MENG: Hi.
Good morning, my friends.
For those who don't know me, my name is Meng.
And for those who know me, my name is still Meng.
Surprise.
I'm Google's Jolly Good Fellow.
And one of the people I blame for my jolliness is Dr. Jon
Kabat-Zinn.
When I was young, I read his first book, this book.
And this book deepened my interest and my understanding
of meditation.
And it is from this meditation that I found inner peace and
happiness, and I've been jolly ever since.
So it's Jon's fault.
I blame you.
And Jon has been a hero to me ever since.
Now Jon has accomplished many great things in his life.
He has a very long bio, and I'm not sure I want to go
through his whole bio.
So I'll just mention one thing.
If history remembers Jon for only one thing, that will be
for being the first person to successfully bring meditation
into mainstream medicine.
And I believe his impact on humanity can
only grow over time.
And we're honored to have Jon give a meditation class today.
My friends, I give you Jon Kabat-Zinn.
[APPLAUSE]
JON KABAT-ZINN: So what a nice turnout for this time of day,
when there are all sorts of other gala events happening, I
guess, on campus.
I guess the meditators, or those interested in
meditation, know that sometimes more hoopla is not
necessarily where it's at.
Nice to see somebody with a US rowing shirt.
One of the adventures that I was in some time ago had to do
with training the US Olympic rowing team in mindfulness,
back in 1984 at Lake Casitas.
And it was really quite an interesting experience, in
part because rowers compete sitting down.
So learning how to sit is not in some
sense relevant to them.
They also compete going backwards, which is very
interesting.
And if you're not in a single, then you're competing with
other minds and other bodies in the same boat.
And to get that into some kind of harmony and synchrony is
non-trivial, and doesn't just have to do with the body.
When the mind and body become one, then the boat and the
water and the wind and all the minds become one, and
something very interesting happens.
So I'm really touched that you've come out in the middle
of the workday to partake of a--
what do you want to call this, a class or a workshop on what
could most easily be described as much ado
about almost nothing.
It's not quite nothing, but it's not so much about doing
as about being, or as the Taoists would
call it, it's non-doing.
And there is a way in which that seems awfully
anti-American, since we're such go-getters, and it's all
about doing, and getting it done, and crossing off
everything on your to do list.
But if we get out of touch with who's doing the doing,
actually that can be quite tragic.
And not just from the point of being so stressed out because
you're always running on a treadmill and--
have you noticed there's no end to work at Google?
There's no end to the workday.
I mean you guys define it, because the campus is
structured so that you'll never have to go home.
You can have a real life, if you want to separate life into
that kind of a way.
But it's actually, even before there was Google, the digital
revolution is actually delocalizing everything, so
that there's no workplace anymore, really, because you
can work anywhere.
There's no work week anymore, because, I
mean, there's no workday.
So all the boundaries are being confused.
But we're still really saddled with a Stone Age mind in a
Digital Age world.
And that Stone Age mind, unless it has a certain kind--
unless it engages in a certain kind of self-education, can
really wind up getting stuck in some realms of serious
confusion, suffering, being lost, and in fact maybe even--
and I just want to throw this out as a possibility--
impeding creativity, imagination, real
thoughtfulness, real breakthrough-type leadership
sensibilities, because we're not running on all cylinders.
Or, to use even I think a better metaphor, and one that
I like a lot, is that we're living in a
multi-dimensional universe.
And if you listen to the cosmologists, and the string
physicists, and the vacuum energy physicists, and so
forth, we're living in a universe that's not even
4-dimensional, it's more like 11, or 26, or whatever it is.
And we still haven't really grokked Einstein's
contribution of spacetime as four dimensions.
So if we are not in touch with the multiple dimensions of our
own being-- and there are many hidden dimensions to being
embodied in the human lifetime for an unbelievably short
period of time--
then, in fact, we're kind of in some way trying to get
somewhere and get all this doing done
without tuning the apparatus.
