin story, Jay asked me to ask teachers what is their current edge or challenge in their practice. But I want to point out that it wasn't just Jay who made that suggestion. It was also another colleague of ours, Kara Lai, who is one of the coaches on the 10% happier app and who will be on this show at some point, I promise,

who had suggested the very same thing. So in fairness, I want to shout out Kara as well. Oh, one final little thing is that this was not John's first time on the show, John Kabat-Zinn's first time on the show, he was also on in March of 2017. And in that episode, we go back into his backstory in a much deeper way. That's episode 75 if you want to check it out. Okay, let's do some voicemails. Here's number one. Hey Dan, this is Christine calling for Netherlands and I just accepted into my first

10-day silent meditation retreat and I'm just calling to ask if you have any tips for how to sit for that long, you know, how to deal with any distractions or anything that you've experienced during your longer sits. I'm a little bit nervous, I'm very excited, and I know that you have some experience, so I'd love to hear your tips and tricks to prepare and maybe how to best cope during that situation. Thank you so much for all you do and have a wonderful day. Well, first of all, congratulations. I mean, I think it's a very bold decision. I'm glad you're

doing it. I mean, I think more people should do retreats. That said, I still feel like the last person you should be asking because I often feel like a deeply flawed meditator, especially when I go on retreat. I just jotted down a bunch of things that just stuck out to me as potentially useful for you, so you can take or leave this long list. One is, you know, kind of give yourself a break. I know in my own, I don't know you, but I know in my own personal experience that I often go into retreats thinking I'm going to somehow win and be the best. And that's not in my experience been a winning strategy. And so just to kind of take it easy.

And especially to recognize that the first couple of days are possibly, will be hard. They are for me. And to just note, to be okay with the fact that you may be sleepy or discouraged or frustrated. And even you know that some teachers might get mad at me for saying this, but maybe even on the first day of the retreat to sleep in. Just to set the tone of like I'm not going to kick my own butt in this context too. You probably will, but if you can shave the edges off that, it might help you. A few other things that have come up from being on retreat that might be useful is, and this actually I think comes from John Capitzin, we can get stuck, or at least I can get stuck

on, you know, is this going well or not? You know, this running with Joseph Goldstein sometimes refers to as the practice assessment tapes. But as John Kabat-Zinn has said, meditation is not about feeling a certain way. So you may not be lost in bliss or something like that as you expected, or totally enveloped in bliss or whatever, or super, super concentrated. But instead of meditation about being, about feeling a certain, being about feeling a certain way, meditation is a fact about feeling whatever you're feeling

clearly. And that is a useful thing to keep in mind, especially if you're grinding yourself down with judgment. And in that vein, the other, another thing I would say is using little mental notes to catch yourself when these, as the Buddhists call them, hindrances arrive. So one of the big ones for me is either, two of the big ones are self-judgment and doubt.

And they're almost, in my mind, they're often the same thing. And just to be able to have this kind of gentle little nerf machine gun in your, you know, not to be aggressive about it, but to have this kind of gentle nerf soft machine gun that is ready loaded full of this mental note of doubt. So every time the thought comes up, oh, I'm doing horribly here. I'd much rather be at home eating twinkies just to gently and warmly fire off the note of, oh, then that's just doubt. That's doubt, doubt, doubt, doubt, catch it over and over because it's super insidious and you can get swamped by it.

I get swamped by it all the time and so to be ready to, you know, to have your mindfulness ready to guard you can be really useful. I remember standing meditation on a retreat a few years ago and having this realization that if I'm suffering, there's something I'm not mindful of. And that has served me well because the suffering is a kind of feedback. Oh yeah, am I stuck in an hour's long inner rant about how I just hate being here. Oh, yeah, well, then there's something I'm not being mindful of. And in this case, it's probably doubt or rushing or a version of some sort and just

so to have that little nerf gun ready. Another thing that Joseph has often said to me when I've been on retreats with him is the notion of surrender. Now, that can be misinterpreted. It's not like surrender to your teacher and do whatever she or he says. It's more like surrender to the process of meditation. Your whole job is just to sit and walk and sit and walk and then be as mindful as you can in all of the other parts of the day. And so if you can surrender into that instead of fighting it all the time, then you may not get so caught in wanting it to be over or wanting it to be in a different way. I'm just reading off my little list here. So sorry if this isn't as organized as you would like it.

