Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 580: Tripping Out with a Legend: Jon Kabat-Zinn on Pain vs. Suffering, Rethinking Your Anxiety, and the Buddha's Teaching in a Single Sentence

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

A beautifully weird conversation with the creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. is Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he founded its world-renown Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Clinic in 1979, and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society (CFM), in 1995. He is the author of many books including Full Catastrophe Living and Wherever You Go, There You Are. His latest book, Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief, illustrates a range of evidence-based mindfulness meditation practices for those suffering with the challenges of chronic pain. In this episode we talk about:The origins of MBSR and its relation to pain reliefPain vs. SufferingThe accessibility of awarenessThe limitation of mindfulness meditation as a self-improvement practiceThe quote, “open your mouth and you’re wrong” Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition of of healing Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jon-kabat-zinn-580 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Okay, well, kids, this was one of those very humbling interviews where I went in with a whole plan and then had to throw the whole plan out the window said, defenestration was required because my interview, we John Kabat's in is a magically unpredictable dude. Deliberately or not, he delivered for me a great Buddhist teaching on abandoning my expectations, which is a lesson I need to learn over and over again. I went in wanting to talk to John about his new book about managing pain with meditation and mindfulness, and we did talk about that a little bit, but then he ended up tripping out in some fascinating and beautiful ways about everything from

rethinking anxiety to the future of the species to the Buddha's teachings in one sentence and More we talked about meditation as a love affair how to achieve equanimity and the invitation to die now for those of you who don't know John Cavitts in PhD is Professor of medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Back in the 1970s, he came up with something called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR, which is a secular way of teaching Buddhist meditation. John may have some quibbles with that description, but it's basically true.

MBSR is massively useful and impactful in many, many ways. It allowed for millions of skeptical non-buddists to meditate and gain the benefits of the practice. It also gave scientists a secular replicable protocol, an eight-week program for teaching meditation. That secular replicable protocol allowed scientists to research meditation in a systematic way. And they came up with all this fascinating information

about what the practice does to our physiology and psychology. And without all of that research, many of us, myself included, might never have started meditating. So much of the credit for my own practice and maybe yours can be traced back to John Capitzin. John has written many books, including full catastrophe living, wherever you go, there you are, and coming to our senses. And he's got a new book called Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief.

In this conversation, we talked about a bit of the origins of MBSR and its relation to pain relief. We talk about pain versus suffering, the accessibility of awareness, the limitation of mindfulness meditation as a self-improvement practice, the quotation, open your mouth and you're wrong, and his definition of healing, which he thinks of as coming to terms with things as they are. Buckle up, kids. This is a good one.

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. Hey, y'all. It's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad.

Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from, MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. John Kabatzen, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Dan. It's really nice to be here. Always great to have you on. And I know your new book is on pain, mindfulness, meditation, for pain relief. And so an obvious starting question, very simple one, would be why pain, why this subject. Well, that was in some way my entry into MBSR was when I back in 1979 when I was working

at the UMass Medical Center in a science lab doing molecular biology and talking to physicians because I was really interested in bringing meditation into the mainstream of medicine, which in 1979 would have been considered the height of lunacy or the visigasarethigates or the citadel of Western civilization about the teratitis. So I went around talking to doctors and asking questions like, what percentage of your patients do you feel you actually help? And it was astonished by what they said.

And they said, well, maybe 10%, maybe 15%, and they said, my God, what happens to the rest of them? And they say things like, well, they either get better on their own or they never get better. And so I said to them, well, do you feel like it would be valuable if you had a place to send all the people that you didn't know what to do with anymore? And sometimes, didn't even want to see again, because it was frustrating on both sides. And a place where they could learn some kind of life skills to self-regulate at the level of the body and the mind and heart and their interactions with the world because things are so stressful. And now a lot of it has to do

with suffering, people are suffering. And so the pain connection comes in part because pain is kind of the way suffering presents itself as emotional pain or physical pain if there's an injury or a chronic issue. And I was speaking with people in the pain clinic, you know, anesthesiologists who were drawing people with chronic pain conditions. And those people were to a large degree falling through the cracks at a healthcare system. They were not getting full satisfaction with the range of treatments that were being offered at that time. So they would send them to the stress reduction clinic, which is what we called mindfulness based stress reduction. And they would learn how to live with the conditions that were not magically going to disappear.

