Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 84: James Gimian, Mindful Magazine Publisher

Episode Date: June 14, 2017

James Gimian, who has been in publishing since the '70s, started covering the emerging mindfulness movement for a small magazine years ago when he said it became clear that secular mindfulness was taking root in "a big and significant way." In 2011, he spearheaded the launch of Mindful, a mission-oriented non-profit organization and magazine dedicated to bringing secular mindfulness to the masses, offering community building, profile pieces, advice and guidance. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a 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 podcasts. Okay, let me start this podcast with an apology. We taped this podcast back in, I think, September or something like that. So big apologies to James Gimian or Jim Gimian, who is the publisher of Mindful Magazine, which is a fantastic magazine, a great place to learn about all the latest and greatest in the,

what I like to think of as the big public health revolution that is Mindfulness and Meditation. And from his perch, as publisher, Jim is able to sort of see all these trends and see all the interesting people who are working in this area. And also he's a great connector of people in this space. Not for nothing, he's also been meditating for decades. And so it has a lot of interesting perspectives on all of this from an interior point of view. So anyway, enough said, here's Jim Gimian.

From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Thanks for coming on, man. My pleasure. Great to chat with you. So how did you get into meditation? Well, I got into meditation really from a lot of disillusionment in my college years. That's how I got into it.

I mean, I went to Stanford University, arguably one of the fine universities, got to know professors very well because it was a small place. Was that the KC days? We see you doing acid and stuff. He was a little earlier, early 60s, but that does come into the story. I mean, first we had arguably the best professors, and in a small place you got to know them, and my observation was that they were expert in their field, but there was no transference from that expert to their everyday lives.

I mean, their everyday lives were a mess. And I just thought to myself, do I want to wind up there? So that was part of the disillusionment. The other part was I was very active in the anti-war movement. We shut down the university for a quarter, and yet still getting to see the leaders of the anti-war movement,

they had no more insight about the roots of aggression and how to under, as I uproot those roots of aggression, than the people they were protesting against. And I thought again, do I wind up there? And the third thing was, it was a time of experimentation with drugs, and I certainly did my fair share of scientific inquiry. And you know, it was the first experience that there was something beyond this habitual thought pattern. There was a world outside of that and this experience of being interconnected with all the other elements of life.

We came a visceral one, but the short coming there is you just couldn't continue to repeat that as some, you know, taking some external agents. Yeah, just just again, it was clear it wasn't leading anywhere for those people who did. So how to find a way that answered those questions for me. That was a 1970 I dropped out of Stanford and never graduated because it wasn't relevant, but it led me to an inquiry of how do you address those? How do you live an authentic life where the you behind the screen and the you and you know in front of the screen are the same person? How do you address those

deep roots of aggression that seem to be you know prevalent in our society? Very evident nowadays and you know how does one sustain the kind of relationship with those habitual thoughts that gets us kind of, as you say, not dragged around by them? Yeah, man, you were a much deeper dude in your early 20s than I was. Well, I didn't seem deep. I have to say. I guess with the draft hanging over you a year, yeah, it was a pretty intense time in that way. Did you have a good number that didn't get called or? I first failed my pre-induction physical

because I was so freaked out at the prospect that I was pulled out of the line and told that I had high blood pressure. So I had to do some medical workups, but then the lottery came in and I had a high number. Which didn't really solve the problem because a lot of my friends either were drafted or went to jail or the threat of jail because of their unwillingness. So at the time my older brother was doing his third tour of duty in Vietnam. So this was a very personal and difficult.

And he made it through though. Yeah, he did. So how did you go from disillusioned college kid, dablin' a little bit with drugs to actually starting to meditate? One of the things that happened by chance was friend of mine was quitting his job as the caretaker for a very remote remote farm in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada's in northern California and

I had spent time hanging out with him. He left and I applied for the job and I was there for a year and it was pretty much like being on to treat so during that time I took much like being on retreat. So during that time I took yoga and Nevada City and a yoga studio there which would stack up by today's standards a great place in 1970-71. I got into meditation, I started reading books, I started going on an all-vegetarian diet and lost about 50 pounds because I'd eat 50 pounds of carrots every week, either in juice or in raw form. So, out of that year, it's been- That has ended because we just had lunch and you had tuna. Right, long time ago.

Okay. It's funny because we've been friends for years and I didn't know 90% of these biographical. This is really interesting. Well, you know, I Have lived my experience and I have it reminded in my Disgressive thoughts plenty so I know it when I we get together. I'm much more fascinated by hearing your story Also, I'm a narcissist and I talk a lot so that that takes takes up a lot of it It's easy to encourage you, but I appreciate that because I was here fascinating insights about People getting into meditation and I learned from you saying those things, so well, thank you easy to encourage you, but I appreciate that because I was your fascinating insights about people getting into meditation and I learned from you saying those things.

