BESS MARCUS: I'm Bess Marcus,
the dean of the School
of Public Health here at Brown.
And we're so delighted to
have all of you with us today.
So thanks for being here.
We're here today at 4:00 to
celebrate the 20th Annual Dr.
And Mrs. Frederick Barnes
Lecture in Public Health.
And I'm delighted to see so
many people, all of you, here.
And we have another room
where we're broadcasting
this very important day today.
So the Barnes Lecture
started under the leadership
of Vince Mor in the year
2000, way back in 2000.
He, at the time, was the
chair of the Department
of Community Health.
And then this lectureship
continued under Dr. Fox Wetle,
the prior dean of
the School of Public
Health, our inaugural dean.
And I'm excited to
continue this tradition
and have it really be a
centerpiece of our National
Public Health Week
here at Brown.
So before introducing
our speaker today,
I'd like to tell you a little
bit about Fred Barnes, who
this lectureship is named for.
Dr. Barnes came to Brown in
1962 to help Brown's new program
in medicine.
He was so excited
about the prospect
of developing physicians
in a liberal arts setting.
And he taught what became a
hugely popular course called
the "Informative Way of Life."
And many students were very
inspired by this course.
And one of those
students, Jim Zisson,
who was a 1974
graduate of Brown,
endowed this lectureship
in honor of Dr. Barnes.
And so I'd like to acknowledge
Susan [? Waldrop ?] Barnes
who's here with us to
celebrate this important day.
[APPLAUSE]
And now, I'll speak
about our lecturer
for this 20th anniversary
of this lecture.
So I'm really honored
to welcome and introduce
the internationally-known
and award-winning scientist,
writer, and mindfulness
pioneer, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn.
One of the central themes of
our School of Public Health
Strategic Plan is about
mental health, resilience,
and mindfulness.
And this lecture is very
connected to those themes.
In fact, we're learning
that mindfulness
can be a powerful tool in
the prevention and treatment
of health issues like high blood
pressure, anxiety, depression,
obesity, and many other areas.
And we're really
focusing here at Brown
on the evidence-based
applications of mindfulness.
And you'll hear more
about that later on.
So Dr. Kabat-Zinn
has really propelled
mindfulness-based programs
into the mainstream
and really advocated for
participatory preventive
medicine, which is very
connected to public health--
really, the core
of public health.
Dr. Kabat-Zinn is professor
of medicine emeritus
at the University of
Massachusetts Medical School,
where he created the Stress
Reduction Clinic and the Center
for Mindfulness,
which was in Medicine,
Health Care, and Society.
So you'll hear
more from him soon.
But his practice of yoga and
studies with Buddhist teachers
led him to integrate these
findings within science,
within scientific findings.
And the stress reduction
program that he created
called Mindfulness-based
Stress Reduction
has become increasingly adopted
as a public health intervention
locally here in Providence,
nationally, and in fact,
globally.
Today, it is offered both
in clinical and community
settings, including
schools, hospitals, prisons,
and corporate work environments.
Dr. Kabat-Zinn is the
author of numerous books,
including Full
Catastrophe Living,
Arriving at Your Own Door,
Coming to Our Senses.
And the first book of Dr.
Kabat-Zinn's that I read,
which remains my favorite,
is called Wherever You Go,
There You Are.
Dr. Kabat-Zinn is an advisor
to our Mindfulness Center
here at Brown and
has been a mentor
to and a major influence
on many of our faculty,
including our director,
Eric Loucks, who
you'll hear from later today.
I first became aware of
Dr. Kabat-Zinn's work
when I was a graduate
student looking
at non-pharmacologic,
non-medication approaches
to helping people quit
smoking, lose weight, and lead
more meaningful lives.
So it's really a
great honor to have
him here today as our speaker
during National Public Health
Week.
Please join me in
welcoming Dr. Kabat-Zinn.
[APPLAUSE]
JON KABAT-ZINN: Thank you
for that introduction.
That was so nice.
Well, thanks.
Thank you for that
lovely introduction.
And thank you, Susan
[? Waldrop ?] Barnes,
for keeping the lineage going.
And thank you all for
coming this afternoon.
And ordinarily, I don't
think I would be aware
that it's Public Health Week.
But having been invited by
the School of Public Health
and seeing the sign
outside the door,
it reminded me that it
is, indeed, Public Health.
So I feel very in alignment--
and you'll see why
in a few moments--
with this whole
domain of inquiry
around how to further our health
in the public sphere, which
includes the nation, the
environment, our planet.
So public health is
very, very big topic.
And part of what I'll talk
about is the fact that, in 1979,
40 years ago this year, that
I started the MBSR program.
I conceived of it as a
public health intervention
in the sense that
the idea was to move
the bell curve of society.
And if I ever get to
my PowerPoint slides,
you'll see the bell curve
and move and stuff like that.
But I don't like to be confined
by PowerPoint, because when
I create a PowerPoint
presentation,
I create it at
some other moment.
But mindfulness is
all about this moment.
So why should I pull
you through what
my thoughts were at some
other moment rather than just
interact here?
But there are certain
things that for the image
value of them I've kept.
So this will have some degree of
PowerPoint presentation to it.
But what I'd like
mostly is for you
to not think of it as
a talk but think of it
as an engagement of some kind.
You all showed up here.
And I'm sure that
every single one of you
has better things to do with
this beautiful sunny afternoon
in early spring than to come
inside and hear one more person
talk--
and no less from a
very high platform.
[LAUGHTER]
Which, of course,
puffs up my sort
of being enormously that I'm
up here with all the flowers.
And you can start worshipping
me whenever you like.
[LAUGHTER]
But for me, that's
kind of, in some sense,
antithetical to why I'm here.
And so what I'd like to do is
invite you to more have a sense
that rather than
coming to a talk,
you're coming to some kind of
exploration of why you decided
to come in the first place.
Because, again, none of
you were here by accident.
You all had better things to do.
So there must be
something significant
that would be easily trivialized
that brought you here today.
And we're not going
to evaluate it.
We're not going to judge it.
But it would be nice
if we recognized it,
because that
recognition that lies
at the heart of mindfulness is
that awareness of the actuality
of things, including
what our motives are
for showing up someplace.
And since this is about
mindfulness-- and mindfulness
is not a concept or some
nice philosophy or catechism,
but it is a way of being in
relationship with reality
and the actuality
of life itself,
and it is an extremely rigorous
and arduous, in some sense,
meditation practice,
the very fact
that 300 people showed
up in the afternoon
on a weekday for this talk
is a certain kind of data.
Because if we offered
this talk 40 years ago,
zero people would have shown up.
[LAUGHTER]
So some element of public
health has to do with me.
The whole idea, as
you'll see, of my MBSR
was to take people
falling through the cracks
of the health care
system and challenging
them to do something
for themselves
that nobody on the
planet, including
their physicians, surgeons,
religious people, their family
and so forth, can do
for you, that only
you can do for yourself.
And there was no
availability for that.
It was always an auto
mechanics model of medicine.
You drive your broken down
body or mind into the clinic,
and then we'll fix you.
And truth be known, there are
very, very few fixes or cures
in medicine, even to this day.
There are a few, and
they're fabulous.
And if you have knee
problems or hip problems
and you need a bionic
joint, it turns out,
you can get one
and be pain free.
And there's amazing,
miraculous things in medicine.
But still, in terms of
the body as a whole,
there are very few cures.
And we want to differentiate
between curing and healing.
And healing is available
to us in any moment.
And if I can follow enough
thought strands together
without my frame of mind
or what I had in mind,
I will pull those together
at a certain point.
Or you can remind me
in the Q&A, because I
would like to have this be
very much an interaction.
So there'll be plenty of time
for questions and dialogue
and also for deep inquiry.
Let's look at the whole
thing as being an invitation
to deeply inquire not just
why you showed up today,
but in fact, who are you anyway?
And what would it mean to
even be healthy in a world
that is, in so many
ways, seriously toxic
and where we're experiencing
the stress of that
and the pain of that and the
rending of that in ways that
are as old as
civilization itself
and also as new as Twitter
and Facebook and Instagram?
So I'd like to take
a moment and before I
start clicking on the
PowerPoint to just invite
you to drop into the fact
that whatever got you here,
you are already arrived.
You are here.
So let's see if we are.
Because your mind could
already be thinking,
well, I made a mistake coming
to this lecture, I thought.
[LAUGHTER]
Get me out of here.
I wish I'd sat at the
back or whatever it is.
And I also want to honor
how many students are here.
So how many students are
here, students at Brown?
Fantastic-- how many
graduate students?
Just keep your hands up.
How many undergraduates?
Wonderful-- how many
graduates of an MBSR program?
Wow.
And how many teachers of MBSR?
Well, welcome one and all.
And if you don't fit into those
categories, the only category
I'm interested in,
frankly, is human.
So I'd like to invite
you to actually--
and can you all
hear me at the back?
Am I audible?
OK, because I don't want
to shout about meditation.
[LAUGHTER]
But I'd like to invite
you to drop into the fact
that your body is sitting
here on this chair.
And it took a lot of energy,
as we said, to get you here.
You made all sorts of
choices, and now here you are.
So how could you actually drop
in to being fully present?
Well, one way you might do it--
well, let me ask
one more question.
How many of you would call
yourself regular meditators?
Raise your hands.
Almost everybody, or
maybe 70% of people--
so deep bow to you all for that.
