>> My name is Helen Damon Moore, and I am the director of service
and education at the Tucker Foundation,
here at Dartmouth college.
I am honored to welcome you all and to introduce John Cabotson
on behalf of the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center
Pailateive Care Service, the Tucker Foundation,
the Rubin Committee of Dartmouth College,
Alice Peck Day Hospital, Dartmouth Medical School,
the Norris Cotton Cancer Center,
and the Valley Insight Medication Society.
Special thanks to Ira Biak and Yvonne Corbet,
and the Pailateive care service for partnering on this project.
And to those at tucker who have worked so hard,
and who are this week celebrating the 60th anniversary
year Tucker Foundation, Dartmouth's center for service,
spirituality, and social justice.
We are pleased to welcome Dr. John Cabotson
to Dartmouth college today for the second time.
Cabotson first visited Dartmouth in the summer of 1984
when the college and the Connecticut river served
as the training camp for the men's Olympic rowing team.
He was the meditation trainer for the team, helping them
to optimize their mental performance.
Today he is here to help optimize our performance.
John Cabotson hold an a Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT.
He is professor of medicine emeritus at the University
of Massachusetts Medical School and founder of the Center
For Mindfulness and Medicine, Healthcare, and Society
and its mindfulness-based stress reduction clinic.
He is the author of numerous best-selling books,
including Full Catastrophe Living,
Wherever You Go There You Are, Coming to Our Senses,
and the Mindful Way Through Depression,
co-authors with Williams, Tisdale, and Siegal.
Dr. Cabotson's research focuses on mind-body interactions
for healing, and on the clinical applications
and cost effectiveness of mindfulness training for people
with chronic pain and stress-related disorders,
including the effects
of mindfulness-based stress reduction on the brain.
His current projects include editing the Mind's Own
Physician, with Richard Davidson, and guest co-editing
with Mark Williams a special issue
of The Journal Contemporary Buddhism.
Dr. Cabotson's work has contributed hugely
to a growing movement of mindfulness
in main stream institutions such as medicine, psychology,
healthcare, schools and colleges, corporations, prisons,
and professional sports.
Courtesy of Kerry Jo Grant [Assumed spelling] here
in our health promotion department, Dr. Cabotson
and his work have even made their way to the inside
of our bathroom doors.
Featured as they are in the current edition
of the Dartmouth College Stall Street Journal.
Please join me in welcoming John Cabotson back
to Dartmouth college.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you.
It's a delight to be here.
Do I have to have the light this bright in my eyes?
Because maybe you could tone it down a little bit
so people can still see me,
but I'd like to be able to see you too.
It's a delight to be here.
It's nice to walk into a theater
where mindfulness is on the marquee.
You know you've really made it when it's on the marquee,
along with Frankenstein.
So -- it's like, you're part of the main stream, so to speak,
however that goes from moment to moment and from day-to-day.
But it's really a delight to be here, and I am here basically
because of Helen Damon Moore and her work, which I actually got
to see at University of Iowa, when she was
at Iowa before coming here.
And also Dr. Ira Biak, who I met in --
in Ireland about two years ago, almost exactly two years ago.
And was just incredibly impressed with what he's doing
with integrative medicine and palliative care.
And so you know, it's like I don't live that far
from this place, and got in the car this morning and drove up.
And I'm really happy to be here for the next three days.
And you know, so to have this many people come out at 4:30
on a sunny afternoon after the kind of winter we had,
to a talk about mindfulness is really some kind of an indicator
that something has shifted in the society.
You all have better things to do, I'm sure,
this afternoon, than to come here.
Unless you have some kind of real intuition
about what the healing power of mindfulness might be.
And then it might actually be incredibly valuable
to spend the end of a nice sunny Thursday afternoon
here together.
So this talk is not about me or what I have
to say, it's about us.
It's about every single one of us,
and in some sense what the potential is, as the slide says,
for living your moments as if they really mattered.
And I put a little asterisk in there,
and the reason they too is
because we're only alive when we're alive.
This seems kind of a no-brainer, but you could say that a lot
of our lives we're walking around with a no-brainer,
or just basically no brain, or the brain is on auto pilot
or something like that.
And what mindfulness is really
about is bringing it back on line, so to speak.
In the present moment, because that turns
out to be the only moment that any of us ever have.
But we're so good at thinking, so incredibly good at thinking,
that we can spend enormous amounts of our time
and energy absorbed in the past.
Have you noticed that?
Just incredible preoccupations about who's to blame
about why it's like this.
Or how great it was in the good old days,
and why can't it be that way now.
So there's a tremendous attraction to the past
and tremendous aversion, but whether it's attraction
or aversion, we spend a lot of time there.
Would you agree?
Have you noticed that a lot of the time if you check
on what your mind is up to, it's up to memory.
It's up to thinking about things
that are already over, to a large degree.
The other favorite preoccupation of the mind is
in the opposite direction.
The future.
And if again you check in every once come a while just to,
you know, sometimes I like to say you know,
you can call yourself up.
You may have to, you know, because we're on 24-7,
we're just infinitely connected.
Probably every single person has one of these in their pocket,
although I hope there are some exceptions.
But -- and they're called smart phones, you know?
But they're not.
But we actually -- but they can really dumb us
down because we can be infinitely connected everywhere
except here.
And so we may need to call ourselves
up every once in a while.
John, are you actually here?
And the answer is no, I'm off in the future thinking.
And one of our favorite preoccupations --
and by the way, of course you'll get a bill from AT&T or Verizon.
But seriously, what -- what are our favorite preoccupations
in the future?
Well, one is worrying.
I don't know about the north country,
maybe you've gone beyond worrying.
The rest of the world a lot of worry about things that --
that haven't happened yet and may never happen.
In fact, Mark Twain is famous for having said,
you've probably heard this in a lot of different guises,
but he's famous for having said there's been a huge amount
of tragedy in my life, and some of it actually happened.
But -- but there is this saying that you know, we die --
he died a thousand deaths.
I mean , we drive ourselves crazy over things
that are not going to be happening
because we're not smart enough to actually forecast the future,
but that doesn't prevent us from driving ourselves crazy,
and perseverating over and over and over about what will happen.
And then something else happens because we're not that smart.
So something else happens, and we say we're blind-sided.
Now how many of you would like the future to be different
from the way -- the way we think it's going to turn out.
Anybody ever find yourself wishing the future was going
to be like, majorly different, that we'd make some kind
of change in the world?
Raise your hands, I want to just feel in the audience.
Okay, I heard social justice mentioned earlier, and you know,
this is after all a university
or I guess you call yourself a college.
You know, a campus kind of situation.
So it doesn't surprise me.
But this -- this kind
of engagement really requires thinking about, like,
what it means to make the future different.
How can we possibly apply any leverage,
could we kind an Archimedes, you know, fulcrum in which
to influence the future.
There's only one fulcrum that I know for that,
and that is the present.
Because guess what, we're living in the future
of every single moment in all of our lives
that came before this one.
Do you remember back, I mean, I see there's kind of a range
of ages, although most of you don't look
like you're college students, I've got to say.
And I'm a little disappointed.
I mean, I -- you know, not that I'm disappointed that you came,
but I'd like to see a lot more college students.
They look at -- they're going to Frankenstein probably, later.
It's an awkward time of day for the young people.
How many of you are under 25, 25 and under.
Oh, so I'm wrong.
That's really nice to be wrong.
So -- really -- so I was going to say to the older people,
but maybe you did it when you were even younger.
Do you remember before you got into college here,
and probably you got into planning what the courses were
that you were going to take when you got ahold of the catalog,
or you went on line and began planning, oh,
in the freshman year I'll take this,
and the sophomore year, and the junior year.
And maybe you planned even who you're going to meet
and who you're going to marry,
and what your children are going to look like.
Does that sound familiar, that sometimes we do
that when we're young.
And we think that it's all going to turn out in the future.
So no matter what your age is, I've got news for you.
This is it.
It already turned out.
How did it turn out?
It turned out just like this.
In any moment your life is just like this.
Not happy with it , a little bit sad or depressed
or wishing it was different -- that's not a problem.
That's not a problem.
Because we can always sort of feel like okay, how are we going
to be in relationship to this, and of course life is not easy.
And a lot of times we're faced with enormous challenges,
sometimes with enormous pain.
Sometimes with enormous threat.
And that's part of the human condition.
But the real interesting question when it concerns, say,
the future, and concerns living
as if life really mattered is can we actually be
in the present moment when things are not kind
of the way we thought they would be.
Or sometimes the shorthand for it is well,
I didn't sign up for this.
I mean, or another way to put it, sometimes,
maybe no offense meant, but how did I get born into this family,
or who are all these crazy people,
why am I the only sane person.