Well, thank you. So you're on the farm, imbibing carrots, and you start meditating a little bit. Yeah, and really trying a whole range. That was one of the blessings of the time. There was such a wide array of options available. Teachers coming through, writing books, there were Sufis, there were Christian mystics, there were Buddhists, Ramdas, who was getting people to stare at candles, and you know, I tried a little bit of all of them, but there was something at a certain point that a book called meditation in action, a very slim volume

about mindfulness meditation that just penetrated. And from there I came down after about a year and saw Chugam Trumpa, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher. And within about six months I was in back in Palo Alto, in the book and publishing industry. And on the extra time starting a meditation center for people who wanted to get involved in mindfulness practice. A trunk plan that started something called Shambhala, which you know it has people who listen to this podcast may know it, they've meditation centers all over the country, all over

the world, or maybe all over North America You can correct me wherever I run a stray here and as I and they also did some publishing still do some publishing so What used to be known as the Shambhalasana is now the lion's roar and also a magazine called booted Dharma and you Were the publisher? Yes for 15 years when it was known as a Shambhalasana that is a separate and the publisher? Yes, for 15 years when it was known as a chambalasana. That is a separate and independent nonprofit. So it originated back in the 90s from that community, but has long been independent and renamed as the Lions Roar Foundation. And then when I got to know you, I know it was, six, seven years ago, you were the publisher of

what was then the Shambhalasana. And you guys were starting a new venture, right, called Mindful. We started covering the emerging mindfulness movement from the Shambhalasana. We did articles on Richie Davidson. We did articles on John, Kabadzin. And we started small and we did cover stories and then we did special editions and it became very clear after about three years

that this was something that was taking root in a big and significant way and required its own independent nonprofit that was dedicated to the mission of bringing secular mindfulness practice everywhere that people would want to have it brought in. So in 2011, we established the 5013C, a nonprofit mission oriented and really we still see ourselves as a mission-oriented field building operation to support the champions in the field who are doing the incredible work, many of whom have come on your podcast, and to support that work and help build the credibility, first of all, and then

the activation, the way in which it could help. From the outside, we look like a media operation because we sustain ourselves from a print magazine, Mindful.org, the website, and those have grown over the four years of the startup world, which you know about now. It's a real crapshoot. And I had a lot of challenge in the early stages, convincing philanthropic organizations to invest because startups are dangerous and magazine startups are pure death. So that was a real challenge. While around me, all of our colleagues who were doing profit startups, apps and things like that. Apps and all sorts of things were getting $3,000,000, $10,000,000.

It was a little discouraging, but certainly understandable. But so how's it going now? You've been up and running for a while. Just completing our fourth year of print publication. How many subscribers? We have about, well, total circulation, subscribers, new stand copies is about 80,000. Good number.

And tremendous growth in the last year on the digital side, about 600,000 unique visitors and 135,000 people who get our newsletters and emails. Tremendous growth, we've just reached the sort of end of that startup phase. I'm so happy to tell you, I got more time in the garden this summer than I have for five years. And given that you live in Canada,

the summer's about two weeks on. Four. Four weeks on four. Four weeks on. But it's true. You know, we really feel we've achieved the proof of concept stage that the media that there is sufficient and sustainable interest to have a business that prints sells print magazines and creates content for both digital also special packages. We've just brought out our first special publication where we've repurposed content from mindful magazine to a beautiful book getting started in mind with mindfulness for beginners bringing all of that content

from various issues together in a beautiful edition though. Yeah, so, but for people who, you know, listen to the podcast and just may want a good read, what, tell us, I mean, I know that mindfulness great, but just walk everybody through what's in the magazine. I'll give you a high level version because I think more important than me doing it

is for you to have editor-in-chief Barry Boyson this year so he can tell you about the editorial relationship with our reader. He definitely will be in the chair. He's also hilarious, dude, just like you. And I should say, both you and Barry have been invaluable advisors to me as I've stumbled along in this world.

From years before I wrote the book and you were advising me, you guys both read several versions of drafts and gave me lots of pointers and helped me figure out, have helped me make key decisions along the way. So you've been incredibly supportive that way and you play that role for a lot of people

who are in the mindfulness space. Both you and Barry. So credit where credit's due. And that probably didn't even give you sufficient credit for the amount of just pure gold guidance you've provided me in particular over the year and I know over the years and I know that you do that with many other people. But in terms of what's in the magazine for the listeners, just give us a high level sense. As any magazine is structured, there are the small bits and pieces in the front of the magazine that concentrate on news you can use, things that are helpful in your life, short bits that are easy to read. The center of the book called The Editorial Well has a range of more thoughtful pieces

that will cover some of the wonderful work that's being done. Like our launch issue was on our friends in Baltimore who do the incredible mindfulness work in the school system. Yeah, Ali Smith was on the podcast. He's an amazing dude and his brother, Adman, and their colleague Andy. Absolutely. Yeah, that was a great article. Well, a range of stories like that, that bring to the community of people

who have a growing interest, examples of how this practice and its various forms can be helpful in their lives, and how it's affecting the society that we live in. That's a very important thing to us, because for us, as I said, the mission here is to bring the benefits of mindfulness to wherever in society, the challenges are there.