And often their pain, their physical level of pain, would attenuate because they were learning to differentiate between pain and suffering and how much the emotional and cognitive dimensions of pain can actually inflame and exacerbate a pain that is really coming from the body. So this is a kind of beautiful learning curve for people that is in some sense elementary and obvious if you're a meditator, but if you're not a meditator, it's like you need help from the outside and we were saying, well, to the degree that you can get help from the outside, great, that's what medicine is all about.

But what about helping yourself, what about drawing on your own deep interior resources for learning, for growing, for healing and transformation through these ancient practices that all have to do with the cultivation of awareness, of attention, of deep inquiry into the nature of who you actually are, and regard for the depths of that who. A regard for the depths of that who? What does that mean? I've never heard myself quite put it that way, but we tell ourselves stories all the time about who we are and how my life is ruined and this is killing me, but we don't really inquire that often about who the me is, or the story of me, but we don't really inquire that often about who the

me is, or the story of me, or where I'm going, and how this ruined it, or all of that kind of stuff. So the meditative awareness is really about a deep inquiry into the nature of our being, and very often the narratives that we tell ourselves are just a surface glimpse and often an inaccurate read about the depth of our wholeness, the depth of our beauty, the depth of our being. When we can learn how to inhabit the domain of full being and not just get caught in our thoughts and narratives and stories, most of which, if you start to pay attention to it, it's like there's a movie going on in your head constantly and you know, and it has

to do with the lot of it's a past, a lot of it's the future. Present moment tends to get squeezed out a lot of the time, especially, you know, so you don't necessarily even recognize the beauty in the present moment, the richness, the relationships and the appreciation. And so this practice kind of just invites people to step out of the story of me and actually be the awareness that when you boil it all down, it's who you might actually be much more than any story. Does that make any sense to you the way I framed it? It makes sense to me,

because I've been around for a minute in this space, doing some meditation. And yet, I'm always trying to represent the listener, and they may understand it too, but let me just push you a little bit. How exactly can we use meditation to inhabit this space of awareness? And then further, how does that help us differentiate between, as you said, before pain and the suffering? Yeah. Well, great questions. And I think I would start off by saying that this is not an abstraction, so that when you are suffering, when you're in pain,

it's very, very real. And so to offer something that you can't wrap your mind around or sounds crazy, that's not very helpful. And so, MBSR from the beginning was meant to take these meditative practices, which really, as you're sigesting, I mean, take a while to learn how to drop into, and can be seen in many different lights as arcane or specialized or requires me to become a Buddhist or learn a whole different vocabulary and so forth, that maybe one person out of a hundred could do.

And what MBSR is about is saying, no, let's throw out the vocabulary, read language all of this, and make the practices available with the intention for 95% or 100% of the people who are coming through the door to actually get it as opposed to 5% or 10%, which is very often what happens in meditation centers, is

like the people stay are very small percentage of the people who come. But in a hospital you have a kind of moral and ethical responsibility to meet everybody's suffering as if it was possible to actually transform it into wisdom, not to take away the pain, but understand that space between pain and suffering, and that's where awareness comes in. And we never get any instruction in how to be in contact with or appreciate our own awareness. And awareness everybody's born with it. We have it all day long, maybe not deep sleep for most people, but all day long. So it's not awareness itself that we're

cultivating. It's actually optimizing access to our awareness. And so attention is the doorway to awareness. Let me see if I can put it in very simple terms and then you can tell me if I'm close. I think what I'm here, you say, is in meditation, we learn how to be with the raw data of the pain, the raw data of our emotions about the pain and split that off, separate that off, see the difference between the raw data of the sensations and the emotions and the stories about the pain and our emotions. Which is also part of the raw data actually. It's the seeing function that we forget most of the time. So you could say a lot of the time and you can pay attention to this in your life and

see if it's true or not for you. A lot of the time we're zoning along on the autopilot. So the thoughts and the emotions and the stories, they wind up being the full extent of one's life or reality, but only because we're not paying attention to the fact that all of this is in some sense thinking, narrative, and it's generated by certain intelligence factors that we have, but sometimes if we don't recruit other intelligence factors like thought is great, okay? Nobody, I'm not knocking thought, or classical education or anything like that.