May it just continue
ad nauseum--
[LAUGHTER]
--or ad infinitum,
however you like,
the beauty of the
present moment being
that it's infinite anyway.
So there's no time in
the present moment.
So the invitation
is to actually drop
into what, in a certain way, is
the timeless quality of being
and also not being caught
in the stream of time that
really arises through
what we call thinking.
Thinking is, in some
sense, a generator of time.
And what mindfulness
is is awareness.
And awareness is, in a certain
way, always in the now.
So if you're thinking about
the past, it's thinking.
If you're anticipating
the future, it's thinking.
But here, so can you sense your
body sitting here breathing?
And the answer is,
of course you can.
That's part of the
human repertoire.
But will you?
Will you be willing to do this?
So can you feel the breath
moving in and out of your body?
And then I'll ask
you the question.
Who's feeling it?
We even say "your body."
Who is whoever it is that's
saying, it's my body?
The personal pronouns come
into this very, very rapidly.
And me and we are going to
be a big theme in this talk.
So we'll be moving in and
out of personal pronouns
the whole time.
But it's a non-trivial question
to ask who's breathing.
Because if it were up
to you to be breathing,
you would have dropped
dead a long time ago.
You got some kind of
text or had a thought
and checked your Instagram.
And whoops-- dead.
[LAUGHTER]
So whoever you think
you are, you're
not allowed anywhere near the
brain stem in the phrenic nerve
and the diaphragm that
is doing the work.
You know why?
You, that personal
pronoun or what
a referent is, way
too unreliable to keep
the breath going.
You're lucky if you can
even be aware of this breath
and then get so bored
the next breath is like,
forget about it.
I'm out to lunch,
which is literally
and metaphorically true--
so bringing
ourselves back moment
by moment with huge
playfulness and generosity
and seeing if we can actually
inhabit this timeless moment
we call now, fully awake, fully
aware, with no agenda other
than to be, fully
awake, fully aware,
which doesn't require any
effort because it's biologically
woven in.
And then silence
becomes your friend.
Stillness becomes your friend.
And you don't have to shut off
all the thoughts in your mind.
And if you're thinking
at the moment among all
the other thoughts
in your mind that you
are the only one that has
thoughts in your mind,
forget about it.
Everybody is plagued by thoughts
in the mind, virtually all
the time.
And a lot of them are
very heavily freighted
with emotion and
unbelievable narratives
of who did what to whom
and why and who's to blame
and how you're certainly not
you and on and on and on.
And not just about yourself,
but everybody else,
the whole world, and there are
the good guys and the bad guys
and who we love and who
we hate and all this
us-ing and them-ing.
And can we find a
way to simply rest
in awareness of the whole thing
without shutting any of it off?
And since most of you practice
on a hopefully regular basis,
you all already recognize that
that's available to you 24/7
or whenever you're
at least awake,
that you don't have to be
sitting in a particular way
to do this.
You could be walking
down the street
or in class or cooking
dinner or making love.
It doesn't hurt to
be present for that.
[LAUGHTER]
Or being with your
children or grandchildren,
there's no waking
moment when it wouldn't
be, in some sense, richer
and more dimensional, more
multi-dimensional, if you
were actually present for it.
And there many, many
years of research
that shows that this
is not just some quaint
import from Southeast
Asia or East Asia
or India that has a kind
of catechism and belief
system and everything.
This is like this
actually transforms
how we are biologically,
psychologically,
cognitively,
emotionally, socially.
Because where's
the barrier of you?
Are you confined to the
envelope of your skin?
Interesting questions
to ask, aren't they?
So there's a certain
way, which, yes,
we are the center
of the universe.
I am the center of the universe.
And the interesting
thing about this universe
is that it's true that
we're very self-involved.
And we want the best for
ourselves and for the people
that we're closest to
and that we care about.
And everybody else, it's
like, good luck or bad news.
So then we fall into what's
called the narrative of me,
the story of me, our
favorite subject.
Like a movie on the marquee,
"The Story of Me" starring--
guess who--
me.
[LAUGHTER]
And I would like to say
that from the public health
perspective, in 1979, when I
started the Stress Reduction
Clinic, a large part of it
was to get people falling
through the cracks of
the health care system
to come into the hospital and
see if there wasn't something
they could do for themselves
that nobody else could
do for them and challenge
them with these very rigorous
Buddhist meditative practices
that were never solely
Buddhist because they are
virtually universal, being
about attention, awareness,
kindness, compassion,
interconnectivity.
And then just see.
Is it valuable or not?
Because when people are
falling through the cracks
of the health care system--
and probably all of us have
at one point or another.
It's not like it's
not an epidemic.
The health care system is like--
the chancellor of
Duke University
wrote a paper saying
the chassis is broken,
and the wheels are falling off--
talking about
American health care.
And I'm not talking about how
we pay for American health care.
I'm not talking about Obamacare
and how good that might be.
I'm talking about how much
care is in health care
and how much more
could be in there if we
had a participatory medicine,
if we had a medicine that
met people in a way that gave
them tools to actually optimize
health across the lifespan
when they're young enough
to be able to actually fall in
love with that way of being.
And then the rewards,
so to speak, the payoff,
comes from actually
what we call health.
So that's public health.
But in 1979, the idea was, well,
you take people as individuals.
You put them in classes,
in fairly large classes.
It's not therapy, and it's
certainly not group therapy.
And we trained
together, exercising
the muscle of mindfulness.
And we'll see what happens.
And what happened
was symptoms dropped
through the floor in eight
weeks for many, many people
who were given up by the
medical system as basically
helpless chronic
pain patients, people
with all sorts of
chronic conditions
where like there were no cures.
But healing, my working
definition of it
is coming to terms with
things as they are.
That's always possible.
But it requires a
rotation in consciousness.
So instead of just caught in
the story of how bad things
are for me and how it's all
over and downhill from here
and I'm a mess
and all the things
that we say to ourselves
using those personal pronouns,
that we actually
learn to not privilege
thinking when we have this
whole other intelligence
available to us called
awareness that we never
get any training in school
until Harold Roth came to Brown.
[LAUGHTER]
And if you put the balance
between thought and awareness
together, very
often, the balance
is so far weighted
down by thinking
that it's really hard
to be aware for anything
except for a fleeting
fraction of a second
before even whatever
you're aware of,
the object of attention,
carries you off
in some other direction.
So it does require a discipline
of re-equilibrating moment
by moment so we can attend.
And physicians, how many
physicians in the room?
Welcome.
So those of you who are not
physicians may not know,
but physicians who
round in the hospital
to see patients in the
hospital are called attendings.
OK, there's a reason for that.
So what I'd like to suggest is a
practice for you to do tomorrow
morning, OK?
This is going to
be very radical.
We were just dropping in.
And maybe you think that I'm
giving a lecture now rather
than a guided meditation.
Like, did that end?
[LAUGHTER]
Or maybe we've got this
meditation thing all wrong.
And it's all meditation If.
You're paying attention,
if you're listening,
if you're hearing not
my words, but where
my words are pointing,
which you have
to reach out to them so
that the resonances actually
go into the heart.
Otherwise, they just
go into the ears,
and then they're metabolized
through liking and disliking,
agree, don't agree,
more thinking.
And if that's the case,
then I failed completely
in this non-talk.
[LAUGHTER]
So here's kind of a
little homework which
may sound very radical
to some of you,
especially if you're
die hard meditators
in the sort of heavy duty
meditative traditions.
And full disclosure, I am.
The virtues of
meditating in bed--
OK, I would like to suggest
that tomorrow morning when
you wake up that you finish the
job before you get out of bed.
Because this is all
about waking up.
And we wake up every
morning, but we wake up
on to automatic pilot.
A lot of the time, is it
not true that you wake up,
and already, you're late?
Oh, my god, I got--
and you're out of bed.
And before your feet hit the
floor, you're out of your body
and into your calendar.
Is that true for anybody?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
JON KABAT-ZINN: And getting
the kids, lunch and school--
and so here's the suggestion.
Just when you notice
that you're awake--
you do this every day, so it's
not like, oh, how do I do that?
How do I get started?
You'll be aware, at a certain
moment, that you're awake.
Even if the impulse is to
jump immediately out of bed,
don't jump.
Lie in bed.
Turn over onto your
back in what in yoga--
how many of you do yoga?
OK, it's called
the corpse pose--
beautiful.
The invitation is to die.
[LAUGHTER]
Die now and get it over with.
[LAUGHTER]
Die to the past.
Die to the future.
And therefore, show up,
wake up, to this moment, OK?
You just woke up.
Can you feel your body?
So right now, stretch out a
little bit just pretending
you're in bed.
And I want to invite
you to just see
if you can imagine that
you're lying in bed,
and you're feeling your breath
moving in and out of your body
just the way I invited you
to do a few minutes ago.
OK, so it's not
about the breath.
The breath's an
object of attention.
It's about the attending itself.
So can you rest in
the attending or surf
on the waves of your own
breathing with full awareness?
OK, and now you're still in bed.
And at a certain
point, depending
on how long you want
to keep this up,
see if you can actually put
your attention in your hands.
So you're going to feature
your hands, both of them,
if you have two
hands, center stage
in the field of your awareness.
After all, they're connected
to the rest of you.
Can you actually feel what's
here to be felt in the hands?
And it doesn't
matter what it is.
If you feel nothing but
numbness or nothing,
then be aware of
numbness or nothing.