Nowadays, that's just about everywhere. And there are wonderful people who are doing this work. We want to tell their stories, support their work, connect them to others who are doing their work. And the stories help us do that, you know. And so if I'm interested in meditation, you know, practicing some, maybe not, maybe thinking about practicing, which the elevator pitch, why should I read mindful? One place that you can get credible information, you can trust about the ways you can get engaged, the places you can go to get support, the community of people who are doing the same thing,

the kinds of things that people getting into any new venture need, if you're a golfer, you know, you want to get the best instruction, the best equipment, you want to learn about what others are doing, and we're doing the same thing for this community. So there's a proliferation of information because of how this has become so popularized. But we have gotten now, clearly, the reputation as the authoritative voice of trusted, credible information on the science, on the different kinds of practices you can do. You know, there are a lot of things nowadays that are called mindfulness.

And the nuances are hard to detect if you're new to the field. In particular right now, as I go around, as I do, as part of my job in seeing what people are doing in the trenches, I have, in Los Angeles, and in New York City in the last month, been to meditation, mindfulness days, and local centers, where an array of teachers are presenting, each one of them touting the science as finally proving that mindfulness is beneficial, and then quickly following that, presenting their meditation that they wanna teach, and not knowing that none of the science

that they're presenting was done on the form of meditation that they're teaching. So, mindful helps you sort that sort of thing out. And that's kind of critical. So how much of a... This is such a baby... I don't know what do we call it in the industry, a movement, a health revolution.

I don't know what we call it, but this field is so sort of new. It's got a real Wild West thing going on. How tricky is it to navigate if you're a newcomer? Well, I think that it's not all that tricky. I arguably know the field and what's going on as well as anybody because it's my job. No, I would say you are just because you can't say this. You really have a vantage point on what's going on in this field that is hard to surpass because you were talking to everybody.

You're talking to everybody and also you bring to it decades of meditation practice and a real, I think, a very hard to question. I would say unimpeachable sort of understanding of what meditation could do in an individual life, as you've taught it, you've written about it, so you have a real, you have real standing to make, to answer a bunch of the questions that I'm about to ask you. I know you can't say any of that, but I'm saying it to the, to the list. You're eating up a lot of time with these.

This is my show, man. I do that. Hey, I can say whatever the hell I want, my show. And there's no time limit. So you can, all right. All right, well, kind of you to say, I'm my pleasure. But may take it back, you keep a wise, you can crack in wise like that.

But my point, dude, and I did have one, is that I can say without any hesitation, that 90% of the people that are doing the work in the trenches have the highest motivation, inspiration to actually help people and a reliable amount of training to be able to back that up. How long that's going to be the case is the question. Do you see in early signs of huxterism? Oh, yeah. Sure.

Well, one example is what I just told you, but people touting the science and then presenting a medicine. It's sort of like, take vitamin D and it's going to prove this medical condition. That's the research proves it. But here, take some of this vitamin A. It's like, there's no relationship. So yes, there are lots of early signs, but you know, I think in the early stages of any kind of fundamental cultural change, which is what's really in question right now, is how can this practice help us in our relationships in the way we do what we do as a society?

Not just how does it help me in my life. That's important. But if it doesn't change the way in which we are as a society, it's really not going to be that helpful. So, I think the point is that in the early stages, we've got leaders who are genuinely trained and inspired Followed by people jumping in to capitalize in it for a whole range of reasons and Part of that reason is experimentation. So I think

We're getting close to the period where we need things definitely like credentials and Assessments and all those and I'm not against those. But I don't think we want to lose the fact that we're going through something for the first time. And if we clamp down too soon on some of the experiments that are taking place, we're going to lose a lot of innovative, exciting and different solutions of how mindfulness can be applied. And I see a lot of innovative, exciting, and different solutions of how mindfulness can be applied. And I see a lot of those things that you never would have imagined that mindfulness might be helpful. We met a Spanish language lab professor at the University of Virginia.