But there's this other superpower that's at least this biggest thought, in fact, bigger, and it can prove it in a second. And that's called human awareness and how much attention does that get in our education system, or the university, or corporations, or any place else. Well, you know, in the past 20 years, the answer is more and more.

More and more. Mindfulness is moving into the mainstream of society, whether you like it or not, whether you think it's like fully kosher or not. There's no question that we're waking up to an orthogonal dimension of experience that we've been for the most part just ignorant of, we have the capacity for awareness and we can examine the outer universe and the inner universe in ways that are absolutely remarkable. And we're evolving to be able to do that. And if we're not successful at it, we won't evolve.

The cockroaches won't care. And a couple of more billion years on planet Earth, however hot it gets. Again, the cockroaches won't care. And some other life form will emerge. But if we care about what's deepest and best and most beautiful in humanity, then maybe we need to address this moment in its uniqueness and say, look, you know, this is like, we're all cells of the one body of the planet, of the body politic, however you want to frame it. And if we don't get a blood supply to all of ourselves, the tissue necrosis, every cell needs an adequate blood supply. So if you take that in terms of like the planet, every human being needs an adequate blood supply of whatever

it is, resources to be able to live a life of dignity, peace, health, well-being, and contribute to a larger sense of meaning and collaborative engagement. And I think that's what's going on on the planet, on an evolutionary scale, and the jury's out about how successful it would be, but certainly the universe could not have imagined 20 years ago, Dan Harris now doing this compared to what Dan Harris started out thinking his life was going to be about. And that's evidence. That's like I would

say data of its own. It's like, well, how did that happen? And are you some kind of weird mutant? No, you're not. This is happening to millions of millions of people, people are beginning to wake up to these hidden dimensions. And also the level of aspiration about what I want for the brief moment that we are alive on this planet, how to live with integrity in a way that has meaning virtue and contributes to the larger whole. There's a certain way in which we're constantly leaving a legacy for our children, for our grandchildren, for our students, for the people we affect, because our being affects other people's being in ways that, I mean, that's what love is all about. So in a certain way, when I take my seat in the morning to meditate formally,

I came to see it after maybe 30 or 40 years of sitting as like a love affair. It's not like, oh no, now I got to meditate for an hour to keep up the story of how long I've been meditating or how devoted I am to the practice. No, it's a love affair to get your ass on the cushion if you don't mind putting it that way. And then just give yourself over to the domain of being outside of time. over to the domain of being outside of time. And it doesn't matter how long it happens by the clock, but to actually recognize and remember this hidden dimension of experience that is inhabitable.

And not only that can become what the neuroscientists would call your default mode, so that that's where you live. You live in awareness. Embodied awareness. And then I was saying, the first thing you recognize is that you're part of this larger hole. So, profound into connectedness with people, with the air, with water, with trees, with sunlight. And so, that's where compassion arises. like wonder and compassion, awe and compassion, compassion for other people who can only be who they are. And when they are suffering, the heart goes out.

The heart actually takes a journey. It reaches out. We've all felt that because you want to be of some help. And sometimes very frustratingly, you can't be of doubtful help because conditions have to be right to be of some use. So the love affair, the real meditation practice, life itself. And if it's not a love affair, forget about it, then it becomes one more self-improvement strategy, but there's no improving on the self because the fact that it matters, there

is no self in the way that we usually talk about it. When we say, I, me and mine, we don't even have a remote idea of who we really are. So we're just limited to the narrative. And then, you know, sometimes late at night, in the middle of the nightmare or some kind of deep depression, you know, your narratives. Not true, doesn't hold water, it's just like, but you cling to it like a flotsam, a piece of wreckage, you know, because it prevents you from drowning. But the fact that a matter is that you were born able to swim. And so that's what the meditation practice is about, is sort of gifting that back to people in ways that are so common sensual and so much like resonant without my having to say it or talk about it as a love

affair, that it's in certain ways infectious. You know, it's like, yeah, yeah, the domain of being isn't getting anywhere near the amount of attention that it really is required on a daily basis. And if we do that, then actually everything's meditation, not just sitting on a cushion or something like that, but you know, how you say good morning to whoever you live with in the morning, how you hold your children or your grandchildren or what comes out of your mouth. Everything can just be naturally embraced and awareness without any contrivance. It's not like forcing or thinking, or now I have to be mindful of what's

