Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Thank you.
It's quite an honor to be here,
and it's great to hear Dan speak
and to be able to talk about this interface of the mind and mindfulness
and how it all works.
So I was - about 20-something years ago,
I was traveling around Southeast Asia,
and I heard that you could go to a monastery there
and you could practice meditation.
And I just thought, "Why not?"
So I ended up in a monastery,
living in - it's in the jungle, in Thailand -
sitting on the concrete floor, and your bed was a kind of concrete slab,
and I had my first lesson in mindfulness,
which was "When you walk into your room,
you've got to check in your shoe
and make sure there are no scorpions there."
So you have to be very, very mindful to start.
And what we did was we practiced, for hours at a time,
sitting and walking mindfully,
and as we did it, my mind was crazy,
my mind was wild.
I had all my neuroses and all my anxiety, obsessions, worries, fear.
And then after a while of trying to practice being present,
and practicing and practicing,
something shifted,
and I began to kind of calm down
and get present
and feel connected and at ease.
And there was a shift that began to happen in my whole body and mind,
and over time, I got hooked.
I got really into this meditation practice
and I began to practice it for years and years,
doing long meditation retreats,
spending time in silent meditation,
and I saw that as I did this, something changed inside me,
that I went from being, you know, having a normal, let's say, neurotic mind
to someone that had a little bit more self-awareness,
a little bit more compassion,
a little bit more kindness for myself
and that I could find a place of peace and ease
no matter what was happening in life.
That was like a huge, a huge change for me,
that no matter what the ups and downs were with life,
there was a place of peace that I could find.
So that was over a number of years,
and I came back to the States,
and I've been practicing, of course, in the States
and then began teaching this stuff.
And back then, there weren't that many people practicing mindfulness.
Or it was kind of hidden.
I remember once saying to one of my friends,
"I have something really important to tell you.
I think I'm a meditator."
(Laughter)
She said, "Oh my God. What does that mean?"
Because at that time, people weren't doing it,
and so I've watched this whole transition
over 20, 25 years
of seeing mindfulness come out into the culture.
And we're seeing mindfulness brought into schools and into corporations
and into the medical world
and into law and into all different fields
because mindfulness, this practice, this very simple practice
that I was learning in a Buddhist context in the monastery in Thailand
was something that anybody can do
regardless of your background,
regardless of where you come from and what your religion is.
This practice of paying attention:
it's so simple and not easy to do,
but very, very simple.
And so it's been exciting to watch this practice go out into the world
and that it becomes kind of a buzz word:
"Oh, people are really interested in mindfulness these days."
So there's been a lot of research.
That's one of the things people have done now.
They've researched mindfulness,
and over the last decade or so,
there's gone from maybe 100 studies to over 1,000 studies about mindfulness.
And what we've seen is that it impacts physical health,
it impacts mental health,
it impacts attention.
So an interesting study that was done back a while ago
was they looked at people who had psoriasis.
When you have psoriasis,
one of the treatments for that - the itchy-skin condition -
is that you get put into kind of like a tanning booth
and get UVB light rays.
So they had one group of people
doing that with just the typical treatment,
and one group with listening to a meditation CD at the same time.
And as they did that, those people - when they looked at the results later on -
and they were practicing along with the CD,
they healed three times faster than the people who did it without.
So it's interesting:
it can boost the immune system,
it can impact stress-related conditions.
And mindfulness, it's just quite helpful with physical issues related to stress.
It also impacts emotional well-being,
and so an interesting study that was done just recently
was a study done with cell phones.
And what they did was they beeped people.
They had 2,500 people all across the world,
and they beeped them in the middle of the day.
They said, "What are you doing right now?"
They asked three questions:
What are you doing right now?
Is your mind on it?
And how do you feel?
And what they found
was if there mind was on what they were doing,
they reported more happiness than if their mind was wandering.
Even if they were doing something that they didn't like
and even if they were thinking about things
that they thought would give them pleasure,
their minds were still unhappier
than if they were paying attention to the present moment.