The greatest fear in acquiring a new language has something to do with the brain that I can't repeat to you. But it's a huge obstacle. And she's actually pioneering research on applying mindfulness to overcoming this obstacle. And it's showing a lot of promise. Now, I would never have guessed that one of the things mindfulness might be able to help with is foreign language acquisition. And that may not seem like the biggest problem in the world, but that's a huge vast area of life. And it's just, you know, multiple examples of something like that. So, a lot of it of pretty interesting experimentation. I'm a pretty conservative person, but I really am feeling that this particular period of explosion of interest is yes the Wild West, but that's kind of an exciting time.

Yeah, I agree. One of the, our mutual friend, David Gellis, who wrote an excellent book called Mindful Workies at Reporter for the New York Times Times and wrote about how mindfulness is showing up in workplaces all over the country and the world. He raises the idea that maybe we need some sort of good housekeeping seal of approval, so that you know that if somebody is coming into your workplace to teach you mindfulness, that they actually have some training they know what they're doing, because after all they're getting under the hood of your mind. Do you think that's that that's something that

should be considered and who would do it? It's already being talked about. It is. A couple of groups, actually three different groups who have the kind of background in training to do it and they're taking a very slow and methodical step because you know who has the ability to create that in a way that's unimpeachable? I would say there's probably, you know, five or six threads of conversation, all with little differences in their approach, the need first to come together, so it's as inclusive. Because if you lock that stuff down too soon,

there will be people outside of that system who aren't approved. They're not going to discontinue their work, but they're going to continue it outside of that. There's just too much uncertainty in the science or in the outcomes of some of this research for us to be able to say at this stage, here, we can give this the seal of approval. We, if you talk about businesses and how some of them are bringing mindfulness in, they're either doing it because there's an internal champion who themselves is processed or that

person, if they're not processed and trained or the HR leader, is surveying all the other people. They're peers and cohorts to test what's been working, what's not been working, what's trustworthy. So there's pretty robust crowdsourcing system in place, or readmindful.org, or Mindful Magazine, and you have a resource that can pretty much reflect back to you the things you

know you can trust. So yes, it's important. Is the time right? I don't think quite yet. You move, you circulate quite widely in the mindfulness world. These are all people who allegedly meditate, right? And yet, there are politics. And how are the politics, you think, because there are different groups who may want, who may feel like they have the right to say, well, we should give the good house giving the sale of approval,

and there are different companies competing against one another. Do you, are there sharp elbows in this world that you see or is it actually a pretty nice place compared to almost any other industry? Given that everybody's meditating or says they are meditating. I think it's, you didn't say this, but to make a point all exaggerated on what you did say, I think it's naive to think that mindfulness

is gonna rid us of our human foibles. We're going to have politics, we're going to have aggression, we're going to have all sorts of neurotic behaviors. I think, as we know, from the way meditation is taught, being aware of those things, creating an environment where they can arise and be seen clearly, and then who knows what, but not instantaneously acted upon. That's really what we're hoping for. So in the mindfulness world or industry, I would say the real danger is not that there's

politics, but the presumption that there shouldn't be. Because then what you get is those things that are natural to humans get submerged. And I have seen that. And that worries me more. Because I mean, anybody's gonna tell me there's not politics or territory or aggression or ambition, I'm gonna be suspicious of that.

That's just not believable. When we don't have the capacity to bring it out and talk about it and be able to process it and have mindfulness practice help us do that, that's when I would get worried. I love it. Well played, dude. Do you have a sense of where all this is going? Like when you, given, as I said, given that you're having so many conversations with so many people and you really do have a bird's eye view on what's happening in the mindfulness space since I'm struggling to come up with a way to describe it. Where is it? Are we heading toward a world where like everybody meditates and that it changes the nature of our society?

That's a little utopian, but where do you see this all going? One of the things that we adopted in starting mindful that's a little utopian, but where do you see this all going? One of the things that we adopted in starting Mindful was a kind of systems change approach where, or you could say sort of network theory, in the sense that we saw nodes of activity, really vital, inspiring, genuine, mindfulness activity, but they were disconnected. And the very network theory is if you connect those nodes, then at a certain point they can jump to making a larger network, and that larger network can develop qualities that

the other networks didn't have, things that you can't even expect. So that's why a lot of our work in the magazine and on the website and in person has been to support those nodes, to get to know what people are doing in the trenches, spend time with them, and then to make the connections. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up page six or do-mo-ah or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Disantel.