But if there is sensation there
or a universe of sensation,
simply be aware of it
without naming any of it
or making a story about
that but just inhabiting
the hands of your own body.
And you're still
lying in bed here.
The breath, of
course, doesn't stop
just because you're putting
your attention in your hands.
So you could bring
awareness to that as well.
And then you could play
in many different ways.
Like for instance, could you
put your attention in your feet?
Take it out of your hands
and direct it into your feet
and just play with
that at the moment.
Even one or two minutes of
this before you jump out of bed
can be really profound.
20 or 30 minutes by
the clock of this,
even though it is timeless,
on a regular basis,
because we always say we
don't have time to meditate--
we're too busy,
blah, blah, blah--
but if you go to
bed every night,
then you're already
positioned to do it.
Just set the clock
back a half an hour.
So instead of
getting up at 7:00,
you get up at 6:30 as an
experiment and as a gift
you give to yourself,
I would venture to say.
And just see.
And just do that for eight
weeks and see what happens.
And then the real
meditation practice,
just to say-- so I
won't keep that going.
But you can play with a
lot of different things.
Like just, say, the right
side of your body, right hand,
right foot, or the whole
of the side of the body,
or left hand, and just--
You couldn't even do this.
How many of you could
feel your hands?
OK.
So when you put your
mind in your hands,
do you know how you do it?
Do you know what's involved in
the nervous system to do that?
I mean, we have maps of
the body and the brain,
the somatosensory homunculus,
for one, but there are many--
insulin and so forth.
When you attend to the hand,
the reason you're doing it
is because you're
attending through the brain
and the map of the brain.
Otherwise you wouldn't
feel it at all.
Sensory nerves all
ascend and descend.
So you're actually experiencing
the miracle of being alive
and being this extremely
complex organism.
And we're asking about health.
So you're the health
of one individual.
However your health is, it's
a wonderful place to start.
We work with people have
every conceivable condition,
medical conditions and even
some psychiatric conditions,
on the planet and where
they are when they come in,
that's the perfect
place to begin.
And then the begin
means befriend
the actuality of your
experience in this moment.
And you don't have to have
some big agenda for how
it's going to rescue you,
save you, heal you, cure
you, enlighten you five
years from now or five
minutes from now.
Just trust that
this is the way life
emerges, by actually
attending to it.
Otherwise-- and I'm sure you've
had this experience-- you could
live 20 or 30 years and
then look back and say,
what happened?
Who are those children?
[LAUGHTER]
Who was I in bed with?
No joke-- and actually,
not just not know,
but have no idea
that you had actually
choices all along the way
that you could have navigated
had you been paying
attention to some
of the most interesting
indicators of reality
out there, of where suffering
lies and where well-being lies.
So this was in 1979, the notion
of public health is like,
you take care of yourself.
And if enough people do it,
the public health will change.
OK, we're in a
different universe now.
That's kind of more
like the me model.
And a lot of me's
maybe become we.
Now we're in the interconnected.
1979 is like we were
living in analog universe.
OK, many of you are what
are called digital natives.
You've been born into
the digital world,
and even a tree is probably not
as interesting as a simulation
if it's a really
good simulation.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm being slightly facetious.
But humanity has gone
through a major event.
And we ain't seen nothing yet.
And one of the major
things about this
is like if the public
health from here
on is really human health.
It's really this
health of the species.
It's really the
health of the planet.
Then we need to
re-conceptualize how
we go from the me part of
it to the we part of it
without disgracing
ourselves by separating self
from other, when
you don't even know
who you are in the first place.
I just proved that by like--
you're not your name.
You're not your age.
You're not whatever is
keeping you breathing.
You're not your heartbeat.
Hey, if you think you're
not allowed near the breath,
which, of course, you
could hold your breath--
never mind the heart.
I mean, you aren't
allowed anywhere near
that because you're just
so bloody unreliable
because you're paying attention.
You're constantly distracted.
We live in the age
of distraction.
And distraction has now
become its own economy.
Your eyeballs are
being bought and sold.
If you don't believe me,
read the wonderful book that
just came out by a woman
who was, for a long time,
a professor at the
Harvard Business School
called The Age of
Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff about what
Google's business plan changed
from just being a really
great search engine to having
to monetize it.
And now they know more
about you than you
know about you, every click.
And they sell it to advertisers.
And there's this thing
called behavioral gathering.
They are gathering.
That's what big data is about.
And there are all
sorts of consequences.
I'll follow up on that
later, if you remind me.
But I feel like I should
actually start the PowerPoint
at this point.
And you'll see why in a moment.
So a few things about
the past, the MBSR,
but we're really moving into
the present and the challenges
that we face in the present
for generations yet to come
and how this is really a
challenge to evolution,
our evolution as a species.
And my thesis will be--
and this is a very
important public health,
in my view at least,
public health commitment,
so to speak--
is that we don't
have that much time
to take care of the species
we call homo sapiens sapiens.
The species that, by the
way, from the Latin sapere,
which means to taste
or to know-- we're
the species that is aware
and is aware that it's aware.
It's not cognition
and metacognition.
It's awareness and
meta-awareness.
And we have not fully
lived our way into it.
And I'm going to say that
in the interests of health,
in the interests
of public health,
in the interest of
planetary health,
that we as a species need to
find our way into the name
Linnaeus gave us as a species
before certain kinds of trends
that are already unfolding
are going to make it much,
much more difficult for us
to actually be awake or woke,
whatever way you
want to frame it,
to wake up to the actuality and
the reality of life where we
tell ourselves narratives
that even if they're true--
and most of them are not true--
they're not true enough.
And they're also dehumanizing,
because they're doing
this othering all the time.
So that said, I want to
dedicate this talk to my friend.
And how many of you recognize
this name, Ferris Urbanowski,
Buck Urbanowski?
So she was my friend
for many, many years,
going back to the early
'70s, so almost 40, 50 years.
And she was a
great MBSR teacher.
And she died recently.
This is Ferris.
And this is Mark Williams,
John Teasdale, myself,
and Zindel Segal.
So they are, if
you know anything
about mindfulness-based
cognitive therapy,
these are the founders of
mindfulness-based cognitive
therapy.
And of course, they didn't
know much about mindfulness
while they were learning about
mindfulness-based cognitive
therapy or developing it.
They didn't.
They didn't.
And they learned an
enormous amount from Ferris
caring for them and
taking care of them
and mentoring them and training
their students and so forth.
And this was taken in
Orangeville, Ontario, in 1999.
So just a moment
for me and whoever
knew her to just recognize
that, as with all of us
here, it ain't permanent.
The only certainty is change.
And so just honor that.
And that's why I
wasn't actually joking
when I said the corpse posture,
die and get it over with.
Die to your attachment
to your story,
to who you think you
are, and therefore,
be born into the larger
dimensionality of who
you actually are.
So you could say
that's a me agenda,
but it's also we
agenda, because we
enter being in the
language of taking that on.
The first thing you are
aware of when you really
penetrate into the present
moment with mindfulness
is that there's no separation.
Everything's connected
to everything else.
Quantum physicists know this.
Cosmologists know this.
The universe is
constructed that way.
But we don't pay
that much attention
to these kinds of things.
And I'm saying there's
a certain degree
of compelling urgency for
us as humans to learn that
so that it's like--
it's already in our DNA.
But it becomes our default
mode as opposed to mindlessness
being the default mode.
OK, so from the very
beginning, I always
thought of MBSR, as I said,
as being a public health
intervention.
Having no credentials to teach
people anything within medicine
or to treat anybody
having been trained
as a molecular biologist
but having just
fallen in love with these
meditative practices and yoga,
the idea was to actually, as
I said, catch people falling
through the cracks of
the health care system
as a kind of educational
clinic and teach them
something as a complement to
whatever health care could
do for them.
And I was inspired by the 1979
Surgeon General's report called
Healthy People, which was an
incredibly important and avant
garde articulation of
the challenge of things
at this moment.
And I'll just read
a little bit of it.
"This report's Central
theme is that the health
of this nation's citizens can be
significantly improved through
actions individuals
can take themselves."
So that's the me part.
And in 1979, there
was no we part.
It was all about help
people be healthier.
Run, do whatever, take your
high blood pressure medication,
but there was not that
much social recognition
that there's a we element to it.
"And then it's
also said," which I
thought gave me license
to just go for it,
"since stressful events
are not always preventable,
preparation for dealing with
them has to begin early.
Emphasis should be
given to building
coping skills in children
and young people," of course.
"Too often, stress
has been addressed
only after the problem
is developed--"
that's what hospitals are for--
"by treatment of the alcoholic."
The languaging, of course,
is like 50 years old.
So it's like you can feel
how it's a little off.
"Of the alcoholic,
the drug abuser--"
can you feel how
disempowering that is?
You're naming and
in a certain way
blaming people for being
caught in something.
"The alcoholic, the drug abuser,
the acutely depressed person--"
the acutely depressed
person is also a person.
"And by penalties for
criminal offenders--
much more attention should
be given to preparing people
to deal in less destructive
ways with unavoidable stress."
Like, OK, we'll just do
it at the medical school,
at the medical center, and
then we'll keep track of it.
Because I was trained
as a scientist,
you got to record, keep track
of what the outcomes are,
and then see.