That reminds me, speaking of the flow of the day, one of the things that's really helped me over time is, I think in some ways I was, there was like an off stage and an on stage version of me on retreat that when I was on stage when I was out with the other yogis sitting or eating or doing walking meditation I would go I would move very slowly and try to be super mindful but when I was in my room I was you know like be like a you know nobody was watching I would just live the way I normally do move really fast and mindlessly. Sometimes I would go out and exercise and go running. And over time I've found, and this is just what's worked for me,

is to really carry the mindfulness through everything. Eating, going to the bathroom, cleaning up my room, whatever it is, and so that continuity has really helped me drop in in a deeper way over the course of the retreat. All right, I think that's everything on my list and I hope it helps. And I'm really psyched for you that you're going on retreat. Good for you.

Let's do voicemail number two. Hi, my name is Loveleek. I'm from Omaha, Nebraska. And my question is about my song stuck in your head. My kids will have them to the soundtrack, and I don't want to devise them of that. But I wake up with the music in my head, and I fall asleep with the music in my head

and experience them to my meditation. I've tried different techniques to maybe deal with the lyrics running through my head, you know, just focusing on the breath more, maybe a mental note like song or annoying. And it's just been really difficult and frustrating because it is the song in my head has this really interfering quality with my meditation. And I just didn't know if you had any other tips or tricks or pointers, just because this seems to be much stronger than any other thought.

I have had from trust to anything else. So anyway, thank you so much for everything you're doing. I love your books, the apps, the podcast, all of it. And I thank you for everything you've done. Thank you so much. Thanks for the question. It's a great question. My five-year-old loves Frozen and Frozen, too.

And I'm not just saying that because I'm a Disney employee. He really loves it. And those songs can get into your head. I get it. So I think, and this is just one person's opinion, but what I hear is that you're kind of halfway there to dealing with it. So you're using a little mental note, which is super helpful.

I find mental noting and we have lots of instructions on mental noting in the 10% happier app if you guys want to check them out and plenty of the teachers on this podcast have talked about it. If you want to listen to them talk about it. But mental noting is super, super helpful. And so your kind of your instinct is right there, but I hear in your note the note you're using was song comma annoying. So in that note is a version. You're resisting what's happening right now. And that's to get a little Buddhist on you, that's a hindrance. Classically, the way the Buddha talked about a version or not accepting or allowing what's happening right now is a hindrance to waking up and being mindful. And so I would just alter the note a little bit to something a little bit more neutral

like hearing or a version, just note the aversion. That can, I think in my experience, can transform something that is allegedly interfering to a more open attitude to what is undeniably just happening right now. your reaction to it can become the object of your meditation instead of you know clinging so tightly to what had been your object probably the breath up until the song arrived uninvited in your mind stream. So try that. What I guess I'm trying you to do to get you to do is not to fight it as much because I think the fighting feeds it. It reminds me a little bit of a story. Joseph Goldstein has told before about some great teacher, this is the prop, this is now a third or fourth hand story because Joseph telling a story that another teacher

once told, but some Asian master meditating in his hut and the villagers nearby are blaring music in the middle of the night and the teacher tells the story of being so angry at these people, how could they be so disrespectful blaring music in the middle of the night and the teacher tells the story of being so angry at these people. How could they be so disrespectful? Blaring this music, I'm the teacher blah, blah, blah. And then he realized the music isn't bothering me.

I'm going out and bothering it. And if he could just be mindful of the fact that he's hearing something right now and the fact that maybe a version is arising, frustration is arising, etc. Well, then he can anything that's happening can be included in the sphere of your meditation. So give that a try and thanks for supporting our parent company Disney. Those are your voice mails this week. Before we go, I just want to say if, you know, we love getting these voice mail questions. I love answering them and I love having it letting teachers and staff members at 10% answer them for you. I think it's a really powerful thing for people to hear other people's concerns and then hear a teacher or, in

this case, me address them. I think it kind of gives you a sense of, it normalizes the fact that meditation is often difficult. So, I want to encourage you to call in with more questions. Here's the number 646-883-836-646-883-836. You can also find this number listed on our website at 10%.com-podcast. This has been a long podcast, so I just want to end this quickly by thank thank you everybody Ryan Kessler Samuel Jones Grace Livingston Lauren Hartzog Tiffany Elma Hundro and Susie Wu who's operating the boards today thank you all and I'll see you next week Hey hey prime members you can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music

app today, or you can listen early and add free with 1-replus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com-survey. at Wondery.com slash Survey.