Where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build-up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud 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 Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondering App. So if you were to tell me five years ago that we would already be beyond the cheerleading stage, that we were no longer having to prove to people that mindfulness was a good thing. But rather, let's get down and find the details of how it can be a good thing. I would have told you, no way, it's going to take much longer than that. Most of the people you know who are in this world and our leaders of it say they've been involved for 40 years years like I have, they

spent the first 35 not telling anybody they were involved. Because it was embarrassing. It was a conversation stopper. A stopper. Oh thank you very much. Turn away. You know, just so consistently. So we're just getting into a period where not only is it okay to talk about it, but you're

like a lot of it as some kind of hero because you do this, which is kind of ludicrous to most of us in that position. So I think it's very hard to predict where it's going to go. But just to give you two examples that I think blew my mind and point to where it could go. One is the all parliamentary committee in the UK. I don't know if you've heard about that. Yes, I have to tell everybody. Very quickly, 135 members of parliament went through mindfulness training

and through the work of a then active member of parliament now retired and the leader of the nonprofit who was bringing this training they've actually got established funding proposals in the UK parliament about bringing mindfulness into the health care system and bct mindfulness-based cognitive therapy into the prison system because it's been shown to reduce you know to the recidivism so that people aren't coming back to prison in the mindfulness-based cognitive therapy into the prison system because it's been shown to reduce

the recidivism so that people aren't coming back to prison. They are now in contact with legislators from 35 different countries who have small, nascent programs going on in the Middle East, in throughout Europe, in Asia, soon, perhaps in Canada. And again, something I never would have imagined that we'd have politicians and legislators

who would not only see this seriously as beneficial to themselves and hard jobs, but bringing it into society. So that's a sign of taking it much further and much faster than I would have thought. The other one is what I recently learned about in Flint, Michigan. So I'll take a step back saying one of the most inspiring city-wide research activations going on right now is in Louisville, Kentucky. We just covered in our recent issue, very inspiring mayor who's making it a compassionate city, bringing mindfulness and compassion training

in research throughout the school system, huge, huge research project supported by the University of Virginia. But Louisville has a long history of being a contemplative city with Thomas Merton having been there. Lots of... It was a Catholic monk who wrote a lot about the overlap to Christianity and contemplative practice. Exactly. And had one of his main inspirations on the streets of Louisville and the cities had that feeling for a long time, but switched now to Flint, Michigan.

Now this is a town that's, you know, as mainstream as it gets in terms of the cities that have been devastated by industrial decline, lowering tax bases in the city, the population is dwindled, and then of course most recently the devastation of lead poisoning in the water system. Through the work of a very mainstream foundation, the CRIM fitness foundation, who got started 40 years ago supporting special Olympic running races in terms of getting people active and moving and expanding that.

Then about 15 years ago, they added nutrition as part of that to help and started like a YMCA, programs for citywide. Through a set of circumstances, they are now adding mindfulness to that to nutrition and active lifestyle and they've been asked to bring this into the school system and the medical system in Flint and the early trainings for the teachers has provided the basis for them being invited in. Because they're saying things like, my class hasn't paid attention to me like that ever before.

They're actually able to do the work. I feel like I'm less under siege than I've ever been. I want more of that. Nobody's proselytizing mindfulness to them. They're responding and wanting it, same with the medical system. So they're just about to embark on bringing those programs in, and this is not coming from some group of long-time mindfulness advocates who are trying to devise ways to promote mindfulness, it's arising from a foundation which did have one of its leaders

being engaged personally in mindfulness meditation but who brought that in at a pace in a way that has kind of standard conventional foundation is now bringing this into the schools in a town of Flint. If it can happen in the town of Flint, I think, it can happen everywhere. And the kinds of challenges and the schools and the hospital and in the streets are the same in a lot of places that they are in Flint. So these are two examples that I couldn't have predicted to you, you know, last year about the peace. So it's an interesting ride. And I think at Mindful and Mindful.org R.O.L. is kind of like, let's tell these stories. Let's support this work. Let's create special publications to help support the learning for these folks and connect Louisville to Flint.

And who knows? I mean, I didn't know about the Flint thing. That's an amazing story. I'm glad you told it. So I'd love to talk a little bit about what the challenges are going forward from mindfulness in our culture. One of them seems to me, but I really like to hear your view on this, is concerns that you hear from, I think, well-intentioned people who, that this is sectarian in nature, that this is stealth

Buddhism. You're a Buddhist practitioner. I'm a self-described Buddhist. We can argue about what Buddhism actually is and all that, but this is a really perception game we're playing here. and all that but but this is really perception game we're playing here and and uh... i think it is hard to argue that mindfulness secular mindfulness is derived from buddhism so how when people say i don't want this taught my school because this is this is uh... basically a religious practice uh... how do you respond to that and how big a problem do you think this is going to be is going to be for this industry going forward? As an advocate for mindfulness in the schools, if I thought somebody was bringing mindfulness

in the schools in order to promote Buddhism, I'd be against it too. I think that's wrong. And as a matter of fact, I disagree with your assessment, you know, of the nature of the relationship between Buddhism and mindfulness. As we describe it in the pages of Mindful Magazine, mindfulness is a common human inheritance since it's innate in human beings. And we've learned now that it's trainable. You can train your brain and you can train your capacity to develop that sense of awareness of your thoughts and emotions and your ability to respond and not react.