But my thought from the very
beginning, my realization
from the very
beginning, was, if this
can be proved in
one environment,
if we can see in one environment
that this benefits people
who are, indeed, with all
sorts of chronic conditions,
including lots of
chronic pain, falling
through the cracks of
the health care system,
and they can, in eight weeks,
do something for themselves
that often they'll go
back to their doctors
and say, I got more out
of that eight week program
then I got eight years
working with you--
[LAUGHTER]
And it's not it's not a
criticism of the doctor.
It's like a recognition that
there's a power within me
that I didn't even realize.
That's what I mean by healing.
And it doesn't mean your
cancer will magically
be meditated away or that
even your blood pressure
will naturally go down,
although it could.
But there's no telling.
But when you move into
that, you get these kinds
of benefits and
many, many more that
are much harder to articulate
but have to do with embodiment,
have to do with living the
life that's yours to live
and being in deep
connection with what's
most meaningful to you.
So that was so inspiring to me.
And I thought, if we have large
classes, not small classes,
but like 30 or 40 medical
patients at a time
and have five or six
or eight classes going
as we did in the heyday of it
for years and years and years,
you are beginning
to actually have
a population effect on people.
Yes, people are getting
their individual benefits,
but you're actually
moving the belt.
So this is our 40th year.
And now it did actually escape
from the Mass Medical Center,
and it has moved
around the world.
And from the
perspective of 1979,
if you had said that the
National Institutes of Health
would be funding scores
of millions of dollars
of research a year on
Buddhist meditation
practices within
mainstream medicine,
somebody would have put you
in a psychiatric institute,
as that is more improbable
than the Big Bang that started
the universe would, all of a
sudden, the expanding universe
would come to a grinding halt
and collapse back onto itself.
That was more probable than
that the NIH would do this.
And the NIH did it.
OK, and it's
continuing to do it.
And the beauty of
this, in some way,
is that the science, although
it's not all top notch science,
so much of it is.
And so many young scientists are
doing this on the clinical side
and on the neuroscience
side, it's staggering.
It's beautiful.
And they came to
meditation before they came
to medicine or neuroscience.
It's a whole new
generation of folks.
Maybe some of you are in
the audience that way.
And so if you don't
know the word Dharma,
you can kind of read
about it in various ways.
But it is a confluence.
MBSR is the confluence
of universes
that never talk to each
other, the universe of what's
called Dharma or deep
meditative wisdom practices
in all traditions.
And what's deepest and best
about medicine and science
when it's at its best--
and believe me, there's a
shadow side to medicine.
The Nazis, the American quote,
unquote, "Indian" Health
Service, the
atrocities that have
been done in the
name of medicine
and sometimes in
the name of science,
they don't get a clean
bill of health either.
But I'm speaking of
the higher reaches
of this, that if we can
actually mobilize them,
there is something
transformative here
that has never happened
before on the planet,
never happened
before on the planet.
And it's not about the Dalai
Lama or Thich Nhat Hanh
or Mother Teresa or your
hero or saint of the moment.
It's about we, us humans.
And it's not about
the Buddha who,
for all intents and purposes,
wasn't actually a Buddhist.
And so none of these
meditation practices
are invitations to change your
religion or your belief system
or anything.
It's fall into awareness.
Wake up.
Then what you're waking
up to, in their language,
would be your true
nature, or they
might say your Buddha nature.
And why not wake up to your
true nature before you die?
Why wait until the last minute?
And Thoreau was
famous for having
said in Walden, "I
went to the woods
because I wished to live
deliberately, to front--"
meaning confront-- "to front
only the essential facts
of life and see if I could not
learn what they had to teach,
and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not left."
So that's what I
mean by die now.
Get it over with.
Because why wait?
The potential is that,
finally, we'll be ready.
We'll be not ready to die,
but we'll be about to die.
And then we'll
realize, holy cow,
I got the whole
bloody thing wrong.
[LAUGHTER]
I was a mean SOB to my children,
and I was so self-centered.
And I didn't recognize
suffering in anybody else.
And I was just--
and then you die.
No.
Face it now.
Why not?
And but not the story of how
mean you were or anything else,
it's that recognition that
there's so much more to you
than even your meanness
or your ignorance
or whatever it is that
you're blaming yourself for.
And maybe take a no-blame
orientation whatsoever,
a non-dual orientation,
that maybe you're
good enough for now.
And then if you
inhabit now, then maybe
that good enough
can simply be good,
I mean really good,
I mean beautiful.
And in that sense, the
meditation practice
and what you'll be doing
in bed tomorrow morning,
this is not one more
thing you have to squeeze
into your already too busy day.
This is a love affair.
It's a love affair
with what it means
to be truly human at a time when
there's a significant urgency
to take care of the world
with a public health
orientation in the
largest definition
or framework of
that for the sake
of the future of all beings.
And not just human beings but
the plant world, the animal
world, the creatures
that we don't even
know we are completely
interdependent on,
and then so we eradicate species
that actually may be incredibly
important to us because
of that realization
of interconnectedness
that science is supporting
in incredible ways.
So let me just say a word
or two about science.
And this is why I did
the PowerPoint at all.
It's for this one slide.
So if you don't
remember anything else,
just look at this, OK?
This is the first
paper to come out
of the Stress Reduction Clinic.
There's a 1 here.
You can't even see the blue
because it's just 1, in 1982,
our first paper on MBSR
and its outcomes for people
with chronic pain.
OK, and over time, you'll
see for decades, really
two decades, sub-threshold,
almost nothing going on,
kind of like the catacombs.
It's kind of a few
people here and there,
a few things in the
medical literature.
And then all of a sudden
around 1998, in 2000,
2003, it starts to go up.
And it is going exponential.
Hundreds, 840, I just got
this data from David Black.
We developed this slide
together many years ago,
842 peer-reviewed papers in
the medical and scientific
literature with
mindfulness in the title.
OK, now, are they
all great science?
No.
If I wanted to be really
rigorous about it,
I would say that at least 10%
of them are great science, OK?
And 10% is already
not insignificant,
and probably, it's
more like 40% or 50%.
So this is a phenomenon.
It's gone from nothing
to a field where people--
if young people in
the old days went
to their neuroscientist
thesis advisor and said,
hey, you know what I
want to do my thesis on?
I want to do my thesis on
mindfulness and the effects
on the brain.
They would laugh at
you and say, you know,
that's the stupidest, most
career-ending move I've ever
heard a graduate student say.
And now it's like
it's a no-brainer.
Of course, everybody
wants to do that.
And then you see you
have two laboratories.
You have the scanner,
and then you get this.
This is a laboratory.
You get to investigate
the nature of you--
non-trivial.
Are you with me?
Are you getting this?
OK, so now, can we dim
the lights, actually?
Is that even humanly possible?
Because I'd like
to show you what
looks like a three minute clip
from Healing and The Mind.
It was a PBS television
special in 1993.
So 14 years into the
Stress Reduction Clinic,
Bill Moyers came.
And does anybody
know how to do that?
Nobody knows.
This is a university.
[LAUGHTER]
Look, I know.
I was at MIT.
And I've seen it in action.
They couldn't even make a slide
projector work in the old days.
So can you see it enough?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
JON KABAT-ZINN: OK, and
hopefully, the sound
will be loud enough.
So this is a class that
they filmed eight weeks.
You come to a class for two and
a half or three hours a week.
It's like 30, 40
people in the room,
all referred by their doctors
for one thing or another.
And Bill Moyers was in
there with three cameras
and a whole sound crew,
just like a whole crew.
And by the end, the whole crew,
they were so into the practice.
I mean, Bill Moyers
was meditating.
I mean, this is like,
oh, what do you know?
[LAUGHTER]
OK, it's these spots
that are tough.
OK.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- I tried to do it after I was
doing my stretches for rehab,
thinking that that's
when I needed to relax.
And all I felt was a
real heightened awareness
of all the pain that
I felt really angry
at all the pain and all the
trauma that it's caused.
- So there's a lot
of anger there.
- Yeah.
- Do you feel at all
friendly towards your body?
- I feel like I've always
used my mind to overcome it.
And now I can't do that anymore.
- Well, this is an
experiment in learning
how to do the whole
thing differently.
And the first thing is
that if pain is there,
we're not going to wall it off
and deny that it's present, OK?
It's going to be here.
And we have to, in some way,
learn how to work around
the corners of it,
work with it, and still
not have it erode the
quality of our life.
- [INAUDIBLE] Dr.
[INAUDIBLE],, Dr. [INAUDIBLE]..
- He takes the
people we can't help.
Those are the ones
who get to Jon.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- Can you bend your knees?
Can they go flat?
That's right.
Now let's see.
OK, beautiful, you got it.
Take your hands away now.
You don't need the hand in
there, just back and forth.
By the third week, I
like to get them down
on the floor practicing yoga,
especially the people who
feel their bodies don't
work very well anymore.
Because often, what comes up
for them, is quite painful.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(WHISPERING) How's it feeling?
- It's all right.
- (WHISPERING)
OK, OK, all right.
- I can't do it anymore.
- Yeah?
- [INAUDIBLE].
- It's fine.
Don't worry about moving
your hand [INAUDIBLE]..
And you feel the pain.
And you just see.
Let me see if I can ride
the waves of this sensation.
(WHISPERING) [INAUDIBLE]
And you watch
the sensations come and go.
And very often,
they will change--
(WHISPERING) Right there.
[INAUDIBLE] --noticing that
you can uncouple the sensations
from your thoughts about
like, this is killing me.