And so we can see
that staying in the present moment creates more happiness,
and so it's been used, it's been helpful for people with anxiety, with depression,
with a whole host of mental health issues
or the mental health issue
of being a human being in the 21st century,
which, of course, we're all a little - right?
It's hard, it's hard. Life is busy.
Anybody here stressed out, by the way?
Just curious. Yeah.
So last thing I'll talk about, just with the research -
and this is connected
to some of the brain research that's being done.
They did a study looking at people who were the long-term meditators,
people that you would kind of consider the Olympic athletes of meditation,
those who've been sitting in caves for 20 or 30 years meditating.
And they looked at their brains,
and they compared their brains to people of the same age range,
and they found
that the meditators' brains did not thin out.
Okay, so I don't know if you know this, but maybe you do:
as you get older, your brain thins out.
Did you know that?
So if you want something else to worry about,
you can worry about what's called age-related cortical decline.
So the meditators, the long-term meditators,
their brains did not thin out in a couple of places:
one is this prefrontal cortex that Dr. Siegel was talking about
and also the insula cortex.
And now, recently, a study at UCLA
has looked at the amount of cortical layers
and connected that to the length of time of people meditating.
So you're thinking, "Great. Maybe I've never done meditation."
But they've also looked at the brain structure
of people who've meditated for just eight weeks,
and after eight weeks of meditation practice,
27 minutes a day,
they saw brain changes,
minute structural brain changes in the areas connected to the same thing -
for executive functioning, the prefrontal cortex,
the areas related to decision-making and flexible thinking,
and it's synthesizing information in the body and brain
and also connected to self-awareness and compassion.
That was one of the findings.
So I've been going on about mindfulness, but what really is mindfulness?
The definition that I like to use
is that mindfulness is paying attention to present-moment experiences
with openness, curiosity and a willingness to be with what is.
Okay, so paying attention to our present-moment experience -
much of the time
we're not paying attention to our present-moment experience.
If you were to look at your mind or kind of examine it,
bring that mindsight into your mind in the midst of a day,
what would you notice?
Your mind is probably in the past or probably in the future.
So if it's in the past, what's it doing?
It's thinking about something that happened,
replaying it,
kind of obsessing about it,
worrying about it, remembering it,
thinking, oh, I could have done it differently.
Or it's in the future, thinking about what's coming up,
planning,
again, obsessing about the future, worrying about that.
So our minds are kind of careening back and forth between these two places,
and what happens is this is where stress lies.
Stress impacts our body, impacts our mind,
but it's the mind that takes us out of the present
that gets us more stressed out.
So with mindfulness, we can bring this attention into the present moment
and find a place of peace and ease.
It's also about the way
in which we go through life on automatic pilot.
So if we can instead bring a curious, interested attention,
we stop that automatic pilot.
You know that sense of getting in the car, getting out of the car,
and you have no idea what happened in-between?
Ever have that experience?
Of course. All the time, right?
Because we're living our life kind of like these automatic-pilot robots or something.
We're just going through the motions.
But with mindfulness,
when we bring curiosity and interest and a sense of presence to the experience,
it's like the world takes on a whole new kind of vitality.
I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and she's very mindful.
Most kids are very mindful.
I think you may know this
if you have a small child or you spend time with children,
which a lot of you here do.
So this can be a pain in the neck
because you're trying to get down the street
and she just sort of plants herself
and looks at a bug for hours and hours and hours, right?
or minutes - as long as I let her.
But she's so present; she's fully there.
She's embodied.
She's connected.
Now, I won't say that she has wisdom.
She doesn't.
She doesn't have experience in life,
but there's something about who she is that's really present.
And so the news I have for all of you is we were all like that too, right?
At some point or another, we were really present and connected.
But then we got educated or we grew up.
We had our traumas, we had our life,
we had all of life experience, and then we lost it some.
And sometimes we talk about mindfulness
in the sense of our minds are like the sky,
our minds are vast and open,
and our thoughts and all of the difficulties,
they're just like clouds coming by across the sky of our minds.