Can I just jump in for a second? Yeah, I fully agree with that. Absolutely. Absolutely. It is a basic human capacity. But, you know, mindfulness-based stress reduction, which was pioneered by a guy named John Kabatzen. What he, as he just, which is really what has, in many ways, led us to this point, which was the first secular and replicable protocol for teaching mindfulness meditation to people in a way that then got studied and we were able to cite those studies. And that really, I think, in my understanding of the history and you can correct me, because I'm probably

veering off into wrong headed territory. Many of the things I'm saying, and I'll leave you to correct me there. But nonetheless, John Capitzin was taking his Buddhist practice and stripping out the Buddhist lingo and the metaphysics. And so yeah, I don't think mindfulness is a Buddhist thing. It's a human thing, but it was described very well by the Buddhists for millennia, and it is the tradition, the vehicle, which kept this alive for a long time. Obviously, it was contemplative practices were alive and well, and are alive and

well, and many other religious communities too. But I think you can't hide the ball on the fact that communities too, but I think you can't hide the ball on the fact that mindfulness as it's currently taught to most people is derived from basic Buddhist meditation. So correct me where I'm wrong in that stuff. Well, I have a different way of describing it, which I think is actually a nuance that makes all the difference for the way in which it stands a chance of being adopted by, you know, a wide swath of our population and people that we care about. We imagine two circles, a large circle and a small circle. If you make Buddhism the large circle as a religion, Buddhism is the thing that created mindfulness

and the arrow goes to the small circle, and then the small circle is mindfulness, and mindfulness is derivative. It's a translation of the bigger circle and anybody that gets involved in that smaller circle is gonna be looking for, well, you know, where is the real stuff that you're coming from? Yeah, yeah. yeah. Really come from, right?

I switched at mindful, we switch the contents of those circles. The human innate quality of being mindful fills the big circle. That is inclusive of everybody, of people from other cultures, of other religions, of other orientations to how to work out this challenging human thing. So saying that that big circle is mindfulness and that the small circle is the fact that the Buddhists over the last 2,500 years have done some really deep and helpful research on that human capacity means that that big circle can include everybody and the smaller circle is the derivative of the larger circle.

And once you say that mindfulness is a human and hate human capacity, you've got to put the mindfulness in the big circle, it seems to me back in those early years on the farm where I was exploring a lot of different traditions of meditation. I didn't reject them because they weren't genuine. They weren't particularly the one for me. So I think where you're right is saying the manifestations we currently see of mindfulness practices in application are largely patterned after what

people have learned in a Buddhist setting. But Buddhists don't own mindfulness and they don't own those technologies. They develop them and they've been giving them away for a long time. But I think it's clearly the case, if you look at what's going on in places like Louisville that you're going to see technologies from other traditions weaving into the same story, having benefit, having research done on them, and being part of the story. So I just think if we want people to feel there's a place for them in this narrative, we should tell the narrative that's human,

not one or the other manifestation of the story. Well, I think that analysis has a lot of merit. I'm just more thinking like if you're advocating if you're advocating for getting mindfulness into a public school and there are parents who are unhappy about it, they're not going to be wrong when they say that this practice, John Kabat-Zinn himself says he got the idea for secularizing and doing, he doesn't like that word, but I'm going to use it anyway, that he got the idea for creating MBSR while on a Buddhist meditation retreat. So they're not wrong, factually, when they point to the links to Buddhism in modern secular mindfulness. So, is that a hurdle that can be vaulted?

I'm really terrible at analogies, but what you're saying is like, if we bring Indian food in, because we're hungry and we want to eat, are we going to be worried that we're all going to turn into people of Indian culture? No, no, no, I'm not. I mean, that's not a good analogy because it's religion. We don't allow prayer in schools. Mindfulness is not religion. I agree with that. I'm just saying, how do you deal with this? How would you kindly, compassionately, and accurately talk a concerned Christian parent off the ledge about the notion that their child

might be taught mindfulness meditation in a public taxpayer-supported school? I would share with them the letter that I got from a Texas. What do you call people who do religion in hospital who do chaplain? He was a chaplain in a very conservative town. He is a Christian and he wrote a letter to mindful thinking it for being open and accessible and helping him have a more intimate and direct relationship to God.

That was his words. It weren't my words, but they really confirmed us what we were trying to do to show that this quality that we are innately born with and the training of it could give you the capacity to lead you wherever you wanted and needed to go in your religious life because of the qualities we say it delivers the ability to not be reactive to be more aware of your thoughts and your emotions. These are human capacities and they can lead you to whatever religious beliefs they're important And we have evidence of that. He's not the only person.