It's going to last forever.
There's nothing I'll
be able to do about it.
This is just [INAUDIBLE]
- But I don't want
to move again.
- When you learn to free
yourself from those thoughts,
you realize those
are just thoughts.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- And done.
Now let's see if you can
let some of the heat out
of [INAUDIBLE].
And then it turns out there's
inner stillness and peace
right within some of the most
difficult life situations.
(WHISPERING) Can you ride
on the waves of that?
Do you know what I mean?
Give yourself to that.
Let's see if you can
stay with the breath
and just the pain
do whatever it does.
Just stay on top of it,
floating on a breath.
- A few people this
week asked my wife, hey,
what's with Danny?
- Your friends are
starting your wife that?
- Yeah, well, they
didn't say it to me.
Well, no, it wasn't my friend.
It is my mother in law.
Oh, boy, he's awful nice and
talkative all of a sudden,
you know?
And I started laughing.
I thought it was pretty good.
I didn't notice that.
I said, oh, there's
nothing with me.
[END PLAYBACK]
JON KABAT-ZINN: OK, we can
have the lights back up.
The way this clip came about--
the program's 45 minutes.
But this is kind of
parenthetical and anecdotal.
But a fellow, a scientist
in Freiburg, Germany,
made this clip out
of that 45 minutes--
this is about three
minutes long--
to take to a
conference in Berlin,
because there was
kind of this notion
afoot among certain people that
MBSR was all about mindfulness,
but it had nothing to
do with compassion.
So he took these clips
and just put it together
into that three minute thing
and brought it to that thing.
Because there is this
kind of phenomenon
that people then
want to self-identify
around professional interests.
So we'll take is compassion is
another deep aspect of Buddhist
meditation.
But people who want to separate
compassion from mindfulness,
it's like--
the word for mind and heart
in all Asian languages
is the same word.
So when you hear in English the
word mindfulness, if you're not
hearing the word
heartfulness, you're
not understanding it at all.
And there's no separation.
They often speak of
compassion as and mindfulness
as two wings of the bird.
But there is a kind of
tendency to differentiate one
from another.
Sometimes that can be
incredibly valuable.
There are real compassionate
meditations and so forth.
But if compassion is not
embodied by the MBSR teacher,
it ain't MBSR.
And if it's
contrived compassion,
then it ain't compassion.
So we have to watch
out, because it's
very easy to put on
a happy smiley face
or get caught up in
pretending that you care.
And of course, everybody knows
you don't, because you can't.
People are not stupid.
They can feel it.
Pretense of compassion
is not compassion.
So you know what
invites embodiment.
And its own puzzle
or koan or challenge
is like, how do you embody
what you already are?
Because you're
already compassionate.
How many people are
mothers in this room?
The Dalai Lama is always
bringing up this example.
Instinctive, inborn
compassion for these creatures
that grew out of your bodies, I
mean, you talk about miracles.
The cognitive conceptual
mind will never get that one.
There are all sorts of
miracles around our humanity
that we just dispense with
or ignore at our peril.
So I want to say that, from the
get go, from the first moment,
MBSR has always been
grounded in a fundamentally
ethical intention and stance.
And that is the
Hippocratic Oath.
And it was under the
umbrella of medicine.
And that is, first, do no harm.
How would you even know
if you're doing harm?
How many of you have been
harmed by a doctor in one way
or another, anybody?
Or even just
disregard is a harm.
So of course, we know that.
So how would you even know
if you're causing harm
unless you're there,
unless you're awake,
unless you're mindful?
So it's axiomatic
that it should be
part of the training
of medical students.
And of course, it has been now
in many, many medical schools
for a very long time.
But the Hippocratic Oath, as
I said, it could be betrayed.
And it has been betrayed
many, many times in medicine
for horrible purposes.
In the Bodhisattva vow in
the Buddhist tradition,
again, it's an ethical stance.
And mindfulness is rooted
and grounded in what's called
[NON-ENGLISH].
The Pali language was
the original language
in which the Buddhist
texts were written down.
And it really does have
to do with non-harming
and the awareness that would
allow you to experience
the impulse to harm or
to differentiate and say,
I'm going to--
I need this.
You're a danger to that.
And then you've already
harmed yourself in doing that.
But it takes a certain
maturity to see that.
So I'm going to just
very quickly read you
a statement that I read
in the New York Times way
back before I
started MBSR sitting
in a cafe around the
Harvard Medical School
where I was working.
And I read this on some
anniversary of Einstein's death
in the New York Times, and when
I read it, I was in the cafe.
I fell my chair.
I mean literally
fell off my chair.
A rabbi had written to Einstein.
The context of this is a rabbi
had written to Albert Einstein.
I don't know how
many of you are not
old enough to have been alive
when Albert-- but I remember
it.
Because he was like
Muhammad-- maybe
you don't even know who
Muhammad Ali is anymore.
[LAUGHTER]
But he was like more famous than
Muhammad Ali or Michael Jordan
rolled up together,
because he was, obviously,
known as the smartest
man in the world.
And they had already
proved enough
of the general
theory of relativity
and the special relativity.
And there was some quip that
only three people understood
relativity, one of them was
Einstein and then Sir Arthur
Eddington, and he couldn't
remember who the third one was.
But of course, there
was lots of physicists.
But it's hard stuff.
But now we live in that
post-Einsteinan world.
But a rabbi had written.
Smart people from
all around the world
would write to the
smartest man in the world
with their personal problems.
And because, I mean, why miss
the chance to ask the one
question you care about most of
the smartest man in the world?
And the most amazing piece of
this is that he'd write back.
This was before the
age of the internet.
And so this rabbi
had written saying
that he had sought
in vain to comfort
his 19-year-old
daughter over the death
of her 16-year-old sister,
a sinless, beautiful being.
And so here's a rabbi,
who is a spiritual person,
a spiritual teacher, asking
advice from the greatest
scientist that ever lived.
And Einstein writes back.
And this is what he wrote.
And this is what
threw me off my chair.
It was like gravitation.
"A human being is a
part of the whole called
by us, the universe, a part
limited in time and space.
He or she--" I'll just do
the personal pronouns the way
he did it.
Of course, he said it in German.
"--experiences himself,
his thoughts and feelings,
as something separated
from the rest,
a kind of optical delusion
of consciousness,"
that separation.
"This delusion is
a kind of prison
for us, restricting us to
our personal desires--"
I, me, and mine--
"and to affection for a
few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free
ourselves from this prison
by widening our circle
of compassion--"
This is the guy who
single-handedly unified
our understanding of matter
and energy and space and time,
and he's talking
about compassion.
"--to embrace all living
creatures and the whole nature
in its beauty.
Nobody is able to
achieve this completely.
But the striving
for such attainment
is in itself a part
of the liberation--"
Now he's using the
word liberation.
"--and a foundation
for inner security."
So by that time,
at some point, I
picked myself up off the floor.
But it was just a level
of insight and compassion
to articulate it in the face
of that kind of suffering,
the death of a child
and how you explain it.
What would you respond?
I mean, I'm sure there are
a lot of psychotherapists
in the room.
But faced with that
question from the rabbi,
what would you respond?
Something.
OK, I want to just point out
a manuscript that hasn't even
been published yet that came
to me sent by Helen Wang, who
was a graduate student at
the University of Wisconsin
with Richie Davidson and
actually just a completely
amazing being and
some other people
from the University of Wisconsin
and other neuroscientists
and various kinds of
clinicians and so forth.
This is a paper.
It hasn't been
published yet, but it's
called "Focus on the Breath--
Brain Decoding Reveals
Internal States of Attention
During Meditation."
They are beginning to now
use artificial intelligence
paradigms to
actually look deeply.
And I know this is happening
here at Brown in Jud Brewer's
lab as well to look deeply into
the actual moment-to-moment
experiences of
what are unfolding
when somebody meditates.
OK, and there's a lot of--
it's a whole universe inside
just one person doing this.
So it's not like, hey, we're
all doing the same thing.
No, none of us are
doing the same thing
except attending or being
completely distracted
and not attending and then
recognizing, oh, my god,
I've been out of
body experience,
out to lunch experience,
and I can come back.
Because that recognition,
you're already back.
And I'll just read you
a paragraph from it,
because there's something
that this paragraph captures
about the science that is what
I was trying to point to when
I talk about the exponential
rise in the science
and how good some of it is.
And these people all
meditate, by the way.
"Meditation practices
or mental exercises
that train qualities
of attention
are increasingly used
to improve health
and well-being in
clinical populations
as well as the general public.
Meditation and
mindfulness-based interventions
may cultivate sustained
attention--" Each one of these
has documentation.
"--compassion and pro-social
behavior, creativity,
improved brain structure and
function, less implicit bias,
reduce stress, and decrease
symptoms in clinical
populations with pain,
depression, anxiety,
and cancer.
Based on these
promising results,
meditation practices
are being implemented
in a variety of fields such
as medicine, psychology,
education, business,
law, and politics."
You'd never know it by looking
at the Brexit stuff that's
going on in there, but
hundreds of parliamentarians
in the House of Commons
and House of Lords
have been through an eight
week program modeled on MBSR.
But the way they're
going at Brexit
is seriously unbelievable.
And that's not to say anything
about the United States.
[LAUGHTER]
Don't get me started.
"Collectively,
meditation practices
may strengthen interoception."