coming out of my mouth. It's not like that. It's like when you're mindful, there's no separation between what's coming out of my mouth and what's in my heart. And the Buddha's famous for having said in one of the sutras that his entire teaching repertoire of well over 40 years could be encapsulated in one sentence. And I like to say on the off chance that he wasn't kidding, and I don't think he was kidding, that maybe we should memorize that sentence. Then the sentence is nothing is to be clung to as I, me or mine. So it's like self-identification, clinging,

that's the source of delusion and the source of wanting, greed, grasping, and the source of hating and pushing away an aversion. And that's like the disease that we're basically healing by taking a look with kindness and with a certain degree of rigor and long term commitment. So it's not about fixing yourself or improving on yourself, but it's about understanding who you are in ways that go way beyond thought. Yeah, great superpower thought, but unless you have heart and awareness, also superpowers,

and they're not themselves mere thinking about, but direct experiencing, then the prognosis for the homo sapiens sapiens, not that great. And I'm very optimistic. I think the prognosis is great, which is why I do it. I do. And what I'm guessing, why you do what you do. And why so many people in the mindfulness space, if you want to call it that, do what they do.

Coming up, John talks about the limitations of mindfulness meditation as a self-improvement practice, the quote, open your mouth, and you're wrong, and the invitation to die now. Life is short, and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is short with Justin Long.

If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you, but I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times, but if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats

between friends about the important stuff. If you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music or Wondering App. I really enjoy listening to you talk. You don't kind of tripping out with you for a number of reasons.

And we don't do it often enough. No, we don't. You know, in listening to you talk, you're very skillful at evoking in the listener, a sense of awe. And a few minutes ago, you said something that you said of many things that landed with me, but there's one particular thing you said that's provoking this question, which ultimately I'll get to, about how you can meditate in a kind of wrote self-improvement. I'm going to focus on this breath, then try to focus on the next one and grit my teeth

and try to focus and do this right and blah, blah, blah. And it can be devoid of a lot of inspiration or the bigger picture. And so I totally agree with that. I can see that in my own practice. And you won't do it. It won't last very long either. If it's coming out of that, it won't last very long. And you'll say things like, well, meditation doesn't work.

I tried it. It's bullshit. Yes. So how do we infuse the wonder into our practice beyond merely listening to you talk, which I think does the trick quite nicely? That's very sweet of you to say. My short answer would be, anyway, you can. I mentioned the in-breath and the out-breath.

I was like, who cares? You know, in-breath, out breath out breath, what are you talking about? Okay? Yeah. Well, somebody held your head on the water at the beach for even a fraction of a minute. In very short order, the only thing in the entire universe that you would care about would be the next in breath. And you will do everything to make sure that in breath becomes a possibility, anything. And yet we forget that you will only one breath away from being out of here. So the miracles and the wonders, it's just endless. We're talking about the beauty of science and also the beauty of art,

because meditation is a kind of art form, and it's often expressed more in poetry than anything else. So maybe it's appropriate to point out that lots of poets point to what we're speaking about, which at a certain point words won't take you any further. That's why poetry even exists because the poets, their karmic assignment is to put things into words that are impossible to put into words. And when the great ones do it, whether Shakespeare or Dante or anybody else, it's like, how did they do it? I mean, it's like, you know, it's just boggles the mind because it transcends the mind, the thinking mind at least. So this is Emily Dickinson, if it's so right to offer it. It doesn't have a title, it's just known by its first line.

Me, from myself, to banish, had I art, impregnable my fortress unto all heart. But since myself assault me, how have I peace? Except by subjugating consciousness. And since we're mutual monarch, I love that we're a mutual monarch, me and myself. How this be, except by abdication, me of me. So you can ask yourself, well, how much of the time in your heart of hearts may be only at three o'clock in the morning, do you think about this way or feel it, that you're not actually being true to yourself. Because you're too busy, too distracted, too much in your phone, too much on YouTube, too much in toxic relationship, whatever it is, you create a warfare or barriers between me and myself.