And so we can learn to become more identified with the sky
and not the clouds that obscure that,
that we can connect with our true nature.
Because this is what mindfulness is really teaching us,
this is what mindfulness is showing us,
that we can come back into the present moment
and be at home and connected,
and this is our birthright.
So let's do it, okay? Let's practice mindfulness.
I want to invite you just to kind of settle back in your chair.
You can close your eyes or not close your eyes, as you wish.
It's really up to you.
And just be in a comfortable position.
Because I can talk about mindfulness all day,
but the truth is until you experience it, it's just an idea, a concept.
So just begin by checking into your body,
bringing your attention into your body
and feeling your body present on the chair.
And let your posture be upright,
but not too tight or rigid.
Let your hands be wherever they're comfortable.
Feet on the floor.
As I said, eyes closed or open,
but looking down if you wish to keep them open.
And take a few breaths, just take a breath.
And as you inhale, bringing in fresh oxygen.
As you exhale, letting go of anything that's troubling you right now,
if you can.
And notice your feet on the floor
and the way that your feet feel against the floor.
And you can notice your legs and your back against the chair.
Notice if your stomach is tight or tense, and you can allow it to soften.
And you can soften your hands and your shoulders.
And soften your jaw and face.
And then begin to notice that your body is breathing;
that without you having to do anything, your body is breathing.
And see if you can feel your breath in your body,
the rising and falling of your abdomen.
Let the breath be natural;
don't try to control it one way or the other.
Just let it be.
Rising and falling of the abdomen
or the in-and-out sensations at your nostrils.
Now, as you do this,
see if you can notice one breath and then the next breath.
And then your mind wanders off,
you start thinking about something else,
and this is completely normal,
and then just come back to the present moment,
come back to the breath.
So with a breath.
Lost in thought.
You notice you're lost, and you come back to the breath.
Lost in thought, come back to the breath.
So try it just for a few more seconds,
on your own.
And then you can bring your attention to your body.
Notice your body seated.
Notice how you're feeling, letting whatever is here, be here.
It's all okay from the perspective of mindfulness.
And then you can open your eyes when you're ready.
So we did a short taste of mindfulness.
I'm wondering
if this may be the only TED Talk where someone stops talking.
It is possible.
(Laughter)
So, what I'm imagining that you experienced
is that there was probably a lot of racing mind.
Did your mind race a bit?
Did it start thinking about all sorts of things?
Anyone find it difficult to pay attention to your breathing?
Raise your hand.
Of course you found it difficult; this is what our minds do.
They're trained - our minds are trained
and have been trained since we were a child
to be running all over the place.
And with all of the media these days and all of the -
there's so much stress and pressure on our minds.
So learning to be present, to come into the present moment,
is a difficult thing to do.
We get sleepy, we get restless, we get frustrated,
but the fact is, we just keep coming back.
This is the tool: we keep coming back.
So we learn it on the level of meditation,
we learn it as a meditation practice,
this practice of coming back.
And then suddenly we find that we can start coming back in the midst of life.
Then instead of having a mind that's all over the place,
we find that our mind can be present,
that when we're talking with our child that we're actually showing up
instead of thinking about everything else we have to do.
A student of mine, the other day,
said that [she was] jumping on the trampoline with her child,
and it was the first time she ever jumped on the trampoline with her child.
Oh, she jumped on it, you know, many, many times before,
but never with her mind present, never right there.
And so we learn this practice of coming back,
and in this way, we cultivate more and more ease,
more and more well-being,
this sense of being part of this vast sky
and the clouds of our mind just kind of floating by,
and we find peace.
And so this has tremendous potential for transforming ourselves,
for transforming whoever we connect with,
our relationships, our communities, our professional world
and the larger world itself.
And so I offer you this taste
and let you know it actually takes a lot of work.
It's not just a little thing that you do for a few minutes.
It takes a lot of work, but it's absolutely worth it.
So, thank you.
(Applause)