That's awareness of
internal body sensations,
and that's through
those maps in the brain.
OK, no maps, no
brain, no neurons,
no sensation in the hand, OK?
So it's not like, oh,
yeah, there's my hand.
I mean, there's no you,
and there's no hand.
There's just these phenomena
that are arising through.
And I didn't say
it, but you know
what's sitting right underneath
the vault of your cranium is
the most complex organization
of matter in the known universe.
So when you get depressed
just remember that,
hey, you're 86 billion neurons,
another equal amount at least
of glial cells.
And no one knows what they're
doing in there at all,
but they can't be an accident.
And then if you start to think
of the synaptic connections,
ah, thousands of trillions
of synaptic connections
in these neural nets
that are constantly
changing in certain areas
on the basis of moment
by moment experience.
And as Jud Brewer and his
colleagues and other people
have shown, the
practice of mindfulness
actually drives this
neuroplasticity function
to actually create what's called
greater functional connectivity
between regions of the brain.
When you start to
anthropomorphize them,
you say talk to each other
or don't talk to each other.
Like impulse
control in children,
it would be nice
if somebody talked
to the prefrontal
cortex, you know?
But it has to develop first
or talks to the amygdala
and the limbic system.
So anyway, where was I?
"Collectively,
meditation practices
may strengthen interoception,
cognitive processes,
including sustained attention,
cognitive monitoring,
and meta-awareness."
That means awareness
of awareness--
OK, so sapiens sapiens.
And emotion regulation,
in other words,
less judgment and
more equanimity
with internal states,
internal experiences.
"With practice--" that's
exercising the muscle.
And without
exercising the muscle,
we can blah, blah,
blah about mindfulness
till the cows come home.
It means zero.
"With practice, these skills
may lead to better monitoring
and regulation of physical,
emotional, and social
processes, contributing to
improved health decision making
and behaviors.
However, the mechanisms through
which meditation improves
health and well-being
are poorly specified--"
Very poorly specified,
I would say.
"--in part because there is no
current precise way to assess
the quality of
meditation practice."
And then this is
like 50 pages long,
and then it has like a 20 page
appendix with lots of brain
scans which I'm not showing you.
So I'm just saying.
This is only one paper.
There are hundreds of
these papers coming out
by young researchers who
are on fire about this.
But there is as much
tapping into this laboratory
as they are tapping
into the scanner.
I also want to say
that mindfulness
has profound implications
for social justice.
OK, first of all, if we're
talking about public health,
the biggest factor in
public health or the lack
thereof is poverty,
lack of resources,
external resources,
exterior resource,
to say nothing of
interior resources, which
is what we're cultivating when
we're cultivating mindfulness.
We're cultivating a gold
mine of interior resources
that we have to learn how
to mine or tap into in order
to have them emerge.
But if you're starving or if
you're living in a neighborhood
where you've experienced
five episodes of violence
on your way to school, you know
a little meditation is like,
forget about it.
We need to transform the
way the planet operates,
the way our society operates,
where every single human
being is actually, in
a democracy like ours,
given the opportunity
to live their life fully
with minimal suffering
and maximal opportunity
to be healthy, to be well,
to enjoy the public health.
OK, or is public health
just for some people?
OK, and it's like,
oh, yeah, well, just
wait a couple of hundred years,
and it'll work itself out.
No.
We don't have a couple
of hundred years
to have it work itself out.
The body politic is
rending in certain ways,
and it's also
emerging in ways that
are actually quite marvelous.
All you need to do is watch
television, and you'll see.
But I want to point out
that this is not something
that I came to recently.
In the '60s, as I said,
the '60s were also
a period of tremendous
social turmoil and so forth.
And so there was a lot of
stuff going at MIT in the '60s.
We shut it down.
We declared a strike.
We investigated and dialogued
around the uses of science
for developing guided missile
systems to drop bombs down.
MIT brought you all the
laser-guided weapons
and smart bombs, so to
speak, and also the MIRV,
intercontinental
ballistic missiles.
I knew the people who
built them and was
in conversation with them.
We shut the whole place
down and talked about that.
So anyway, so we got to know
a bunch of Black Panthers
during that time.
And it was like really
cool for the Black Panthers
to come on the MIT campus.
And they invited a
French philosopher named
Jean Genet to come and speak.
And it so happened
that I speak enough
French to have been the only
person possible to translate
for the guy.
So that's from the MIT
newspaper at the time.
And it was the time of
Angela Davis being imprisoned
and all sorts of turmoil
around the Black Panthers
and just summary murders
on the part of police
in Chicago and other
places of black people.
So what's changed?
OK, what's different?
And then in 2015,
I had the pleasure
of being on stage
with her in front
of like 1,400 people
in Oakland, almost
none of whom were white, talking
about what use is mindfulness
in an unjust world?
Which is exactly the
kind of conversation
we have to be having to
stretch our own envelope
and to stretch our own ways
in which, for instance, we
don't actually see the
things that we don't see.
We need each other to mirror
back to us what we don't see.
It took me a very long time
to realize, for instance,
that my skin color
is a privilege.
I'm talking about to realize it.
To realize it, it took
me like 73 and 1/2 years,
to realize that the
family I was born into
gave me a certain
kind of access.
The schools I went to,
there was like no end to it.
And I knew that, of
course, not everybody
had those opportunities.
But I didn't know it in a kind
of more than cognitive way,
in a way that
actually recognizes
how important it is to recognize
those kinds of domains.
And then not to
necessarily apologize
because your skin
happens to be white,
but to actually
recognize suffering
and the roots of suffering,
the root causes of suffering,
and how many of those come
out of the hearts and minds
of human beings
that have actually
used justice, used the
law, used different kinds
of institutional
frameworks to prevent
other people from enjoying
on an equal playing field
the possibilities
of this country, OK?
And there's a whole
history of that.
Reconstruction after the Civil
War, and then all of a sudden,
wham, they figured
out another way
to basically have slavery
continue right up to the Civil
Rights Movement.
Only you put people in jail
because of all these state laws
that made it impossible to
vote or impossible to own land
or impossible to this
or impossible to that--
it was all legal as hell.
And if you lived
there where I lived,
that's what the '60s were about.
So I just want to say
that it's hard to separate
one thing from another,
whether it's social issues,
whether it's political issues.
It's all public health.
And to deny certain aspects of
it and do good in other ways,
it's like the country
was founded on genocide.
We've never eaten that one.
The country was
founded on slavery,
which means enormous
amounts of wealth
were actually created from
human slaves who were stolen
from their own continent
in a gigantic enterprise
with very enterprising
people who
had the whole thing down
selling people and a huge amount
of wealth.
So when there's talk about
reparations, it's like,
why shouldn't there be?
At least we have to eat that.
We have to metabolize it.
We have to digest it in a way
that it's not like white guilt
or apology or whatever.
But I'm trying to point
to something that's
intrinsic to the public
health, if we're ever
going to get to public
health in a way that
really is up to the task.
And one way, to look
back to one of the quotes
from the Surgeon General's
report, is start early.
Mindfulness in school is
becoming a giant movement.
But it's not guaranteed,
because people misunderstand
mindfulness, and
they think we're
trying to turn their
kids into Buddhists.
And then rightfully,
there is not
supposed to be religion
in the schools.
And they hire these incredible
right wing law firms
that have read more stuff that
I've written than I can even
remember that I wrote
and misunderstood
every single thing
that is in it.
But so sooner or
later, it's going
to go to the Supreme Court.
But this is work that
Erica Sibinga and people
are doing in Baltimore with
inner city Baltimore schools.
You know what's going on
in Baltimore nowadays.
They've been doing
this work for years.
It's phenomenal.
And also other people, what
I call the Baltimore boys,
Ali Smith and Atman
Smith and Andy Gonzalez
have this whole
thing that they're
doing with kids in the
Baltimore public schools
in the neighborhood
where they grew up.
And it is phenomenal.
It's been featured on various
news programs, television,
and so forth.
That's public health.
When you see these
like five-year-olds
and six-year-Olds
and seven-year-olds
and they're meditating and
doing yoga, it's phenomenal.
And then I just want
to show you in closing
before we go into
dialogue, in 1992,
I learned that a woman
had gone through--
there was only one other
stress reduction MBSR program
in the entire country.
And it was in the Latter
Day Saints Hospital
in Salt Lake City,
Utah, a Mormon hospital.
And there was a woman
there named Peg Hunter.
And she was teaching MBSR.
She got it out of Full
Catastrophe Living,
And she was a meditator.
She figured it out.
She did it.
And in her class was an
elementary school teacher
named Cherry Hamrick.
And Cherry Hamrick was so
touched by what she learned
and practiced in
MBSR, she decided,
I'm going to bring this into
my fourth and fifth grade
classroom at the
Welby Elementary
School in South Jordan, Utah.
Now, had she asked me, I
would have said, don't do it.
You're going to get lynched.
You'll get strung up.
This is like someone's
going to figure out
this is Buddhist
meditation, and they're not
going to understand
that it's universal,
and it's not Buddhist.
Don't do it.
But like any good
student, she didn't ask,
or she didn't listen.
She just went ahead
with what she thought
was the right thing to do.
And it was phenomenal.
And so I'll just show
you some pictures of it.
And one of the things
that I want to say
is that Dave Vago from
Vanderbilt University
and a fellow named Nakamura
at the University of Utah
are doing a 15-year follow up on
these kids who are now-- you'll
see that this is
what the kids looked
like in the fourth
and fifth grade.