And you know, when you're
in a family no one else can know the kind of genetic disease
of that particular family,
that everybody suffers from except you.
So if we hope for the future to be different,
the only place we have to stand is now.
Because first of all, it's the --
it's the future of all the moments
that have come before us.
So if you want to be in the future, here you are.
This is actually non trivial, it's not just oh yeah,
tell us something interesting.
Because -- because what it invites is a kind of shift
in perception and a shift in awareness,
a shift in consciousness, that allows us
to actually live our lives as if they really mattered,
and the only moment we ever have.
And part of that means being embodied.
Because a lot of the time you know, we are lost in thought.
That's another thing you'll notice, if you start
to pay attention to your mind, is that it's all over the place.
It's all over the place.
You don't even have to meditate for that to happen.
It's just default mode.
It's default mode.
You don't even have to have a smart phone.
You don't even have to have e-mail.
You don't even have to have a computer.
It's the default mode of the mind to be all over the place.
It thinks this, and thinks that.
And it likes this and hates that.
And wants you to approach this, but really wants
to stay away from that.
And it's like, wired into our biology.
It's called approach avoidance.
And it's kind of, you know,
the hemispheres are actually somewhat divided in terms
of left hemisphere and the frontal cortical region,
is more approach-related.
And right acre vacation, more --
and that's one of the fundamental biological,
you know, features of living systems.
Move towards food, move away from danger.
Perfectly natural.
But how we actually modulate those impulses
and those reflexes, and those, you know,
kinds of unconscious urges that drive us and cause us
to be reactive a lot of the time.
Is really an art form.
It's the art, if you will, of living our lives
as if they really mattered.
And when we begin to actually drop in on ourselves,
and I brought a few -- a few props.
You know, so sometimes I say when we begin to drop
in on ourselves, you know, we can actually reclaim this moment
in this body with this heart, with this mind, and shift --
begin to shift the tea fault setting
on how we live ourselves.
Begin to actually move in a direction of greater balance
of mind, greater groundedness in the body, greater clarity
of sight, greater, if you will,
recognition of what's actually unfolding moment by moment,
that's not so conditioned by whether we like it or not.
Because the world, maybe you haven't noticed this yet,
but it's not actually organized
around you being the center of the universe.
I know that's really disappointing.
Because you were, I'm guessing now, don't take offense, again,
I'm guessing you are entirely organized
around you being the center of the universe.
Every single one of us is.
It's almost unavoidable.
And that has representations in the brain, it's turning out.
That there are medial -- medial networks in the frontal cortex
and -- that are -- is actually called the default mode.
And it's what we think brains, neuro scientists think,
it's what's happening when you're not doing anything.
Well, turns out when you're not doing anything,
you're very busy.
You're very, very, very busy.
And one of the things what's described is
that your mind wandering.
And now there's an entire field
in neuro science focused on mind wandering.
How many of you have noticed
that your mind sometimes just has a mind of its own.
It goes here, it goes there, it likes to be entertained.
You know, it's very entertaining.
So yeah, that's what's called the default mode.
Now another name for it is the narrative network.
So it's like we are continually constructing narratives
about ourselves.
I mean, after all, it's the favorite topic, right?
Me. What could be more interesting than me?
The story of me, starring -- me.
And if you start to pay attention,
because what we're talking about, what mindfulness is,
it's actually weariness, okay?
And it's cultivated by paying attention.
So just to get clear about this,
that doesn't sound very Buddhist, does it, so far?
Or very Asian or mystical or very -- anything.
I mean, it's just paying attention.
How many teachers are there in the audience,
whatever level you're teaching at, raise your hand
so I can feel that --
okay, don't you want your students to pay attention?
It's non trivial to get them to pay attention.
First you might have to be interesting.
That itself is a challenge.
Second, you might have to make the subject matter interesting.
That's also a challenge.
But third, it's like, I remember as a product
of the New York product schools having teachers actually yell
at us to pay attention.
But that's not a very effective way to get people
to pay attention, because turns out that attending is something
that you need to learn.
It's a learnable skill.
But instead of being taught to pay attention,
you're just told who pay attention.
Get with the program, pay attention.
And a lot of people pay attention very differently.
Some pay attention auditorily,
they're really predominantly auditory.
Some people can't do auditory so well,
they've got to see it visually.
Other people's more intuitive, they feel it
with their bodies, in a certain way.
So this is incredibly important in education at all levels,
because you know, as they say about orchestras,
even the greatest of orchestras, with the greatest musicians
with the greatest instruments playing the greatest music,
before they perform they get together
and they tune their instruments.
First to themselves.
Then with each other.
Until there's a kind of dropping,
if you don't mind me putting it that way,
into kind of resonance, call it an A. Call it what you like,
but that kind of interconnected feeling that we are
in some space together.
You could call it relationality.
And so mindfulness is the awareness that arises
by paying attention on purpose in the present moment.
Paying attention on purpose
in the present moment and non judgmentally.
Now non judgmentally, that's the kicker, because as I said,
the default network is operating constantly ,
and the default network has got ideas about everything.
It's judging constantly.
So non judgmental doesn't mean that you won't be judging
when you actually start to pay attention to what's on your mind
or what's going on in your life.
But you'll notice how much you are judging, how much you want
to approach this and push away that.
And you'll just allow that whole thing to be there,
as if you just put out the welcome mat for it.
Okay, I'm not going to have an opinion about my opinions.
I'm just going to let it all rain down for -- for a moment.
Can you feel how radical a shift that would be in your life,
to just take one moment and allow everything to be as it is,
instead of wishing it was one way or another?
The Buddhists would call that liberation.
It's a kind of freedom that no one else can give you,
but allow us in some sense to rotate in consciousness
so that we -- for one moment we're stepping outside of time.
Because if you live in the now, well,
maybe you've had this experience.
Just check your watch and take a look right now.
What time is it?
I'll tell you what time it is, it's now.
And every time you check your watch
or your phone, it's now again.
Now what -- why am I even talking about this?
Why it I even come here?
It's always good to is it ask those questions, you know,
it's like -- I don't know, actually.
Because it's usually bigger
than whatever you think your reasons are [Inaudible]
but it has a lot to do with -- with the medical schools
and with what -- what Ira's doing there.
And with what Helen is doing in the undergraduate school.
It has to do with the fact that the society has reached a point
where we're beginning to understand
that the exponentially increasing levels of stress,
in medicine, in our professional lives, in our personal lives,
at every age, really require some kind of shift that is not
in the form of taking some pill to numb yourself
out to it or get it together.
But actually, we need to cultivate what's often spoken
of as the domain of being in order to not be so overwhelmed
by the doing and the performing.
And while it's true that with the Olympic team we were using
mindfulness to actually improve their performance,
it was kind of a Zen operation,
that you can't improve performance by trying
to improve performance, especially with the mind.
Because the kind of mind that's grasping
for an outcome is exactly the kind of mind that gets
in the way of any desirable outcome.
Have you got that, did you catch that as it went by?
Okay. So this means we're in new territory.
One example, common example.
You can't get to sleep
by forcing yourself to get to sleep.
By telling yourself how important the meeting is you
have tomorrow.
In fact, that's probably a very bad idea,
because that thought will actually secrete one more
thought, secrete one more thought or the meeting
or the stakes of it, or --
and then that will lead to something else
in this default network of mind wandering and pretty soon,
you are wide awake, desperately wanting to be asleep.
And not knowing how to get there.
So it's not trivial to actually befriend our own minds
and our own lives in such a way we can actually work
in these paradoxical ways where striving won't do it.
Striving won't do it.
That doesn't mean that I'm advocating that all of us, like,
abandon ambition or don't care about anything.
Meditation is not about becoming stupid.
Not even being non judgmental is not about becoming stupid.
It's sounds like, oh don't judge anything.
Maybe I'll just walk off the stage and break my leg,
you know, no, I'm aware the edge of the stage is here.
And if I do fall off the stage and break my leg, yeah,
that will have been a moment of mindlessness or out
of touch, if you will.
But -- walk across the street without looking because,
you know, we have to sense we're not going to judge
that that judge that truck coming at me --
there's a big difference between judgment and discernment.
So mindfulness is all about discerning
with clarity what's actually going on.
Now most of time now, how many of you would say
that you are engaged in some kind of a way
that doesn't feel all that good a lot
of the time in multitasking.
Anybody find yourself multitasking?
Confess. That when you're
on the phone you're actually sending an e-mail
to somebody else.
Anybody ever do that?
Raise your hands, I want to see.
Confession time.
Okay, and you know, we actually do it a lot.
Why? Part of it is really because we're so stressed.
We don't have enough moments in our day to get it all done,
so we like, start to discombobulate a little bit,
and juggle and cut corners.