It's happening to me the most compelling and the one that puts mindful in the best light. He was thanking us. So I mean, I think that's really going to be in the end the success of the so-called mindfulness movement, if it can show the widespread benefit that it promises separate from any set of religious beliefs. Nonetheless, though, it's probably going to end up in court, given the fact that it's

being taught with increasing frequency in public schools, and there are people who aren't going to like that. And I say that's great and fine. I mean, we had one example of that in Colmer choices work. And Cape Cod. And what happened there was this was a mother. Have you told this story? No, but I've actually spoken to that community. You did a fundraiser for them.

This was a mother whose daughter got into a group of friends where they really started doing self-harm. I mean, one of them committed suicide. And she was really worried about where this was going and realized she had to do something in her vein school couldn't. And she brought a program called Commer Choice into her daughter's classroom that had mindfulness as part of it.

And through a number of years, five, six years, I think it's 17 schools and 3,000 students, non-profit, and one of the new board members in the school district took issue in the way that you're describing and had an analysis written and brought to the attention of the school board by a think tank in California that had that kind of concern and it was brought to the attention and it demanded that the school board stop funding it. The school board assessing the benefit and the impact on the students, rejected that pressure, and continues to fund that program. So I don't think court is necessarily the only way, but I don't think it's necessarily a problem. I think if there are genuine

concerns, I would support parents raising those questions and addressing those questions, because as I said, if there is, in fact, some hidden agenda by people bringing mindfulness in, or even naivete, because they don't fully understand the issues and are maybe using without even knowing it, Buddhist jargon, then I think they should be called in the carpet for that. Well said. Do you think there are other, what do you think are the other major challenges facing mindfulness going forward? Well, I think you know one of the huge ones is there's adoption in the workplace, businesses, David's book, did a great service in surveying that. Now, of course, that's a rapidly changing scenario. We've kind of reached

the point where maybe 70 or 80% of the businesses know they should look into this, but maybe 10 or 15 are actually doing anything. So many of what we hear touted as the great examples of corporate uptake are really a single internal champion who's doing this on their own time off the side of their desk with no support from the business. So we shouldn't get too carried away. But say this rolls out, you know, that the interest continues. What is actually a successful way of scaling this in a company with 50,000 employees?

How do you get enough good teachers? That's only one of the issues, you know, but there are many like that in terms of, I mean, we had a wonderful program that the leadership of the US Marines identified as something that would help diminish the deterioration of the nervous system for a functioning Marine. And the big challenge wasn't that there weren't enough teachers, the big challenge was there was no time in a Marine's day to do the program. You couldn't do it in five minutes. It took eight hours, sixteen hours, twenty hours over the span of eight or 10 weeks.

No, just no way. It's that kind of commitment for a new thing. I think you're going to have similar problems in scale up. There's nobody ready to scale up big companies and Starbucks might be starting with 10,000 people, which is a huge project, but they've got 330,000 employees. So that's just a drop in the bucket. So how did genuinely, meaningfully scale with all the aspects, the teacher, but it's the follow-up.

It's the way that it can be integrated into the workplace. That's going to be a huge challenge. I don't think anybody's quite figured it out yet. What about the quality of the science? I'm not a scientist, so I don't think that I'll comment definitively on that, but I'll tell you what the scientists that we respect are saying. And that is that we've got early stage great indications of possible benefits that are really promising. But the research is at such early stages

that the kinds of robust longitudinal studies that need to take place in order to make any definitive statements. Those have not been done. And luckily, it's the leading scientists in the mindfulness movement who are saying that and wanting to really change that and working actively to get bigger studies, more robust studies. So we're very careful in the pages of mindful to to to both say science is indicating

that this is a good thing for you and good thing in these following six ways, but it is not definitive and don't have anybody tell you as people are that you know science is proven. That is not the case. Now that I've riled you up and asked you all the hot butt questions I can think of, can you give us a sense of what your daily practices, or is it even daily? What do you, whatever your practices? What do you do when you, when you meditate? Well, the frequency of formal practice, taking time out of my schedule and practicing happens on two ways. It happens either in daily or in retreat.

And that's been really challenging over the first four years of the startup for Mindful. It's been a terribly difficult thing, especially my time away from work has been really limited. So I've done a couple of things. I've had to shorten daily practice and find many more ways to weave practice into my activities, which I've enjoyed. You know, quite a lot. My more daily or formal practices, the form of shamata or mindfulness practice, a breath practice. You sit down, you notice the feeling of your breath at some point, your belly, your nose, your chest, and when you get lost, you start again.