Now they're adults.
They have children.
They have jobs and
stuff like that.
And so they're going
back and asking,
how did this affect
your life compared
to kids who also went
to that school who
were in other people's classes?
And mindfulness eventually
spread throughout the school.
And even the Mormon bishop who
was the sixth grade teacher,
he was teaching mindfulness.
So it is possible
that these barriers
can dissolve if you understand
that it's not an ism.
It's not a catechism.
It's not a belief system.
It's a way of paying attention
and embodied awareness.
So the kids are meditating here.
And every-- whoops,
how did I do that?
I will just show you
the rest of it this way,
because I don't know
how to get back to it.
Or maybe you can quickly run
up here and do it for me?
Thank you.
Great.
So here, every day, one of
the kids guides a meditation.
I went on a Saturday one day.
I could only fly
in on a Saturday.
And I sat next to a mother
of a child who was told to me
was the most hated
kid in the school.
He was like bouncing
off the walls.
He had ADHD big time.
He led the meditation that day.
And he sat for 15 minutes with
his mother just in disbelief
and also smiling
and was no longer
the most hated
kid in the school.
So here they are
doing body scans,
lying down meditations, sitting
meditation in the classroom,
mindful Hatha yoga, the Tree.
And she was a very
clever teacher.
She was a genius of a teacher.
So she integrated
mindfulness into every aspect
of the curriculum.
You can't see in this
picture, but she also
had two parakeets
flying around the room
and landing in the Trees.
[LAUGHTER]
And here they are eating.
We're famous for giving people
two raisins at the beginning
of the MBSR course and then
taking 15 or 20 minutes
to eat them one at a time.
So here these kids are eating
one eighth of a chocolate bar.
[LAUGHTER]
And then they're doing mindful
walking in the schoolyard.
This is now spread
around the country
and in many other countries too.
Why?
Because teachers are
pulling their hair out
because they can't
teach because the kids
are not coming to
school ready to learn.
So you have to teach them
to tune their instrument
before they can play it,
the instrument of learning.
And if we hope for
future generations
to actually move the bell
curve or to actually live
our way into the full
dimensionality of the species
name we gave ourselves, you
got to start with the kids.
But it's not an indoctrination
into a belief system.
It's an introduction
and an adventuring
into what it means
to be fully human
and how different we all are.
So it's not like
we're all the same.
We all have different
experiences,
but we can put the welcome
mat for the differences.
And then just to
say, it's also spread
throughout medicine and medical
schools and stuff like that.
But in the end, mindfulness
is good medicine.
And I think
mindfulness is actually
foundational for
what we're facing
in terms of public health.
And so I think I'll end before
I go to that slide with one
other thing.
And that is, how
many of you have
heard of Noah Yuval Harari?
He wrote a book called Sapiens.
It was a huge bestseller.
He's an Israeli historian.
Then he wrote a book.
And so that's about
the past, as he says.
Then he wrote a book
called Homo Deus, which
is about the future.
And then he wrote a
book called 21 Lessons
for the 21st Century.
Anybody read it?
It's phenomenal.
So in that book, the 21st
lesson is mindfulness.
By the time you read
those three books,
you're going to be
rather depressed.
[LAUGHTER]
Because what he says about AI
and the algorithms and so forth
and what I was pointing to
about the age of surveillance
capitalism is no joke.
And Elizabeth Warren is
talking about this now,
that we're just like, let
it all happen because we
have no understanding of it.
Whatever Facebook
was doing, fine--
all of a sudden, we can't even
control our own elections.
And nobody
understands this stuff
except the people who have
written the algorithms.
Maybe they don't
even understand it.
So the question is,
how do we corral
this genie that's already
out of the bottle where--
and I'm not talking
about Luddite-ism.
I'm not talking about going
back to the good old days,
because the good old
days, they sucked.
[LAUGHTER]
They weren't the good old days.
There's no good old days.
It's either here now as it is,
and that's insanely beautiful,
and also there's
enormous amount of pain.
How do we hold
that with the kind
of integrity and the
heart, non-duality, wisdom,
compassion, equanimity?
Those are dimensions
of our humanity
that we can learn to cultivate
and help each other with.
We can teach each other.
We need each other.
It's a we engagement not a
me for my self-improvement.
Because there's no
improving on the self,
because actually, there
is no such thing as self.
It's a narrative.
It's a story.
And Yuval Harari is really
very brilliant about saying
how the only way they
could build the pyramids
was to have a story, a story
about the pharaoh and his power
and a story about how
millions of people
can get together and build
something that's like,
who knew that they could
do something like that?
They don't exactly have John
Deere heavy equipment and stuff
like that.
But they had people.
So we've always
been into stories.
I would like to say our
story, the problem with it
is it's not big enough.
So in the last chapter of 21
Lessons for the 21st Century,
he discloses that since a
friend drove him nuts about it,
he finally went on
a meditation retreat
maybe 15 or 20 years ago, a
fairly intensive, month-long
Vipassana retreat where no
connectivity, no cell phones,
no nothing for a month and
that he's been doing that now
for the past 15 or 20 years
every year one or two months.
And he says, I know this
may not be for everybody.
But then he says,
but you know, I
haven't found anything that
even has a glimmer of chance
of being up to the
task of dealing
with the other challenges of the
21 lessons of the 21st century.
This is not optional.
This is an absolute
requirement for us,
as whoever the ad agency was
that did it for the army,
be all you can be.
I would re-frame it as
be all you already are.
Be all we already are.
And so Bill Gates
reviewed the book
on the front page of the
New York Times' Book Review
on a Sunday, Sunday book review.
And he said, when
all is said and done,
what's Harari's
message after he talks
about terrorism and self-driving
cars and this and that
and everything else?
And biotech and info tech,
this is the main message.
It's like biotech and infotech
are just driving things
to the point where,
pretty soon, we're going
to be upgrading ourselves.
Of course, this is an upgrade.
And who over 50 wouldn't
appreciate a memory upgrade
with things?
That's all.
What was I just saying?
But before these kinds
of forces move in,
you can see how much
devastation it can have
if it's not done mindfully.
So we need mindfulness
now more than ever
to control the algorithms
in a certain way.
Or believe me, the algorithms
will start controlling us.
That's his message.
And so he said,
virtually, we only
have like a 10-year
window, in his regard.
This guy's unbelievably smart.
He says we only have a 10-year
window in which to do this.
And Bill Gates is pointing
out that that's his message.
And Bill Gates is saying,
and I agree with it,
because I've been through a
mindfulness course myself.
And I can testify that
it's the real deal.
This is Bill Gates, who
revolutionized our lives more
than anybody else
except maybe Steve Jobs,
not necessarily in ways
that we're happy about.
I was once thinking of writing
a book, How Bill Gates and Steve
Jobs Ruined My Life.
Because most of work
is now, it's like brr.
Anyway, so mindfulness
is good medicine.
And I'd like to leave
you with a quote
from the founder, the
father, he's often spoken of,
of American psychology,
William James, who
said, "I have no doubt
whatever that most people live
whether physically,
intellectually,
or morally in a very
restricted circle
of their potential being.
They make use of a
very small portion
of their possible
consciousness, much
like a man who, out of
his whole bodily organism,
should get into a habit
of using and moving
only his little finger.
We all have reservoirs
of life to draw upon
of which we do not dream."
So maybe we should
start dreaming.
Thank you, folks.
[APPLAUSE]
ERIC LOUCKS: Hi, everyone.
My name's Eric Loucks.
I'm director of the
Mindfulness Center at Brown.
And what we're doing with the
Mindfulness Center right now
is some major
strategic planning that
is involving dozens and
dozens of stakeholders
right across the world.
And so one of the things
that we've been working with
is this idea of setting
big, big goals along
with embodying the mindfulness
qualities of non-striving,
to not grasp for those goals.
And we were watching
a clip of Jon
sharing just how
important it is if we
can be right here in
this moment seeing
what is needed by
society right now
and perhaps how
mindfulness can offer that.
What arises?
And so what is arising in us
in the Mindfulness Center right
now?
And so some of the
things that we're really
starting to be moving
towards is taking
the essence of MBSR, offering
MBSR and meeting people
where they're at,
whether it's meeting them
through online programs,
through offering it in Spanish,
and then also offering it in
for children and educators
and in health care settings
and in corporate settings.
We've hired some of the
best mindfulness educators
in the country in the last year.
And we've also hired some
of the top scientists.
And so the magic is really
happening between those two
so that the scientists
have remarkable mindfulness
educators to be
able to really guide
the wisdom of the
mindfulness interventions
that they're trying out,
and then the educators
have remarkable scientists
to be able to set
the foundation of evidence-based
mindfulness programs
to be developed.
And then one last
thing that we're doing
is creating this Global
Mindfulness Collaborative
that is providing
the infrastructure
for evidence-based
mindfulness programs
to be delivered in high
quality right around the world.
And so we've partnered with
some of the top MBSR teacher
trainers in France and Italy
and Argentina and Mexico, South
Africa, and really,
all around the world so
that we can create
that infrastructure
to allow high quality,
evidence-based mindfulness
interventions to be delivered.
So much of this started
because of John.
And if we look at the
transmission of wisdom
through all the
generations of humanity,
we're hoping that
the Mindfulness
Center is continuing to do
that with the help of John.