And there are wonderful studies that that actually impede
or reduces or -- any kind of, you know, objective measure
of performance, that doing two things at once detracts
from the quality of either one.
Doing five things at once or being that scattered
in your mind, you don't even have to be doing anything,
but when you're at the mercy of this kind
of mind wandering all the time.
And you're trying to get things done is very, very challenging.
Very challenging.
So the question is, is there a way to actually live
that will allow us to deal with what Zorba the Greek
in Kasantzakis in the novel says the full catastrophe
of the human condition; the good, the bad, the ugly,
the unwanted , the feared, the traumatic, the awful.
And to be able to hold each moment in its fullness
and allow our attention faculty and our awareness faculty
to actually hold it in such a way
that we can then inhabit the next moment with authenticity
and maybe even respond appropriately to this vast range
of demands that we're faced with all the time.
Now when I started the stress reduction clinic back in --
at University of Massachusetts back in 1979,
and I did bring some slides, which I don't know
if I will show you, but I'll just sort of take that moment
by moment, maybe I'll show them to you, maybe I won't --
because I'm trying to actually create more of an impression.
I don't want to just leave you with things
in your head, just facts.
Okay? Because you'll lose them immediately.
Okay? Because other facts will come in, and you know, whatever.
If you spent time and energy getting here and I've spent time
and energy getting here,
then what would make me feel most satisfied is if one,
you had some kind of inkling why you came today.
I'm sure you all do it, it's a mystery though, I'm sure.
Hoping to maybe be entertained or maybe connect
on some deeper level or maybe you practice mindfulness
or maybe you've been to a [Inaudible] program,
but if you peel back all those layers there's some is really,
really, really,
really interesting reason why you're here.
And I bet you don't know what it is.
I'm not joking.
Because there's intelligences at work that are just deeper
than the thought function.
And the thought function is so smart that it sometimes
out smarts us completely, have you noticed that?
And then it's like we're stupid.
We're so smart, we're stupid.
It's very hard to see that in yourself but you can see it
in other people just really easily.
Have you -- maybe you've noticed that.
So I'm going to try to weave together a whole bunch of things
that probably none of it is going to make complete sense,
but what I'm doing here is I'm trying
to in some sense plant seeds.
I'm trying to plant seeds in the fertile ground or garden
of whatever it was that brought you here so that
when you leave here something has been touched
that will keep those seeds, that actually I'm not planting,
they are already in you, keep them being watered nurtured,
protected, privileged in a certain way, so that it --
nurtures in some profound sense some aspect of you that wants
to be as alive as you can be while you have the chance.
We say to people coming to our stress reduction clinic,
and they come with every conceivable kind of ailment,
referred by every conceivable sub specialty and specialty,
and generalist in medicine.
And we say -- and it's an eight week long course,
designed to teach you how to take better care of yourself
as a compliment to whatever the healthcare system is,
I should call that a disease care system
by the way, can do with you.
Can do for you.
And we say to them from our perspective as long
as you're breathing, there's more right with you than wrong
with you, no matter what's wrong with you.
No matter what's wrong.
And we see people you would not want to be in their body
or in their mind or in their life.
And they probably wouldn't want to be in yours either.
But you probably wouldn't want to hear that.
Because after all, you're the star of this movie, aren't you?
So -- so that there's more right with you than wrong with you,
no matter what's wrong with you.
That's radical perspective and very, very important.
Because you know, I started the stress reduction clinic in 1979.
In 1979 the surgeon general's report came
out Called Healthy People and that it was saying,
forecasting into the future, which here now,
we are in this future, that no matter how much money America
spends at throwing money at health and healthcare,
it will never be enough to have health.
Because there's a missing ingredient, and it's the humans
that healthcare is supposed to care for.
And that there's not enough money on the planet
to do all the various things that would have to be done
with us when we don't take care of ourselves,
when we don't know how to handle stress, when we do not know how
to be in wise relationship with ourselves and our lifestyle
and our diet and exercise and our bodies and aging
and everything else, that if we leave that all to the, you know,
auto mechanics model of medicine, drive your car
around till it breaks down, then you get the carburetor replaced
or the engine or whatever, the tires.
But this is not a machine.
I know a lot of people, even in biology,
love to use machine analogies and even nano machine analogies
about the body, and to a degree they're correct.
But there's another piece of it,
like no one understands the construction
of the machine that's you.
I'll give you one example.
How many of you see that slide up there,
and what's the color of the background?
Blue. Everybody agree that it's blue.
No one knows how you do that.
No one knowing how you go from the wave length
of electro magnetic radiation, the blue region, okay,
in the visible spectrum, no one knowing how you go
from this wave length, which is colorless, it's just energy,
to a subjective feeling of blue.
And we also really don't know, we have a consensus reality
that agrees that the blue that you're seeing and the blue
that I'm seeing are the same blue, but it's not always true,
and it's not true for colorblind people, the blue-green color.
Okay, so there's a lot of kind of consensus agreement here.
But there's -- the brain weighs approximately three pounds,
okay?
And it's all cells and cables that are part, you know,
made up of cells, neurons.
And then all these gluteal cells in there supporting the neurons.
And incredibly specialized.
I mean, it's really the most complex assembly of matter
in the known by us universe,
right inside your little old body.
And no one knows how senses, how consciousness, how knowing,
how even thinking arises in this three pounds
of what some neuro scientists call meat.
It's a little distasteful.
But to just kind of make it graphic,
so if you for get every once in a while walking around in --
on the Dartmouth campus or in Hanover or wherever you happen
to live that you're a miraculous being.
Well, okay.
It's just one more mind wandering, you know?
One more default sort of not really being aware
of how amazing it is that you can see, for instance.
That you can hear.
That you can taste.
How many of us eat food and we don't bother
to taste it, we just devour it.
Or we taste the idea of the food.
Yeah, that was really good.
Yeah, but you didn't actually taste it.
Have you ever had a mindless hug from somebody
who was really trying to be friendly?
Sort of impulse to be friendly, but not in one's body.
Okay? So all of these things we take for granted.
But we can actually begin a process of re-minding --
and I put a little hyphen in there --
re-minding ourselves, re-bodying ourselves.
When? Now.
Because this is the only time you have.
And coming back into a certain kind of vector or alignment
with the entire life trajectory,
and it doesn't matter how old you are
when you begin this process.
The Native Americans, actually, measured your age
from when you became -- they started to measure your age
from when you became a grand parent.
Before that, it was like you were really too busy
to be human.
And the -- and in the Asian Indians, measure your age
from when you start practicing yoga.
So if you're 75 years old and you've been into yoga
for three months, you're three months old, I like that.
Isn't that nice?
What about new beginning?
Every moment a new beginning.
That's what mindfulness is about.
Every moment fresh.
Now this is not a philosophy.
It's not a good idea, it's not a concept.
It's a way of being.
It's not a technique.
It's not a technique and it's not a special state.
Oh, I think I'll trot over to the MBSR clinic, meditate.
[ Background noise ]
>> Maybe you're waiting for something else to happen.
But nothing else happens.
Nothing else happens.
This is it.
You know, good-bye.
Maybe you're hoping for something special to happen.
Some special meditative state.
Some kind of vision.
Some kind of alignment of the, you know, spheres.
Some special bolt of lightening out of the blue to wake you up.
It's a mistake.
A miss, hyphen, take, on meditation.
On mindfulness, on reality.
Let's just pretend, okay, why don't we just sit for a moment.
Ah, you're already sitting.
You don't even need to shift your posture,
although I see some people getting ready.
Okay, now we're going to get into it.
It's going to be somewhat experiential.
Thank God.
He could talk forever.
But you see, you know, you don't even have to shift your posture
to be awake or to be aware.
You could do it like this.
And really be aware.
And by the way, I can't see my hands.
But I know where they are.
How do I know?
A sense called proprioception.
Maybe you've heard of it, maybe you haven't.
But there are a lot more than five senses,
I just want to put that out, okay?
When we're talking about miraculous being or genius,
it's got lots of different dimensions to it.
Many. If I ask you how are you
in the elevator and you say fine.
How do you know?
Aside from the fact that you're not fine but you just don't want
to go into it in the elevator,
with somebody you don't want to tell anyway.
But when, you know, you're sort of -- someone --
a friend asks you how our and you say fine, how do you know?
That's another sense.
And you know very quickly.
And you know when you're not, too.
What is that knowing called?
It's not called well, let me think.
I don't know.
How am I. No, you know instantly.
That sense is called interoception.
There are ways that the organism has, you know, using the brain
and nervous system, which has lots of maps,
by the way the brain is loaded with maps of the body.
Loaded with maps of the body.
And not just the somatosensory cortises.