It would be like the Philadelphia philharmonic or
some great orchestra, let's say San Francisco Symphony
orchestra, playing Beethoven without tuning
first. And no matter--
they could have the greatest musicians with the greatest
instruments in the world, and they still tune first, to
themselves and to each other.
And so in a sense, I like to say meditation, in some sense
you could say it's like tuning your instrument before you
take it out on the road.
and tuning it in the morning can make a big difference in
how the whole day goes, just on a kind of mundane level,
never mind all the hidden dimensions of possibility,
imagination.
And yet it does seem really, in some sense, outside of the
common norms of our culture.
And so, whether it's in the Bay Area or sort of less
charged places like that, it's very easy to kind of accrete a
kind of feeling on the part of other people that there's
something weird about stillness, or about silence,
or about self-reflection, about non-doing.
And I want to say there's nothing weird or anti-American
about this at all, or un-American about this at all.
It's in some sense a recognition of sanity, and
that doing and being have always been intimately
interrelated, and without some kind of deep reflection, well,
where do you think scientific breakthroughs or engineering
breakthroughs come from?
They all come out of the human mind.
And very often they come serendipitously, in the middle
of the night or in dreams or whatever.
And there have been Nobel Prizes that have come just
from like a dream, like a snake eating its tail, and
voila, you've got the benzene ring and all
the molecular orbitals.
And there are lots of instances like that, that in
science, it's not what you know.
It's what you're willing to know you don't know, and then
to linger at that sometimes very uncomfortable place of
having banged your head, and banged your head, and banged
your head, and gone through a lot of different kinds of
solutions, none of which actually lead to
any kind of a solution.
And all of a sudden you just like, OK.
And you don't try to force anything anymore.
And you just open.
And you go, in some sense, beyond thinking.
You go beyond thinking.
It's not like you're discounting thought, but in
some sense you're giving yourself over to something
that's just much bigger that we never get educated around.
It never hardly is ever mentioned.
Sometimes it might be called intuition.
Sometimes it might be called creativity.
I call it awareness.
When was the last time you had a course in awareness, or it
was even mentioned as important in school, aside
from, say, people yelling at you if you were looking out
the window and the teacher caught you doing it and said,
pay attention, as if paying attention was some kind of
military discipline, and a bad thing.
So from the point of view the meditative traditions, the
entire society is suffering from attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder, certifiable diagnosis.
From the point of view of the meditative traditions, because
it's all about doing and there's no
recognition of being.
So in a sense, there's no place to rest.
And what this work is really all about is saying, there is
plenty of place to rest, and there's plenty of time.
It's not like, oh, you've got to squeeze this into your busy
day, because awareness is boundless and infinitely
available in every moment, no matter what you're doing.
So if the doing is coming, in some sense, out of being, out
of awareness, then it's not like, well, I have to find an
hour to meditate, and if I can find an hour then
to hell with it.
Because that's a kind of idealization, that's what in
some traditions they call a gaining idea, that now I'm
going to meditate to get better at something.
I'm going to meditate so that I can be more like a samurai
mind, cuts through all, discerns all problems clearly,
cuts through the Gordian Knot of it and goes right to the
solution, breakthrough after breakthrough.
And of course, that's an idealization.
Non-doing really means non-doing.
And radically speaking, it means giving up wanting
anything else to happen in even the next moment, never
mind at the end of the day or at the end of a year, in terms
of the bottom line, and being willing to just stand in how
things are in this moment.
Now, I would like this to be interactive and
conversational.
I can talk for hours about this stuff--
I mean, really, I'm embarrassed to say it--
because it's so much--
well, I would say that for me, meditation is an act of love,
and, as I was implying, an act of sanity, just to stop for a
fraction of a second and drop.
Sometimes I even bring a tennis ball in,
like drop into being.
You think, well, if I do that, maybe I'll lose my mind.
I don't want to go into my mind.
Many people I knew and grew up with were Nobel laureates.
And I asked one, George Wald, actually, at Harvard, who won
the Nobel Prize for color vision, and we--
he was my yoga student, and meditations
through many years.