So I just really want to
thank you for being here
and offering your wisdom to us.
I want to respect
everyone's time as well.
So if you need to
go, you definitely
should feel free to do that.
But we also might have like
maybe five minutes or so
for questions and dialogue too.
So we'll just open
it up for that.
And one final remember
reminder is that tomorrow
is Public Health Research Day.
And we'll be meeting
here at 1:30.
So if you want to really
see the science that's
happening at the School
of Public Health,
it'll be happening in this room
on display tomorrow as well.
And you're very
welcome to be here.
So thank you, and we'll
turn it over to John.
So thanks.
JON KABAT-ZINN: And I just
want to echo what Eric just
said that, there has
been a confluence here
at Brown in the past year
to add to what's already
been going on for many,
many decades here at Brown.
And I think the mindfulness
community and the Mindfulness
Center at Brown has an
enormous opportunity here
to really do things
in a phenomenal way.
The staff, the teaching staff,
the faculty, the researchers,
everybody is on
board in a way that
is very hard to actually
happen within any kind
of institutional framework.
And I am just really in awe
of it and very optimistic
that this community is going to
play a huge role in the future
in moving that
bell curve, exactly
as we were talking
about, in directions
that really make a lot of
sense, including recognizing
the community here in
Providence that may need or want
to have some kind of engagement
with these kinds of adventures
and to really see that that's
not like a one way street
where the benefit all
goes in one direction,
but the benefits are
profound in all directions.
And to just say that Harold
Roth's teacher and my Zen
teacher, it all started
here in Providence
at the Providence Zen Center
on [INAUDIBLE] Street.
And I used to drive
down from Cambridge
sometimes every morning
before going to work.
I'd drive from Cambridge down
here, sit the morning sitting,
and then drive back
and go to work.
So Providence itself is
like a major nexus of this,
and it has been so
long as I can remember.
So let's have a few
responses to anything
that either got said
or didn't get said
or that pushed your buttons
or that you want to amplify.
We won't take too much time.
And I apologize
for running over.
I just, in some sense, got
carried away by your attention.
I'll put the blame on you.
[LAUGHTER]
And I moved into the timeless
in a kind of irresponsible way.
So please.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, hi,
I'm a graduate student
in public health.
JON KABAT-ZINN: You
can tilt it down so
that it's at your level.
AUDIENCE: OK, yeah,
I'm a graduate student
in public health.
And I am a Vipassana meditator.
I became interested
in mindfulness
when I was working
in refugee camps
before I started
this MPH program.
And I know you did
touch on social justice.
And my question is,
you had elements
of personal responsibility
in your presentation,
how the individual should take
responsibility when the health
system is letting
them down, and they're
falling through the cracks.
But out of the mindfulness
literature that there is,
there's very few
studies that have
been done amongst low
income populations
and ethnic minorities.
It seems like there's structural
barriers and social justice
elements that hold
back mindfulness
from certain populations.
And there's a huge
gap from getting
people that don't have
their basic needs met
to a collective society
where everyone's
getting their public
health needs equally met.
So I'm wondering how you see
mindfulness filling that gap.
Like how do we get from where
we are now to a society where
public health is equal, and
Native Americans aren't--
have the highest
prevalence of diabetes?
JON KABAT-ZINN: [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: Like how do we
include those populations?
JON KABAT-ZINN: Thank
you for the question.
And actually, we've been
having these very conversations
with the dean, with Bess
Marcus and with Eric.
And the intention,
as I understand it,
is to really move out in that
direction into the community
but not like in the
imperialistic occupying
territory, but
actually Invitational
to how this can develop.
I will say that back
in the early '90s,
I started a Stress
Reduction Clinic
in the inner city in Worcester
which ran for like nine years.
And there's a paper
that finally came out
about that kind of thing.
But the barriers really are--
in some sense, you're right.
There are all sorts of
social and economic barriers.
But the biggest barrier's
in our own minds.
And that when we reach
out to communities
and we find domains of common
ground and common languaging,
rather than imposing in any
kind of imperialist kind of way
some framework that
we think will be good
for you, the other, then that's
how community really melds
and where we can dissolve some
of those structural barriers,
structural racism,
implicit bias, all
of those kinds of things.
It's workable if we're
willing to do the work.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi, thank you so much.
JON KABAT-ZINN: You can tilt
it back up to your height.
AUDIENCE: So this
is a broad question.
But I'm a first year
undergrad at Brown.
And I'm thinking about
studying environmental studies,
but I'm also really interested
in figuring out ways
to involve contemplative
practices, mindfulness,
in environmental studies.
And I have really very
few concrete ideas
of how to do that.
But I'm just
wondering, because you
talked so much
about social justice
and how mindfulness can be--
JON KABAT-ZINN:
Hold it up closer.
AUDIENCE: Sorry--
and how mindfulness
can be a powerful tool
in social problems,
social justice,
how we can involve
mindfulness and
contemplative practice
in addressing the
ecological crisis that's
happening in our planet.
JON KABAT-ZINN: What
a beautiful question.
And I'm just
lingering with that.
And what comes to mind--
and I don't mean to blow
you off with this response--
but to actually ignite
some kind of afterburner
to your passion any way you can.
See, that's kind of what
the karmic assignment is,
if it is, indeed, your
karmic assignment,
is to find imaginative
possibilities
that everybody is going
to say are impossible
and then make them happen.
So I would prefer that answer
to giving you A, B, and C bullet
points about what you can do.
Because you're a unique human
being in your freshman year.
And you've got the
resources of the university,
your entire life in front
of you, trust what you love.
And don't let anybody tell
you that it's bullshit.
And then you'll learn
from your experience.
And failure is not a problem.
Failure is just one more way
to understand what might not
work at the present moment, and
you just try something else.
And I often use this analogy.
Think of it as water, like
snowmelt finding its way
down a mountain.
It will find its way.
And it is not
stopped by obstacles.
It will simply go around them.
So the more you can use
your university experience
and your community experience
and your family experience
and your whatever
you love experience
or whoever you think you
are and those narratives
you tell yourself being
the age that you are,
that's all part
of the adventure.
And there's no one
right way to do it.
There are an infinite
number of wrong ways,
but there's no one right way.
So if you really
listen carefully,
your interior wisdom--
aging is not necessarily
like wisdom comes with aging.
You just get fucking older.
[LAUGHTER]
If you'll pardon my
putting it that way--
but the most important
thing is to trust your love.
What do you care about so
deeply it doesn't matter
what anybody else thinks?
You trust that.
And it will change over time.
And you'll learn, and you'll
learn from everybody else.
And if you don't
get too caught up
in your own ego
or your own story,
then you may really wind up
making a contribution that's
yours uniquely to make.
And I'm not now talking to you.
I'm talking to every
single person in the room,
because I think that that's
the way the world really
transforms and heals.
And everything else is, in some
sense, a power grab or more
about me.
Does that make any sense to you?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Go for it.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I've worked--
JON KABAT-ZINN: This will
be the last question.
Oh, yeah, I think we
should have it be the last,
just because I ran over so long.
AUDIENCE: I do work part time.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Point it up a
little closer to your mouth,
yeah.
AUDIENCE: Is that better?
JON KABAT-ZINN: Much better.
AUDIENCE: I work
part time working
with families that have elderly
family members or people
with chronic illnesses.
And I've had experiences
working with families, patients,
and the medical
community, usually when
they're interfacing with--
JON KABAT-ZINN: I'm
not hearing you well.
AUDIENCE: OK, is that better?
JON KABAT-ZINN: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: So I've
had experiences
as a consultant working with
people with chronic illnesses,
people who are terminally
ill and their families,
and the traditional
community-- hospitals, doctors,
social workers.
And I've had a few
experiences noticing
that the way medicine
is constructed today
with insurance being
such a big voice in terms
of how traditional
medicine is handled
and also how the
compartmentalization
of specialties has
been constructed,
that dealing with the whole
person gets harder and harder.
And the interface between
the medical community
and different members
of the medical community
gets difficult, because
they're on a certain track,
and families are on
a different track.
And the patient is sort of
divided up by what's going on.
And because of your
experience, and I
noticed in your
presentation you talked
about helping
people who were not
being helped by traditional
medical practice,
so I wanted to ask you.
How do you see this practice
affecting the infrastructure
of traditional medicine?
Do you think there's any way
for this to be integrated
and to influence
it organizationally
or to help people
on a larger scale?
JON KABAT-ZINN: I hope so.
I totally see the possibility.
I would say that part of it is
that the physicians, if we're
talking about medicine, the
physicians and the nurses
have to reclaim sovereignty
over their own domain
and not have it be a business.
Because the real
business is the business
of healing and
recognizing the other
and not being afraid
of suffering and not
algorithmizing it, and that's
just one way in which those
algorithms are going to
really destroy what's
best in our institutions.
Medicine has serious
problems and really
needs to be completely
restructured in certain ways.
And how that's
going to unfold, I
don't think anybody is sitting
in the place where they know.
But the more we can be the
cells of the body politic,
the more we actually
already can influence
how things are going to unfold.
And then, of course,
since there are
a lot of young
people in the room,
these things don't
happen overnight.
And maybe that's your
karma or karmic assignment
is to contribute in profound
ways to making medicine work,
making work work.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Thank you.
And I want to thank you all
for your attention and thanks
to Bess Marcus.
[APPLAUSE]