But the insula and the cerebellum and the, you know,
the hippocampus, I mean, lots and lots -- and again I stress,
we're beginning to understand something about what lights
up when, when you meditate, when you do this and do that,
when you go into depression.
All sorts of wonderful, wonderful things happening.
Brain research in neuro science nowadays.
But still, no one knowing how it comes together.
In you, in this moment, in a way
that actually you don't have to think about.
And even if there's something going on, even if you're in,
say, pain from your lower back and you've had it
for a long time, or even if you have cancer at the moment
or you're a cancer survivor or whatever it is.
Or you have, you know, heart, you know,
issues of one kind or another.
Whatever it is.
The sum total of this universe, of --
between 10 and 100 trillion cells,
the whole body now we're talking about.
Is good enough to have gotten you here today.
Hmm? It's good enough for now.
And the more energy you pour into it,
the more that robustness, whatever it is,
sometimes called homeostasis,
but it's a very dynamical process that we call health,
as opposed to disease or dis-ease.
When we start to pour attention, energy in the form of attention
into what's already right with us,
it turns out that the body has its ear to the rail,
the brain has its ear to the rail, the brain is part
of the rail, the -- the heart, every aspect
of our being is one integrated whole.
It's not like different systems.
The immune system talks to the nervous system.
And the nervous system talks right back.
And everybody else is listening in on the conversation.
And it's all cells.
And if you took your liver -- if we all took our livers
and put them out on the stage here,
that would be an interesting exercise,
and then we shuffled them around and then you were all encouraged
to just pick yours up on the way out.
You wouldn't know which was yours.
You can look at all hundred trillion of these cells
in your body, and your name isn't on any of it.
It's like, oh, here's my liver.
Here's my gal bladder.
The punctuation from the cell phones is actually really --
if that was a cell phone -- is really interesting.
But do you hear what I'm saying?
Even the question of who we are, when you start
to actually ask it with tremendous authenticity,
it might not be so feasible to just say your name
or even describe what you do, or even send in your CV.
If you've ever hired people,
you know that the CV is not the person
and you hire the CV a lot of the time.
Big mistake.
Because you can't work with the person a lot of the time.
What you want it congruence, you want integration.
So when we take our seats, so to speak,
what we're actually engaging in, is a recognition
of how integrated we already are.
We don't need to, oh, I'm such a wreck,
I've got to get integrated.
No, from this perspective you are already as integrated
as you're going to be in this moment.
Is it enough?
Is it good enough?
So let's actually take a moment.
I've even brought another prop.
I brought some bells.
We don't need the bells.
But I'll ring them.
And when I ring them -- why don't --
just for fun, you don't have to shift your posture,
but just for fun, why don't you shift your posture and sit
in a posture that for now embodies dignity,
whatever that means for you.
Look, the entire room is moving.
Not that dignified, I guess.
All right, but actually it doesn't matter.
The posture is secondary.
What's important is the inner orientation.
The willingness to open to the present moment,
to put out the welcome mat and to get --
and to let the idea that oh, now we're going
to do something special, drop.
Because as soon as you sort of plant that seed, now we're going
to do something special
and we're going experience something special,
then you'll be on the look out for something special.
But you see, nothing special.
There's a wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker
that I actually mentioned a long time ago
in Wherever You Go There You Are, two Zen monks, you know,
one obviously elder, the other young.
And the young one's looking up quizzically at the older one.
And the caption underneath,
the old one's speaking, nothing happens next.
This is it.
I just said that to you earlier.
But the this is it, is really important.
Otherwise, you could spend 20 or 30 years or more,
and people do this, meditating, trying to get some place else.
Trying to have some special experience.
That's what it's all about.
Now I'm enlightened.
The problem is you're already enlightened.
But the personal pronoun that wants to grab it
and say I'm enlightened,
it's the personal pronoun that's the problem,
not the enlightenment.
Your eyes are already enlightened.
Your ears are already enlightened.
Your feet actually do what they're supposed
to do for the most part.
Your brain is doing what it's supposed to.
Your liver is doing what it's supposed to do.
Very famous scientist
and physician named Lewis Thomas once said he'd rather be
at the controls of a 747 trying to land
with no pilot training whatsoever than at the controls
of his own liver for 30 seconds.
So you don't need to find special.
This is good enough, okay?
So let's actually sit for a moment, if you're sitting,
or stand if you're standing, in a posture that for you
at this moment embodies wakefulness and dignity.
You don't even have to close your eyes.
But you can if you like, or let them fall unfocused on the chair
in front of you or whatever.
And as I ring the bell, seeing if you can just follow the sound
of the bells into the space of the air.
[ Bell ringing ]
[ Background noise ]
>> And allowing the space of the air to be co-extensive
with the space, you could call it, of awareness.
So that there's simply awareness.
Hearing what's here, to be heard.
The sound of the bells are past, and now there's just sound.
Whatever's arising.
And you could feature hearing as a way
of anchoring our attention.
You can focus on some object like --
or field of objects, like hearing.
And just rest in being aware of sounds and the stillness,
the silence in between, inside, and underneath.
Any and all sounds, including, of course, my voice.
Alternatively, because there's more than one thing going on,
there's not just hearing going on, there's also seeing
and smelling and you know,
all the senses are actually operating.
Seeing if you can actually instead of hearing,
feature for now a feeling, a sense of the breath moving
in and out of your body.
Wherever it's most vivid in the body.
Just allowing awareness to inhabit the whole of the body
and be most vivid in the region
where the breath sensations are arising and passing away.
In breath.
Up.
[ Background noise ]
>> And seeing if you can ride on the waves of the breath
with full awareness, moment by moment by moment.
And noticing any time the mind goes off and gets involved
in anything else, including judging how stupid this is.
We came for a talk and all
of a sudden we're doing this stupid exercise.
Whatever is flitting through the mind at the moment,
just making it so spacious
that you can see whatever's unfolding, hear my guidance
as I'm speaking, and at the same time ride on the wave
of the breath coming in, and the breath going out.
With full awareness.
And a kind of interest, the kind of, in some sense,
affectionate attention.
Even if the breath isn't all that interesting to you or all
that boring, or your mind says okay, I get that concept.
What else.
Just staying with the breath.
And then playing with the possibility
of expanding the field of awareness around the breath,
wherever you're experiencing it most in the body
until it includes a sense of the body as a whole, sitting here
or standing here, breathing.
And noticing you can do that just easy as pie.
It's not really a doing, but when I say it,
you can easily be --
the awareness can hold the whole body to one degree or another.
And whatever degree you can hold it, that's fine.
It's not like, oh,
if I practiced I'd get better at this.
That's just the thought, never mind.
Just letting the thoughts come and go,
and staying with the awareness of the body as a whole,
sitting and breathing.
And if possible, remembering
that this isn't some simple little exercise that we're doing
in the middle of a talk.
That this is your life unfolding in this very moment.
And this breath is important to you.
You wouldn't want to do without it.
So with that kind of quality of attending, that it's not --
it's not really -- it's like tuning a guitar string.
You know, too lose, two-tone, too tight.
You know, two-tone, but if you can just bring the lightest
of touches, the lightest of touches of awareness
to the sense of the body as a whole, breathing.
As if it mattered.
And of course it does.
Because it's your body in this moment.
It's your life and the breath is vital.
And then one more before we end.
Noticing any thoughts that may be moving through your mind,
and noticing how easy it is to self-distracts,
that the mind does wander.
That it wanders away from the breath, if we did this
for any period of time.
Sooner or later your mind would be someplace else.
Probably not even in the room.
Maybe not even in the present moment.
Maybe having dinner in Paris.
Or Bangkok, or in an argument three years ago.
In the shower with yourself.
So when you notice the mind has self distracted, no problem,
no judging, just -- or if you judge it,
don't judge the judging, and just see if you can come back
to this moment in awareness.
Featuring whatever object of attention you care to.
It could be anything that's in the field of awareness.
But the last little piece to just underscore that none
of this is about the sound of the bells.
None of this is about the feeling
of the breath in the body.
None of this is about the thoughts moving
through the mind.
Those are all important and they're secondary,
but what it's really about is the awareness
that knows the sound when it comes to the ears that knows --
and I mean non conceptually knows, not just conceptually --
knows the feeling of the breath moving in the body.
Non conceptually inhabits the body as a whole, in awareness,
sitting and breathing.
Non conceptually knows when the mind self distracts,
or we get into an emotional whirl pool or turbulence
of some kind or another.
And the awareness can just, like allow it to just be here.
Feature it center stage, let it calm, let it go,
and meanwhile we just continue to rest.
To rest in awareness.
Outside of time, because the present moment is time --
timeless in some profound way.
[ Background noise ]
>> And awareness and silence and stillness are all different ways
of saying the same thing.
