I've been meditating now for 53 years and at a certain point along that
trajectory I began to realize, when I sit in the morning,
or let me say when I practice in the morning, it's not always sitting because
there are many different doors into it. You can do standing meditation,
you can do lying down meditation in bed, you can do walking meditation,
sometimes slow, sometimes fast, you can do wheeling meditation,
you can do breathing meditation, you can do watching thoughts meditation, a million different..
but it's all "Attending."
What I came to discover, or realize, was that when I take my seat in the morning it's a radical act.
A lot of people would think it's insane.
"You got so much to do why are you sitting there doing nothing!"
You know, I hear my father saying that to me, you know.
"Why are you doing nothing" this is not nothing, it's a non-doing.
And what I came to realize is that it's a radical act
of sanity, actually, to stop all the doing and the driving through our moments to
get to better moments and actually be in the moment that we have.
This breath in, this breath out, this thought, this bad feeling, if it's a
hard moment, this good feeling, but good, bad, or ugly the full
catastrophe of the human condition why not put the welcome mat out?
Why? Because it's already here it's completely influencing us.
How am I going to be in relationship to it? That's what mindfulness is,
the relationality. So I've come to see it as a radical act
of sanity and ultimately a radical act of love.
By take, I'm taking care, and it's not narcissistic, it's not like
radical act of love for myself,
it's a radical act of, a willingness to be,
to remind myself, that it's possible to rest in awareness, as we were just doing,
and that awareness is boundless, it's not limited to the skull, or to the skin, it's like
are you, try to find the extent of your awareness.
I don't think you're going to find it. Try to find the center of it.
Even the center, like moi, me, where you won't find it.
I urge you to experiment don't take my word for it. But
that's interesting if this the boundless spaciousness is inside us in some sense
or, part of our true nature, you could say,
then who are we, really? And maybe dropping into being
outside of time for a few moments at least
is kind of like, when you have an orchestra they don't just get together
and play great music. Mozart, Beethoven whatever uh with great
instruments and great performance they actually tune their instruments,
to themselves and to each other, right, before they play.
What if you see this as a tuning before I go into the doing
of the day, how about tuning the instrument?
So that when the first thing that I could get angry about arises,
and how long do you think that will take?
I noticed the arising of anger
and I noticed that my awareness of the anger isn't angry.
You can ask yourself, you can look, and this is not dissociation, this is not a
prescription for dissociation, this is like discovering a hidden
dimension of your humanity, that then you can inhabit and then all
the doing can come out of that being.
All the creativity comes out of that. All the imagination and basically all
the love, because the love, you know we can't talk about it.
Anything we say about it turns to you know, just garbage in our mouths.
It's, it's like because that's all mere cognition, merely
conceptual. And like, you know in relationships, like
when you're, the love is there, and you feel it
words are useless. Maybe poetry, but not, certainly not prose.
And when the love's not there no amount of words is going to be of any use.
And when the love is there we also don't need words.
So medicine and meditation are linked at
the etymological hip, and so the thought was
when I started MBSR,
why keep this to myself? I mean I'm finding this to be extraordinary,
why not go to places where people are suffering, because
this comes out of the Buddhist tradition primarily, although it's totally universal,
but the Buddha was, you could think of
him as a very sophisticated scientist who
asked deep questions about the nature of the mind, and the nature of reality.
And he didn't have an fMRI, and Helen Weng to, you know, go into the fMRI scanner and
with you know sort of, uh artificial
intelligence programs decode what's going on when he pays attention to his
breathing and so forth he didn't have that. He didn't even have quantitative
EEG. He just had this, and he said, "Okay, I just have this, I'm
going to sit down and this is going to be the instrument of my
inquiry, this is going to be the laboratory."
And he discovered some things that are profound and have nothing to do with
Buddhism, in the same way as, you know, gravitation, you know, say
Galileo discovered gravitation, or if you want
Newton did the math.
Gravitation is not Italian.
Gravitation is not English, it's not like, you know, the sort of
Cambridge University is trying to get a patent on gravitation.
And, and the Dharma isn't Buddhist. Wisdom is not Buddhist. Awareness is not
Buddhist. Mindfulness is not Buddhist, although it's the heart of Buddhist
meditation because Buddhism is not Buddhism, because as soon
as you make an "ism" of any kind, as soon as you make
"this" you make "that" and that's a dualism and
Buddhism is about non-duality. So there are all sorts of very
interesting currents and ironies here that are deep and profound, and
transformative and wisdom and it's in some sense the Indo-Europe,
the Indo-Asian, you know, Indo-Tibetan, Indo-Chinese
culture that is kind of offering us now stuff that
a hundred years ago no one had a clue about this, I mean,
William James was writing about the wandering mind and any kind of education
that would help us to deal with a wandering mind would be
the education par-excellence, he said. Meanwhile halfway around the world
without the internet, in 1890, there were people who had been
practicing that for centuries! How to deal with a, an unruly, wandering mind.
But now in the 21st century
everything is out there, everything is everywhere, but the question is, "Can we
bring it inside in a way that is fungible, that is valuable?"