You're banishing that part of me from myself to banish, had I art. And of course, as I understand it with Emily Dickinson, she had a very you know, sort of challenging and heartbreaking love affair. We all know something about that from her youth at least. And how much we define ourselves by the love of another. Well, that's not actually such an effective way to develop a stable relationship that's going to last over decades because you're leaning, it's like trying to make two crutches stand up in space by leaning against each other, not stable. You got to learn how to stand on your own in your full humanity and not banish me from myself.

What do you think she meant by mutual monarch? I love that phrase too. Oh, isn't that beautiful? Yeah, we're mutual monarch. Who is me and myself? What's the bifurcation? Well, I think it means Buddha nature. It's your original nature. So with mutual monarch, it means there never was a separation.

We are in charge here. We're the ruler. We're the throne, but when we separate ourselves from ourselves, then we're abdicating large parts of ourselves. Robert Blah used to talk about this and speak about another poet, like totally amazing. Robert Blah used to say, everybody's born with little black bag over their shoulder. And over the course of their life, all of the things that they told they're bad or they shouldn't do this or they're no good or all of those sort of things that kind of

other people will try to be helpful about, but that are really toxic. You take them and you stuff them because you don't want to look at it and you're stuck into your bag. And by the time you're in your 30s or 40s, you've got a bag that's like so long that when you walk into the elevator, the door is closed on the bag, it's so long and it's so heavy and you're dragging it around everywhere. And this is the kind of story of me when we believe what other people project on to us, whether it's positive or negative. I mean, the positive is just as toxic as the negative.

And we've seen so many people become like worship by their followers and then, you know, just fall into total unethical behavior, disarm any and so forth. And surprise, well, projections are toxic. So you have to actually embody what it is that you're offering, and that means understanding that we're mutual monarch, so to speak, yeah, on a relative level, there's me and myself, right? But on an absolute level, it's beyond words, so again, Sansa, you used to say, open your mouth and you're wrong. Can it be talked about? Open your mouth and you're wrong.

I mean, that is such a nice corrective against the epidemic, the pandemic of certainty that I see in our culture. It's like, I'm right, you're wrong. Everybody else is wrong except for the people in my tribe. Well, there's the I, me and my is also like, at the heart of dualism, there's self and there's other. So that's the dualism.

And that expresses on a lot of different levels, but on the social level, it's us versus them. Okay, it's us versus them. And it's tribalism, just as you're saying. And in the evolution of human beings, people would kill each other over that kind of stuff or figure out ways to sort of make peace. But there's been an evolutionary arc. That's why I keep coming back to the sort of evolutionary nature of this that, yeah, we're learning how to grow out of that tribal thing when there were maybe like a million human beings on the planet altogether, because now it's seven

billion, and they don't have spears, they have nuclear weapons. And so we need a reboot, we need to kind of reassess like what is our karmic assignment here as a species. And the hypocritical is, you know, to come back to medicine and MBSR in the hospital. The hypocritical is a very good place to start, even though it's not always honored in, you know, the actual embodiment of it, but it's first to know her. And how would you even know if you're doing harm unless you're aware, unless you're mindful? And unless you're heartful, because if you're harming another person, say, by your words, or by even a look, that you don't notice, and you don't notice that you've harmed that person, that just perpetuates suffering. But if you catch it, then you can do all sorts of things. You can

apologize if it's after the fact, a sincere apology, and learn from it, and not do it down the road when you get triggered, so to speak, feel defensive, and then you wind up lashing out or just stupidly saying something that's really hurtful to another person. Just a certain kind of other thing, all that comes from tribalism. And our karmic assignment is to outgrow it, and the only way to do it is to exercise the muscle of mindfulness, of heartfulness. And when we take responsibility and live this practice in an ethical way, you know, first do no harm.

And again, how would you know it unless you're aware? Then that, in certain, since reaffirms what living might be, the nature of possibility embodied possibility, so that it's not like a dream thing for the future, but it's right here right now, in no time. So you're not, when you sit down to meditate, just for anybody who's like listening to this dimension of it, you notice how much you might be bringing to that sitting down that, now what am I supposed to do?