Of pointing to something that's already yours,
that you don't have to get.
But has tremendous healing potential.
Tremendous potential for learning.
For seeing things in new ways for that rotation
in consciousness that I was speaking of.
Everything's the same, only nothing's the same.
Why? Because you showed up in your fullness.
So learning.
And out of that learning, growing.
And out of that growing, healing, which in my vocabulary,
the way I define healing is coming to terms
with things as they are.
Coming to terms with thing as they are.
Very different from curing.
There are very few cures in medicine, but the opportunity
for healing as long as there's breath,
it's in some sense already here.
All we need to do is see it, feel it, live it.
And it's not about denying pain and suffering.
It's about, in some sense, befriending even that.
So resting for a final few moments in stillness,
in silence, full wakefulness, in full awareness, outside of time,
as if you had nothing to do, no place to go.
Nothing to do.
And nothing to attain.
Because you're already whole.
The meaning, by the way, of the words health and healing,
and even the word holy , H-O-L-Y.
And by the same token, the word medicine
and the word meditation, they grow out of the same tree.
The same root, Indo-European root.
Medicine and meditation are joined at the hip.
It's not so radical to actually bring them together
in main stream, clinical care.
In fact, it's essential for caring.
So silent, wakefulness.
Attending to what is.
[ Background noise ]
[ Bell ringing ]
>> Somehow the real meditation practice never stops.
Just because some bell as got rung.
Just because we're going to shift gears a little bit.
The real meditation is how you live your life moment to moment.
It's not how good you are sitting without moving.
Or what great yoga poses you do.
Because yoga is itself a meditation.
A beautiful form of meditation we use enormously
and to do good purpose in MBSR,
mindfulness-based stress reduction.
I'd like to just say a few things about stress and medicine
and then we'll open it up to --
and give you a little bit of an expanse of how we work.
But I want you to have at least this taste of it,
and I want to share a couple of poems with you.
And it's not like all
of a sudden we've gotten a little weird,
I'm going a little weird on you.
How many of you when you hear the word poetry or poems,
you go yeah, I don't know.
Not a poem!
It's like I don't understand those things.
That's not uncommon.
But -- but one of my colleagues, John Tisdale, with whom I wrote
that book, The Mindful Way Through Depression,
who is like one of the world's great cognitive scientists,
is coming out with a -- several papers, in which he's arguing
that the root cause of suffering
in human beings is not knowing how to deal with our emotions
because we don't know how to inhabit
and then shift our relationship
to what he calls implicational meaning.
Implicational meaning is what moves, say, in poetry, okay?
It's different from the propositional meaning,
which is just the kind of bear facts.
Okay? So if I -- I'll recite a poem for you.
This is a poem by Antonio Muchato,
who's a great Spanish poet of the turn
of the 19th, 20th century.
And won the Nobel Prize.
It's very short.
But see if you can feel it.
The wind one brilliant day called to my soul
with an odor of jasmine.
The wind one brilliant day called to my soul
with an odor of jasmine.
In exchange for the odor of my jasmine,
I would like the odor of your Roses.
I have no roses.
All the flowers in my garden are dead.
Can you feel that?
I -- how many times have we had
that feeling or a similar feeling.
I have no roses.
There's nothing beautiful about me.
All the flowers in my garden are dead.
Well then, I'll take the withered petals
and the withered leaves, and the waters
in the fountain and the wind left.
And I wept.
And I said to myself, what have you done to the garden
that was entrusted to you.
Can you feel that?
This is a poem about great sadness.
Could easily go into depression.
I actually -- just because he's a noble laureate doesn't mean,
you know, I'd like to actually change the last line.
And I would suggest that for our purposes,
rather than what have you done to the garden that was entrusted
to you, which is a kind of a blaming, wouldn't you say?
I mean, it's like, stick the knife in, oh, all right,
as long as I'm feeling down, why not just go right over the edge?
And a lot of cultures actually perpetrate
that kind of perspective.
But instead, why don't we say what are we doing
with the gardens that are entrusted to us.
Gardens plural, okay?
Because right now we have a lot
of gardens entrusted to us, I would say.
The closest of, you know, to us,
is I would say the garden of the body.
You know, better than an American Express credit card,
you can't leave home without it.
But a lot of the time we're not even in the body.
And a lot of the time our feelings about the body are
so negative like, the less said the better.
Just don't bother me about the body.
I don't even want to know it just exists.
If it doesn't -- is not driving me crazy I feel lucky.
And William -- James Joyce is famous for starting
out a short story in Dubliners with the following sentence.
This is an approximation,
but it's Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.
And if you start to pay attention
in the way I'm suggesting in the present moment you'll discover
that that's your address as well, a lot of the time.
We're in our heads, lost in thought.
Some place else.
Not in the body.
That has biological consequences, by the way.
Everything I've said tonight,
when I started the stress reduction clinic
in 1979 it was like, there was almost no science of the effects
of stress and the biology of stress on the body
and on the mind and on the heart.
Now the data is just like, overwhelming.
Including, as I'll show you in a minute, aging.
That it's turning out that you know, stress is --
they used to say stress is not a real factor for morbidity
or mortality because you know, it's not like, you know,
high fat diet, it's not like cigarette smoking,
it's not like hypertension.
High blood pressure.
But now it turns out, there's incontrovertible evidence
that stress actually reduces --
increases the rate of degradation of the ends of all
of our chromosomes, which are called telomeres.
You're going to hear a lot more about that word.
The woman Liz Blackburn at UCSF
who actually discovered telomerase, which is the enzyme
that builds them back up, won the Nobel Prize in 2008.
Okay? And her lab is studying the effects of mindfulness
of telomeres and telomerase.
And the evidence is moving in the direction
of meditation can actually enhance telomerase,
and not just that, it's more than meditation or mindfulness.
It's your attitude towards what's happening.
It's not like these people aren't
under a huge amount of stress.
But it's never the stress, it's how you choose to be
in relationship to it.
And if you have really exhausted your resources
for handling stress, then of course, yeah, all bets are off.
But if you know how to draw resources to yourself,
then even under very, very high levels of stress you can dance
with the energy, sometimes it's unbelievably painful.
But never the less, you're much bigger even than the pain
or suffering, and liberate yourself from that.
And guess what, the telomeres get longer.
So every aspect of our biology is what's now called plastic.
And that's a new terminology.
It's not like, you know, Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.
This is for the older people.
But it means that the --
our biology is miraculous in another way.
It's constantly reorganizing itself.
It's not just it's all downhill from here.
Yes, there is aging.
Yes, we are all going to die,
unless somebody makes a very important discovery
very quickly.
But you know, the question is not is there life after death
or is there some way to escape death.
But actually, can we live while we have a chance.
Is there life before death.
That's the most interesting question.
And right up to the moment of death.
And a lot of time I think that really, when we talk about fear
of death we're really more afraid
of life than we are of death.
And there are two chapters.
I was going to say, actually, tell you some stories,
but I don't think I will, about my early days at MIT.
One of which was how I got into meditation.
I got into meditation at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology as a graduate student in molecular biology
with a noble laureate, believe it or not.
Go figure.
Not in some monastery in Asia.
Because a Zen master came and gave a talk, actually, at MIT.
And I was one of five people in all of MIT that went to the talk
and took the head off --
took the top off my head at the age of 22.
I was like, oh my God, there's an entirely different way
of knowing.
Why didn't they tell us this in kindergarten.
An entirely different way of knowing, and no less beautiful,
no less profound, no less transformative, than thought.
Just different.
And this should be part of the repertoire, so to speak,
and part of the science and investigation.
The other thing was the story of my thesis defense,
because I wrote, you know, a thesis on some arcane topic
in molecular biology and I had, you know,
all these MIT noble laureate types,
real hot-shot molecular biologists.
And a few from Harvard who came over because you always have
to have someone from another institution.
And my thesis, you know, it was an existential challenge for me.
How many of you are graduate students here,
any of you a graduate student?
It's like, hard.
It's hard to be a graduate student.
Because nobody cares.
And most of the time, you don't either.
But it could be really humiliating, and like --
then of course if you're a scientist,
science is 99% failure.
Which doesn't do that much for your self esteem, so to speak.
So you're looking for that 1%.
And so I finally got my thesis together and I wrote
in the front page, on a page by itself,
they let you have a little dedication, little saying,
something like that, I wrote he
who dies before he dies does not die when he dies.
I don't even know where I got it.
You know, it's like some Greek, very old Greek.
So I put that line in the first, you know,
page by itself before you get into the thesis.
And so I go into the -- the room with all these scientists
who are going to decide whether I get my doctorate or not,
after what's called -- I don't know,
I forget what they even call it, thesis review, or defence.