Fundamentally, and there's some, you know, there are ways of mixing that breath with space that make it more three-dimensional, which is an elaboration. I don't understand that. Well I would say this way, from my point of view, the fundamental point of mindfulness practice is, and I think you say this very well, you talk about no longer being let around by the thoughts rambling in your head. And that's an ongoing practice. And going back to when I talked about taking LSD, it was the experience brought on from this

of the sense of a bigger world outside of the thought structure and being connected to bigger things. The discipline of bringing your mind to the attention on your, say, your outbreath is a practice training your attention. Having that outbreath dissolve into space connects your mind processes with a bigger space and has the same effect of dissolving the centralization. From my point of view of the single, the single biggest obstacle in all those thoughts, is it centralizes ourself.

It brings us back to the central reference point through which we're warding off or overcoming or fighting with. So the central reference point of me. Of me, me, me, me, me, me, in all of its different forms. So that practice, a way of mixing mind with breath, is a way of enlarging the space. So at the end of the breath,

you just kind of get a sense of the space that extends infinitely beyond you and your... It's a little simpler. It's much simpler. And following or being one with your breath as it leaves your nostrils or your mouth, it naturally dissolves into space. You follow that out into space.

And what happens before you naturally breathe in, is there is a momentary gap, just natural. Then you breathe back in and your attention comes to your breath and you breathe back in and your attention comes to your breath and you breathe out again. The breath just dissolves into space and there's a momentary gap. Training yourself to bring your attention to your breath is one part of mind training. The experience of the momentary gap is a break in the incessant mental talking self-talk. Yeah, but what if you're at selfless?

In idiot like me and you fill that break with like your to-do list. It's more a question of like all the rest of this practice noticing what's happening rather than filling it up. That gap is happening all the time. Your speed of your habitual mindset means that you don't pay attention to it. In the same way that that's true about our bodily fluids, we, and Polly fluids, our bodily functions. We feel our emotional states and mental states in our body, but we're not paying attention to it. So a lot of the practices are about how to tune in to how those things arise in the body.

And you can catch your experience there before you manifest that. A lot of the practices are about that. So that sort of thing is happening all the time. The practice is slowing down your mental processes to experience them. We've had you and I have had many, many conversations over the past several years as you've started this magazine and website and as it continues to evolve. And it's been tough, you said it already. It's hard to get starting something up in this way.

Do you think your practice has been useful and helpful for you as you've gone through all this? Yes, I think very much so. In two ways. There's a really wonderful inspiring short Tibetan Buddhist texts, only a few pages that's around on the internet. It's called the Way of Ma-Ati. And there's a simple line in there that I think talks directly about this and that is about how the simple everyday

practice is being open to every experience situation into all people without blockages or obstruction and without continually centralizing back into yourself. Now it sounds kind of theoretical but at a certain point I realized that's what I was doing all the time. Every experience I had was filtered through the constant sense of me and you know what I'm getting out of this situation or how I'm manipulating this situation. Turning the tables on that, paying more attention to other or not creating that sense of blockage or obstruction is a wonderful way of Integrating practice into daily life especially for someone like me whose every day work is going around the country talking to all these great people and hearing their stories and And so it's a way in which my work and my practice have come together since it's been very hard to integrate

more formal practice as much as I might have been used to, finding ways to integrating my practice into my work, like all of us are hoping to bring those worlds together. That's one way it's happened for me. And that's been really, really helpful. Thank you for coming on the podcast. It's always a great time. I hope whatever we've talked about is going to be helpful to your listeners.

I think it will be. And just thank you for all the work you're doing at Mindful. Everybody should read it. Mindfulmagazinemindful.org. Well done. Go there. Go there. And if you're in the philanthrop topic world uh... send me an email

yes you should send an email should we should we give you a email address yeah sure it's that's right on the on the website jgimme a minute mindful of that or and also thank you for just being a great friend uh... just as a friend friend and also as a key it incredibly valuable advisor to me as i've just muddled through this thing for the last couple years and and it's just worth repeating that you you and bary who will be on the show at some point,

do a great service, not only in your work for what you produce at Mindful and Mindful.org, but also in the connections you make among behind the scenes and almost never get incredible for it, just connecting people, advising people, checking in with people, it's incredibly valuable and deeply appreciated. So thank you. Kind words again, I know you probably want the last word, but for us, the path you've been going along

of your inquiry, your boldness in telling your story and your relentlessness in wanting to have this conversation on a wide scale, very inspiring and very educational for us to be part of and our conversations and to watch you do it. So thank you very much. Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. If you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris.

Importantly, I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren F. Ron, Josh Cohen, and the rest of the folks here at ABC, who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts. You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey

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