You know, what am I supposed to feel? How can I feel good and stuff like that? And all of that is irrelevant. It's just like, it's now feeling what's here to be felt, seeing what's here to be seen, knowing what's here to be known, knowing what's not known. And just being okay with that in no time. So it's not like, now you're built a story out of that, but it's just like this moment, this moment, this moment, and something

deeply transformative unfolds when we give ourselves over to that kind of a resting, taking up residency in awareness. All we need is to be in this moment and the next moment we'll take care of itself. And we don't need to fill it, pursue anything or push anything away. And then now what? Yeah. And then stay open, keep your heart open, keep your eyes open, keep your all your senses. And see what might be possible. And then it just becomes like the adventure of a lifetime. But you're here for it it rather than just before you die as

Thoreau said famously in Walden, you don't want it just before you die wake up and realize that you hadn't lived, that you were living in the story of me and it wasn't wrong, it wasn't a complete story, it wasn't true, but it was a prison and now you die. So that's why in the yoga tradition, and Roman Maharshi actually did this when he was 16 years old, he lay down the coffin and decided, okay, I'm going to just die now, and he woke up apparently, that's the story, and seems to be confirmed by however many decades he lived afterwards and taught. But that's why in yoga, over all the 84,000 main yoga poses and 10 variations on each one of those yoga poses, they say the hardest of all the yoga poses is the corp's pose. We're just lying on

your back. Okay, because the real invitation, why do they call it the corp's pose, we're just lying on your back. Okay, because the real invitation why do they call it the corp's pose isn't that a little on the model inside? Well, no, it's not. It's actually an incredible gift. The invitation is like, die now. Die now to say the future. Die now to the past and then wake up into the present. That's what the corpse pose really. It was a die to all of that stuff, the me from myself, the banish and all of that warfare that goes on within ourselves wanting to have the perfect life when you've already in some sense have it. And it's a miracle and the body itself is a miracle. Never mind the mind, the family, you, children, old age, I mean, everything. And that's where realization is all about waking up.

Realize it. And then don't build a big story about enlightenment or anything like that, because that'll imprison you as well as anything else. And give you seriously wrong ideas about what this is all about. Coming up, John talks about equanimity, ending the war between the mutual monarchs realizing that you have what you need right now. And that's very appealing to me as

somebody who's quite anxious. And, you know, I can think back to some of the more operatic moments for me on my various meditation retreats and the common denominator among all of the moments that I might call a quote unquote breakthrough, which is probably not the right terminology, is a feeling of everything's okay. And yet I go back to my life and I'm still dealing with a quite dog-ed sense of fear. And so when I hear you talk on both inspired and feeling a little bit like a failure. Okay, let's go to the everything's okay part of it. What do you mean by everything's okay? Well, I'm not in that mind state right now, so it's hard for me to summon it, but yeah, I guess it's just a real equanimity, a sense of like I can handle whatever comes up. I'm not in

control of it, but I can be cool with whatever happens. So things are as they are, basically. Yes. Okay. And you mentioned equanimity, which is a very powerful space that is inhabitable with and is congruent with wisdom, where you see that the nature of greed, hatred and delusion and its consequences in terms of suffering has been ongoing. But when it comes to just everything is as it is, that doesn't mean that you don't act. It means that you act from a place of boundless spaciousness where it's fine to recognize that there's anxiety too, you know, that like, yeah, I mean, I still have to do this, this, and this, and it's challenging, and, you know,

and then people reacting one way or another. So it's not like that stuff doesn't still pertain. What changes is how you are in relationship to it, including how you're in relationship with, I'll say it this way, your own anxiety, although it's not yours. It's more like a weather pattern in the mind, but when we take it personally, then it becomes my anxiety. And just to notice the difference between my anxiety and this cloud of contracted feeling that's overcoming my jaw and my back and my face and comes with a lot of sorrow or fear. And then all of a sudden it's like a snowstorm or a blizzard or, you know, rain. And it's just a weather pattern and you don't have to take it personally. In my own experience, I've found that over time, that's really helpful.

I mean, anxiety arises at times. And if not for oneself, for one's loved ones, for people who cares about, you know, the what ifs and the, oh my God, no, and all of this stuff, which is the actuality. And as you're saying, this is it. This is the way it is. It's always been this way. Now it's this way with more beauty and more destructive power. So the challenge is always the same. How am I or how are we going to be in wise relationship to it? And so then the anxiety, you put it a welcome matter for it say,

if it's here, it becomes an object of our meditation practice, welcome anxiety. Let's let it just do its thing. We don't try to get rid of it. We don't pursue it. But we just let it work itself out as a storm. And then have you ever had this thought afterwards, like, what was I so anxious about?