Right, defense.
It's a war term.
They're going to attack and I'm going to defend.
And if I do it well enough, then -- so I go in there,
and I knew them all because it's a small community and everybody,
you know, sort of likes each other.
And -- but I was of course terrified.
You know, a lot hangs in the balance.
And so somebody says what's this he
who dies before he dies does not die when he dies.
That's the first question on my thesis.
So I worked five years on this research and they want
to know he who dies before he dies.
Of course they were pushing 50.
You know, I was 27 or something like that.
They were in their 50's, and like, thinking ahead?
Obviously piqued some interest.
You die before you die, you don't die when you die.
I want that.
So I said do you really want to know?
And they all said yeah.
I said well, it might take some time.
We've got time.
So actually, I would say half
of my thesis defense was actually unpacking what
mindfulness is about to these guys.
This was in 1971, by the way.
And I wrote it up.
It's a chapter called Dying Before You Die, duh,
because the first dying before you die was the other story
that I told about, you know,
first encountering meditation at MIT.
So that's just to say that I didn't want
to continue a career in molecular biology.
I wanted to bring my training as a scientist together
with my training in meditation, because it seemed like,
well everybody is doing the science.
But nobody's paying attention to thought and this other function
of our brains and nervous system,
that no one's paying attention to, called awareness,
that is painfully obviously bigger than thought,
because whatever thought you have
or whatever emotion you have,
you could embrace it in awareness.
And not have to do anything with it, but it would change
by virtue of simply holding it in awareness
if you were patient enough to do it.
Especially if it didn't feel good.
And so that's what we teach now.
And it's come into the main stream of medicine in ways
that are really astonishing.
The National Institute of Health is funding hundreds of studies
of mindfulness to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars.
And the idea that that would have been the case in 1979 I
like to say more improbable than that the big bang would all
of a sudden stop and implode back on itself.
And yet it's happening.
And so mindfulness is in the main stream of medicine.
And in the last -- I'll just show you some pictures before we
go to questions, okay?
Would that be all right with you?
Are you still awake?
Good. Because you don't ever have to stop.
Even when you go to sleep.
You know, that -- it's being present.
That's all.
Being fully present.
Okay? Is anybody good at this?
No. Okay, so don't make, oh, I'm no good at this.
Nobody's any good at it.
But all you need to do is be a little better
than automatic pilot and your life will rotate.
It will be very, very different.
And any time anger comes up, the default mode comes up,
whether it's anger or anything else,
Tecna Hans [Assumed spelling] likes to say, you know,
the reason we have to practice mindfulness, the reason we have
to cultivate it intentionally is we're busy cultivating the
opposite all day long.
Cultivating anger, cultivating jealousy, cultivating, you know,
sort of low self esteem, cultivating, you know,
all sorts of negativity in the emotional domain
or in the thought domain.
And the people who are doing the telomere research are saying
their research is showing
that the real stress comes from thinking.
So this is a biological and molecular,
biological consequence that accelerates aging,
accelerates a lot of -- heart disease, I mean, it's a --
you know, you can't interview people who die
of sudden cardiac death.
But if you could, you'd find out, like,
probably it was a thought that did it.
The wrong thought at the wrong time.
Dead. I'm not -- I'm actually not joking.
I mean, it's so serious that we need to laugh.
And I want to say that about meditation too.
It may seem like I'm not taking this stuff seriously.
This stuff is so serious that it's too serious
to take too seriously.
And I'm serious.
So this is, if any of you were alive back then,
this is the cover of Time Magazine back in 1983.
Four years after I started the stress reduction clinic.
And it's just like, you know,
I look back on that time and say stress?
What stress?
Compared to now.
I mean, there was no internet.
There was no e-mail.
There was no instant messaging.
I mean, you know, there were no computers except main frames.
I used to say in the early '80's that I could get --
once I had my first PC, you know, which was like, gigantic,
that I could get more work done in a month
than I could get done -- I could get more work done in a day
than I used to be able to get done in a month.
Well that was in the mid '80's.
Now it's like I can get more work done in a day
than I could get done in a year.
That's not so good.
You know, we're always on.
Not so good.
We're not computer servers, we're human beings.
So here is the evidence from Liz Blackburn's lab and Alyssa Epple
who is the mindfulness researcher in her lab,
proceedings in National Academy
of Sciences is showing telomere length as a function of years
of chronicity of care giving, of children, this is parents
with children with severe medical
and -- disabilities, okay?
So it's like an unavoidable stress.
You can't just walk out, I don't do stress,
sorry, good-bye, children.
No, you can't do that.
But look at this, also in that study.
This is a perceived scale -- perceived stress scale.
It's the perception of stress that makes the difference.
If you are just dealing with it because it's the way it is,
then you can be more transparent to the stress.
Your telomeres are longer.
If you take everything personally,
your telomeres degrade.
So if you want one take-home message from this,
this turns out to be harder to enact that it is to say,
don't take things personally when they're not personal.
Then you might ask, when are they not personal?
That's a good question to keep asking yourself.
It may be they're never personal.
It may be the you that you think you are is not the real you.
That you're much bigger.
And now the neuro science is actually showing that.
You want to be your narrative self?
Fine. Then you're using certain regions of the brain.
You want to be your moment by moment, experiential self, in --
grounded in the body,
you're using lateral networks in the brain.
A whole different brain profile.
So you choose.
One is related more to happiness.
The left activation in the prefrontal cortex,
if you could monks in the scanners,
and I'll show you some pictures of that, you know,
they have tremendous activation in the left prefrontal cortex
in particular regions that have to do with approach and have
to do with emotional balance.
And when we train people in MBSR,
they shift from right activation
to left activation in eight weeks.
Their brains actually change structure in eight weeks.
Work out of Sara Lazar's [Assumed spelling] lab,
German post doctoral fellow who's training with us in MBSR
and has been our student, Britta hisle [Assumed spelling]
for years from Germany, young neuro scientist,
has demonstrated that major regions of the brain change
with eight weeks of mindfulness training in MBSR.
Including the hippocampus, including the cerebellum,
including the posterior singular cortex.
All of these are involved in making meaning in --
in self-regulation, in perception,
decoding, memory, and learning.
Not bad for eight weeks of what looks a lot, if you were looking
in from the outside on our patients,
looks a lot like nothing.
They do nothing lying down.
Then they do nothing sitting, then they do nothing walking.
Like this.
Like the night of the living dead.
You know, really slow, meditative walking.
They're doing nothing.
And healthcare is paying for it.
Amazing. How did they pull that off in and it turns
out the brains are changing, not just in terms of activity,
in terms of structure.
Significant thickening in those regions I mentioned,
significant thinning in the amygdala,
which is the emotional reaction -- reactivity center,
the threat center that triggers --
fires off all the time whenever we feel threatened or, you know,
accosted in one way or another.
So God, I've got a whole talk here I'm not going to give.
How many of you see a triangle?
Raise your hand if you see a triangle in this picture.
Okay, keep your hands up there.
Okay, now look around, so you know you're not alone.
If you see a triangle in that picture.
It's interesting, because there's no triangle
in that picture.
The triangle is defined by a three-sided figure.
And what your mind does is it puts in the sides.
If we shifted that little Pac-man the tiniest little bit,
so the mind can actually see things that are not there.
The brain actually does that.
It's so good at that.
If I had time I would show you this movie, which --
how many of you have seen this image?
Yeah, you can't use it any more.
But I'll just play it anyway -- oops.
Doesn't want to do that.
Let me see.
Anyway, it's a movie.
And they're passing around basketballs.
And you ask the group, you ask the room to sort of count
of number of times the people
in the white shirts pass the basketballs.
And I could get it to work, but it would take too long.
So -- and in the middle of it, I'll try one more time,
in the middle of it, because it's, you know, oh.
No. Okay, so you're counting the number of times the people
in the white shirts are passing the basketballs.
One basketball per each, the whites and the blacks.
And in the middle this gorilla comes out
and then goes off to the other side.
But when you ask people, well, to count the number
of times the people in the white shirts pass the basketball,
they don't actually see the gorilla.
If we did it and none of you had seen it, 95% of people
who have counted the number of times --
usually you get a plus on distribution.
So you can't even count correctly.
But then you don't see the gorilla.
Why? Because the mind has told itself,
the brain has told itself the white shirts are
what's important.
Tune out everything that's not white.
Well, the brain it turns out is fantastic is --
I just showed you, it sees things that aren't there,
and it doesn't see things that are there.
Not very reliable.
Now does that apply to you?
I'll leave that for you to decide.
Just ask your spouse or your mother or your father.
Because that is part of the default mode.
We are out of touch, seriously out of touch with a lot
of different elements of this.
And this is just of a quote
from William James that's basically saying
if we could learn how to bring the mind back
when it was wandering, that would be a good thing.
Turns out the Buddhists have been doing
that for thousands of years.
So I'm going to stop, actually, at this point.
And take a few questions.
We have some time for questions.
And then we'll stop for the evening.
obviously, you can see that I've just gotten started.
I hope you've just gotten started.
I'm not joking.
Because this doesn't stop.
It's called your life.
And it's all really more than magnificent.
And if you can get into that implicational meaning
of the poems, the poetry, then there's the potential
to actually live your life as if it really mattered moment
by moment, and it turns out that that's recruiting
and morphing brain pathways that when you're depressed,
you're into a depressive rumination,
it's not about shutting that stuff off,
that kind of toxic thought stream,
but actually learning how to hold it differently.
And then you don't take it personally
and then you actually don't fall into depression.
You don't relapse into depression.
And I'm talking major depressive disorder.
And so -- and that effects your telomeres,
and that effects actually gene expression in the body
up regulating and down regulating.
Hundreds of genes that have to do with cancer and have to do
with inflammatory responses.
So if -- your whole body is really plastic,
and the more you tune the mind
and the body together the more you participate
in your own health and well being.
I like to call the medicine of the future or the medicine
of the present, actually, participatory medicine.
That's what -- because there's not enough money
to fund medicine if we just use the auto mechanic's model.
So we need to all participate.
And isn't it interesting, that in order
to participate the greatest evidence is suggesting we need
to go back to ancient, ancient practices from very,
very old traditions that are mostly not
from this side of the planet.
But that turns out have deep, deep connections
with our culture and with our nervous system
and with your love.
So I'll leave it at that.
I want to thank you for your attention, and I'm open
to having a few questions.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you for your attention.
And --
>> And if you need to go we understand.
>> Yeah, obviously.
It's 6 o'clock.
>> There is a book signing outside the auditorium
after the question and answer period.
Just so people know.
>> And so why don't we -- okay, you've got --
why don't you line up with that microphone behind the guy
who has it, and we've got another one over here.
So go ahead.
Oh, you're not actually asking a question,
you're just offering -- well, give it to her.
>> Thank you so much.
I really appreciate that talk.
It was fascinating.
One question I had was actually from your biography
that was provided, which was just talking about you
and your wife's interest in supporting initiatives
that further mindfulness in K through 12 education.
And I wondered if you could just provide some examples
of what exactly that can look
like in public education and beyond?
>> Okay, thank you for that question.
I alluded to it, but obviously, you know,
the subject of mindfulness is so vast and to do it in a way
that isn't just throwing facts
at you would take actually multiple occasions.
Or you can remember what we touch on today and then find
out more for yourself, which is really the best part.
But in the book that my wife and I, Myla, wrote together
on mindful parenting, which is a while other story,
there's a chapter in there about fourth and fifth grade teacher
from the Utah public school who herself experienced mindfulness
in MBSR for medical reasons, health reasons,
and then brought it into her classroom against all
of my advice, in Mormon Utah
and it transformed the entire school.
So you could start there.
You can also Google mindfulness in education.
You'll find out there are groups of teachers in lots
of different places that are doing this.
And if you want to take a trip up 89 to South Burlington,
Vermont, I was just there a couple of weeks ago,
and they are doing amazing things in that school system.
The superintendent and one of the principals actually came
to a day-long mindfulness retreat that I did
for the teachers and there are hundreds
of teachers bringing mindfulness
into their curriculum at every age.
So there's a lot to be said about it.
I think it's one of the best things
to happen in modern education.
And it's really inspiring the teachers because nowadays it's
so challenging, and there's so much stress in that profession.
And so many of the kids come and they're not ready to learn.
So they need to learn how to learn,
tuning the instrument before you play it, so to speak.
And this is a way to actually allow that to happen
and in a way that -- I've been in classrooms like this
in Oakland, and in Manhattan, in New York City,
public schools, unbelievable.
I mean, and one teacher in South Burlington called it a
pin-drop moment.
You could hear a pin drop in these classes where a lot
of the kids are like, ordinarily all over the place.
But they have actually learned how to drop in.
It's value for attention deficit disorder,
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and it's also valuable
for the teacher's sanity.
Thank you.
So --
>> Hello. I was just wondering what your general advice would
be, when we're trying to, you know, live it moment by moment,
but we're faced with moments where we have to make decisions.
And I know we have to make dozens of decisions every day.
And sometimes they are big decisions regarding,
like our futures or personal relationships,
and my friends are always telling me,
like, don't overthink it.
>> Don't overthink it?
>> Yeah. But I know it's really difficult.
So --
>> Well, it's a great question.
Now you want an answer?
>> Yeah.
[ Laughter ]
>> I realize that's the reason why I decided to come today.
>> Oh. Wonderful.
Wonderful.
[ Laughter ]
>> You're probably going to overthink it.
But you can hold that in awareness, the overthinking.
And the awareness will actually take care of you.
A lot of times -- let's say it's relationships,
you mentioned relationships, is that right?
And it's very complicated.
And you know, mindfulness is all about relationships.
We start with the body.
What's my relationship with my body?
It's pretty weird even to say I have a relationship
with my body.
Who's talking?
You're not your body.
But you have a body.
Oh yeah? So something even there,
that we don't know a lot more than we let on.
Okay, then you have a relationship
with your mind and your heart.
In all Asian languages, as you may know, the word for mind
and the word for heart is the same word.
So when you hear the word mindfulness,
if you're not hearing heartfullness,
you're not hearing -- you're not really understanding.
It's got this tenor of spaciousness of heart, okay?
So inside of that, a certain kind of trust.
And trust in what?
How about your own beauty?
Okay, so when you start to know yourself in that kind
of non conceptual way, not with thinking,
but through embodied awareness of sensation and of, you know,
hearing and smelling and tasting, and stuff like --
and of your thoughts, that are overthinking who to be
in a relationship with,
or who to break off a relationship with,
or whatever it is, and you're not judging that whole thing --
your deeper intuition and wisdom is trustworthy.
And when you get into trouble, that's trustworthy too.
Oh, I see, I made this kind of decision, I overthought it
to this degree, and I wound up, whamo,
in some place I didn't want to be.
That's important information.
That's useful data.
Then you learn from that, an the next time if you're really,
really, really, really mindful,
you won't repeat the same pattern.
But mostly what we do is repeat the same old pattern,
over and over and over again.
Because we're attracted to just those people
who are not so healthy for us.
If you've read The Power of Now, Ecarte Tole [Phonetic],
which I recommend you read these kinds of things,
he talks about a kind of construct called a pain body.
So a lot of, like, falling in love is like if you start
to look at it, is by pain body, what's all knotted up
and painful and hurt in me recognizes what's all knotted up
and painful and hurt in you, and those pain bodies fall in love.
Meanwhile -- not a good idea.
Because it's what you call a dysfunctional relationship
from the start.
You know, but the awareness can see that, and it can save you.
I have a friend at MIT,
one of the graduate students with me in my lab.
And he said -- he decided to get married at one point,
and I did -- the only time I've ever done this,
I gave somebody advice about who they wanted to marry.
And I said don't do it.
I was young.
And arrogant.
So I said don't do it.
He did it anyway, of course.
He got married.
Thee years later they got divorced,
and he said to me later, he said you know,
how come it took you three seconds
to see what it took me three years to see.
And I said well, it's because, you know, I wasn't in it.
To see it when you're in it,
that requires a whole different rotation in consciousness.
But it is trustworthy.
So there is no answer to your question, it's life unfolding.
And whether it's your relationship to another person
or with choosing courses or a career path or anything
like that, trust your love.
And as what's his name, Joseph Campbell said, and you know,
this is a really good piece of advice, follow your bliss.
Follow your bliss.
And it will teach you everything you need to know,
including how sometimes following your bliss needs
to be modulated a little bit.
I hope that helps, because I don't have anything else to say.
>> Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> People are saying that life is more complicated
and more stressful now, and I would believe it,
I don't have anything to measure it against.
And also the same with war.
That people go to war and come back having experienced things
that they might not have lived through in other wars.
And there are scientists working on PTSD and trying
to help people heal from those things they might not have
lived through.
And so sometimes I think about how we're --
like, if the world is becoming for stressful or complicated
and our answer is change yourself,
change your relationship with that stress, it seems --
I'm not sure, it seems -- I don't know how to say it --
>> I got it.
Thanks. That's the other half of my talk.
>> All right.
>> So thank you for bringing that up.
So let me just very quickly say this isn't
about changing yourself.
It's about recognizing --
it's exactly the opposite of changing yourself.
It's recognizing the beauty in yourself already.
No change necessary.
Now imagine if the congress actually were mindful.