What's a big deal here? You know, it's like until the next time you get anxious and then it's like, oh my god, that's the same god damn thing. So that's kind of like, it's funny. We're laughing about it, but we're not laughing about it when we're in the midst of something like that. And that's where remembering what the practice offers is in no time. It's like really liberating. It's liberating of the suffering associated with the anxiety. Or with sort of the sensation if we're talking about physical pain, acute physical pain. And when we turn towards it and open to it and put the welcome that out, it just gives us new degrees of freedom. It doesn't make everything better, but it gives us new degrees of freedom with working with that.

And that's my working definition of the word healing is not fixing, not curing, making it the way it used to be when I was 20 years younger, but coming to terms with things as they are. And so how do we come to terms with the fact that I'm anxious or depressed or whatever. And part of it is like you could ask, well, just the way who's dying, you could ask in the corpse pose, you'd ask, who's anxious? Who's depressed? And then you see the story of me, and then you see the emptiness of the story of me. It's like empty of any kind of essential nature. And then you see the story of me, and then you see the emptiness of the story of me. It's like empty of any kind of essential nature.

And then it's kind of like, it like falls apart. It's like a construct that's making out of thin air. And you see the impersonal empty nature of it, but it's a real experience. It's not coming out of some kind of philosophy or some kind of thing you read about, you know, the role of emptiness and meditation practice. But it's the nature of reality and the space of awareness is not just, as we said, boundless and centerless, so just like the universe, but it's also mostly empty. I mean, it's really empty, and it's also another word for empty would be full, because it's absolutely full of possibility. And I just love that, because it's kind of like, it is healing. It's a way for us to come to terms

with enormous levels of pain and suffering and then do what we can and not beat ourselves up for what we can't. And then the arc would be coming back to MBSR. You come to MBSR because you're suffering, you're in pain of one kind or another in the hospital for eight weeks, once a week, to an half hour class.

I mean, and you learn this stuff, and you've heard here about it maybe for the first time you've never read any books. And it's like you start to learn something about other people, because you're listening to other people talk about their suffering. We almost never get here from strangers about the depths of their suffering. It almost never get here from strangers about the depths of their suffering. It's like jaw dropping. And then you realize you're part of a much larger circle

here. So that learning, what does learning do to us? Why is education so important? Because we grow as an outcome of learning something, put two it together and it grows into four and a realization that two into is four. Okay, that's like new. So we learning growing and out of that growing is that coming to terms with things as they are, we can't just fix everything but we can contribute in whatever ways we can. And out of healing comes transformation. That you're the same person, you always were, only you're not, because as words were put it, you've recognized discordant elements that now move in one society, you know. So it's like things become unified and you're who you always were, but it's embodied for now.

And the next moment takes care of itself if you take care of this one. And it's a lifetime adventure, lifetime love affair. As far as I can see, I haven't made it to the end yet, so I can't reveal the ending, but many other people have and feel incredibly privileged to be living at this particular time where there is really a potential renaissance of wakefulness and compassion arising on the planet in the face of all this darkness and destruction and the challenges to the earth itself. And I think we're equipped, challenges to the earth itself. And I think we're equipped. We're really well equipped to thread this needle.

And I think that's why having a podcast, a good idea, because somebody's going to be listening to this. I don't know. It's a mystery how people just listen and then they connect. And not so much with Dan Harris or me, but they connect with themselves through a conversation like this. And that is part of the healing and the transformation. And we're all doing what we can.

And it's just insanely beautiful. And I love that we've been in relationship in some weird way over so many decades. And you know, that the beat goes on and just the adventure unfolds. I'm grateful for that for sure. Man, I'm grateful to you for taking the time to do this podcast.

Thank you. Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure for me. Thanks again to John Cavitzin. Thanks to you for listening. Do us a solid and go into your podcast player and rate or review us or both. Five stars would be nice. It's kind of like Uber. Thanks to Well to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% Happier is produced by DJ Cashmere Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davy, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson. Our supervising producer is Marissa Schneidermann,

and Kimmy Regler is our managing producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultraviolet audio, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. We'll see you right back here on Friday for a bonus. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ 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 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey. completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.