Okay? Actually, there is a congress man
in the congress now, Tim Ryan from the 17 eighteenth district
in Ohio who is doing everything he can to bring mindfulness
into the main stream in the political and economic circles.
You'll see his name around from time to time.
Fifth term congress man.
But the much longer thing, and I wrote 100 pages
of mindful politics and coming to our senses.
This is not about forgetting
about social change or transformation.
But in order to really have profound social change that's
in alignment with humanity and with kindness,
we have to look at our own minds.
Because even the social change agents are driven by greed,
hatred, and delusion, just like all the rest of us.
Okay, so until we learn how to sort
of at least recognize the toxic or the sort of inquisitive,
violent aspects in ourself, then we can do all we want
to transform the institutions and even the laws.
But human beings, being what they are, what we need
to do is transform the species.
Or I wouldn't say transform the species,
I would say have the species come into its own.
Because we call ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens.
In Latin, saperi [Phonetic] is the verb to taste or to know.
Okay, K-N-O-W.
So Homo sapien sapien is the species that knows.
And knows that it knows.
So in other words, awareness, yes, and meta awareness,
awareness of awareness.
Now if we really -- that would be wisdom.
If we actually were wise,
then we would see what war does to societies.
We would understand that we --
you know, with the kind of preciosity and weapons
and fire power and everything, we need to find other ways
of resolving human conflict.
But where's that going to come from?
It's going to come out of the same human heart,
the same human mind, and corporations,
which after all mean bodies, okay,
the corpus or the body politic.
And that's made up of human beings.
So we do need to sort of tune the instrument on lots
of different levels, including the law and jurisprudence
to actually privilege awareness over a kind of dualistic,
adversarial condition where it's really winners and losers.
And a huge amount of harm and social injustice gets done
and then we learn to sort of tolerate it, thinking well,
a hundred years from now it will be better.
So this is not going to happen over night.
I have a very long time horizon.
Like -- I like to say, one Zen master put it this way,
never forget the thousand-year view.
I actually have pretty much a thousand year view.
If it happens in 100, so much the better.
Even where we would site nuclear power plants,
if we were building nuclear power plants in, say,
northern Japan, for instance.
Where would you site them, knowing the geology
of the Pacific Rim and northern Japan.
Oh, maybe not too close to the water.
I don't know.
You need an awful lot of mindfulness to actually,
you know, come up with something like that.
So it has infinite number of implications.
And I apologize for actually not having spent more time
on this talk going there.
It is all in coming to our senses,
and there's an awful lot happening
in the world nowadays around that.
So we'll take one more and then we will stop.
Two more. If two people are standing up, I'll take --
are you standing up for a question?
You're just the microphone holder?
Do you want to sing or something,
or just like -- this is your moment.
I mean, American Idol.
>> I can make --
>> This will be -- you want to sing?
>> I'm hoping -- I'm a resident at the hospital here,
and I know you're getting involved with trying
to bring this into, you know, more main stream medicine.
And I'm hoping it's not going to be like, a hundred --
>> Oh no, it's already -- it's already in main stream medicine,
just -- just not here.
>> Right -- so I -- I mean, it's definitely not encouraged for us
to take care of ourselves, and the amount of stresses
and appointments and phone calls and now EDH,
our new computer system --
>> I heard about that.
>> -- and 30 minute -- you know, I'm in psychiatry,
and 30 minutes to like, adjust meds, and also the person wants
to talk to me and all of that.
And it's completely stressed me out.
But I can only imagine -- and I'm pretty great [Inaudible]
and good, you know, great faculty.
But if I were to say you know what, I'm going to go
to Shimbala to meditate, because I do meditation in Shimbala --
>> You mean the Shimbala meditation center in Colorado?
>> Well, there's one in -- White River Junction there's one.
>> Okay.
>> But I've, you know, taken courses
and like, level 1 and level 2.
And -- but if I were to say that, you know what,
I'm going to go for lunch, and we're not really doing anything,
I'm going to go meditate for an hour, and then I'm going to be
so much more there for my patients.
It probably -- even with these kind, you know,
good mentors, it's not going fly.
And I advise my patients on these things.
But still the medical professionals are --
>> You see --
>> -- these superhuman people that I'm not.
>> In a talk like this I can only in some sense point
to how deeply the penetration has gone.
However, what you're saying is not deep enough,
by any stretch of the imagination.
And it takes a long, long time to shift a culture
that has its own self interest.
A long time.
So one --
>> Just like I'm sure it takes a long time for people
to get to your clinic.
I know the chronic pain patients we're seeing,
we're not advising, like, any of the recommend --
you know, what you guys --
>> But you could set up an M B S R --
maybe there is, is there an MBSR --
>> Not even close.
>> Well, that's not that radical to do.
Are you in psychiatry?
>> Yes.
>> Yeah, well, it's not that radical to do.
Maybe medicine should do it, if psychiatry has an aversion
to the mind-body connection.
[ Laughter ]
>> I even know gastroenterologists
who are working with veterans who have PTSD
and pulmonologists, I mean, this goes -- transcends specialty.
>> There are some, and you would hope psychiatry would the most
open to it.
>> Well, I don't know if I would hope.
But you would hope.
If you hope it, then make it happen.
You see, the psychiatry of the future, where does it lie?
>> Not in medication.
>> Well, where does it lie?
I'm being serious with you now.
>> Well, I think in the neuro sciences, and --
>> No, no, I'm looking for something much simpler.
It lies with you.
>> Oh.
>> It lies with that impulse to have come to this talk.
It lies with that impulse to go to the Shambala center
and clear your mind and then be more present.
If you want the medicine of the future to be different
or the psychiatry of the future to be different,
don't look around for someone else to do it.
You do it.
When will you be good enough?
Never. Because part of your mind will tell you,
you don't have enough power, you don't have enough influence,
you don't have enough this.
You've got plenty.
As a medical resident,
as a psychiatry resident, you've got plenty.
And if people don't want to do it, that's too bad.
But you can take the initiative.
And I'm not joking.
I mean, we're really talking about a rotation
in consciousness here.
And the institutions change when people are willing
to actually own how you take it,
and you've had enough medical training to be able
to make coherent arguments that a lot
of the way the healthcare system is set up, I'm guessing,
just from what you've said, is toxic to the people
that you're most trying to help.
What kind of a set up is that?
Even if you have a better medical records system.
[ Laughter ]
>> Okay, this will be the last one, then.
>> There's somebody really ahead of me.
I just wanted to let people know we do have upper valley
[Inaudible] associates, we're psycho therapists,
and we're in our sixth year
of offering mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.
>> Another thing I didn't get to really talk about too much,
mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.
But yeah, I mean, there are -- I'm sure there are resources
in this area, lots of them, like the Shambala center.
Are there any MBSR teachers here, in the community?
There you go.
Say --
[ Inaudible audience comment ]
>> No, wait a minute, someone just said no, there's another
at Dartmouth, Hitchcock.
But MBSR is at Dartmouth Hitchcock?
[ Inaudible audience comment ]
>> Well, you see, the doctor doesn't --
you know, so between the two of you, you have an insurrection.
How many else -- how many other people are here with that,
how many are -- oh, so now you have a revolution.
I mean, you know, listen, that's how institutions change.
And you can do it with tremendous intelligence,
with tremendous propriety, with tremendous intentionality.
And kindness.
So that it's not like you're going to go and just sort
of be obnoxious and tell everybody what they're
doing wrong.
But to actually offer a new option that I'm not joking,
folks, people are dying for.
People are dying for it.
Metaphorically and literally.
And if -- there's never been more scientific evidence
in favor of moving in this direction.
So in some sense what I'm saying is the responsibility
for the future of not only medicine
but our society is a distributive responsibility.
And as I like to say, the world needs all its flowers
and you're one, whether your mind says,
and it's like depressive rumination,
he means everybody else in the room but not me.
No, I mean you.
And see if you don't recognize the flower that you are,
and the genus that you are, and the beauty that you are,
and take it and -- someplace
where it can illuminate some tiny little corner
that may be insignificant, but isn't, you think it is
but it isn't, and just apply what you care most deeply
about there.
That's how health -- that's how the care gets back
into healthcare.
We're not talking about health insurance reform, we're talking
about healthcare reform.
And we haven't seen the beginning of healthcare reform.
And when we do, it will be a participatory medicine.
It will be recruiting the interior dimensionality
and resources that every single human being by virtue
of being born a human being has to one degree or another.
And that degree is huge.
And we need to learn how to recruit it,
because anything else will just be technology
and it will be all doing-based and none of it being-based.
And we're not called human doings,
we're called human beings.
So at that, I'm going to stop it because again, the -- it's late.
But thank you very much for your attention.
[ Applause ]