But before that he said, I don't want to get into
meditation.
I spent my whole life fine-tuning my thinking mind
so that it works.
What if I go into meditation, I lose my mind?
I say, yes, what if you go into meditation
and find your mind?
Imagine.
You're a big boy, George.
You've already won the Nobel Prize.
Why are you so worried about losing your mind?
We're talking about befriending your mind.
We're talking about, in a sense, making friends with
this aspect of being that is as worthy of paying attention
to as the cones and rods in the eye.
So he got into it.
And in his old age, he'd sit on the beach and
bang a drum and chant.
And he was really into it.
It didn't make him any stupider.
So what I think might be best today is if we actually,
rather than me just talking endlessly about this from one
angle or another and really have it be kind of
advertisement, that we actually practice a little
bit, like a laboratory, and we drop in on our own minds, in
this moment.
Whatever reason you came, I mean, everybody's busy, right?
So if you walked into this room there's something really
interesting about that.
I don't know what it is.
And my guess is, on some deep level, you don't
know what it is.
OK?
But it's interesting.
You made some kind of a choice.
And each one of us will have made that choice
for different reasons.
Even my choice for why did I come here today.
I've got other things to do too.
So there's something very interesting going on, a little
bit indeterminate, and I see it as an adventure.
To sort of just loop back to what I was saying, it's an
adventure in finding out who you actually are, and then
embodying that in ways that could actually add dimensions,
and therefore value, to your life, in ways that are really
not conceivable.
You can't think your way to what the outcome of this will
be and then try to get there, because the irony is, you're
already here.
You're here in this room.
You came.
But you're always here.
There is no there.
Yes, we can formulate goals.
That's one of the most amazing things about thought and
imagination, is we can project out into the future.
And we can develop models for how we're going to go from
here to there.
But if we don't know here, then the there is going to be
colored by what we, in some sense, are unfamiliar with,
and unwilling to look at.
Tacit assumptions, for instance, have sunk many, many
boats in the world of science and engineering, just tacit
assumptions that we haven't really paid
attention to, because--
for whatever, usually emotional reasons.
Do emotions--?
Do you know what I'm saying?
So to be able to--
for one period of time, here today, as a laboratory,
whether you've been meditating for years and you just want to
see one more person coming through Google talking about
mindfulness, or whether this is totally new to you and
somehow you don't even know why you're
here, but you're here.
It's what Suzuki Roshi used to call "beginner's mind." And
the beginner's mind is not something that you only have
at the beginning.
The whole point is to cultivate beginner's mind
moment by moment.
One Korean Zen master that I studied
with, named Seung Sahn--
who talked in this fantastic English, because he never
bothered to learn English grammar, syntax, or words, for
that matter, so he could communicate to Americans in
ways that just--
he just called it "don't know mind." And he would talk about
it like this, who am I?
He'd do this like, who am I?
That's a fundamental meditative question.
Who am I or what am I?
And then he'd sit in his robes, and bald head, and
gnarled Zen stick that he used to beat his students with
metaphorically.
He'd say, who am I?
And he'd say, don't know.
And keeping that not knowing is the best way to interface
between the known and the unknown at the edge of
creativity and science, or, for that
matter, in family life.
You think you know who your children are?
Forget it.
You'll never know who your children are.
You think you know who you're sleeping with?
Forget it.
You'll never--
or, at least, you'll have to get out of your own way an
awful lot to not just see the projections onto that person
of your own mind.
And then it's like it does, in some sense, denature
relationships.
Even if, I love you, honey, but if it's all about me, it
may actually turn toxic.
Is it any wonder like, you know, my wife left me.
What happened?
I don't know.
She just left one day.
Oh, I see.
That was the first symptom?
Yes, it might have been, if you're-- in unawareness, you
don't pay any attention to the signs and symptoms, and all of
a sudden like whammo, you're hit with a heart attack.
But it's very unlikely that that was the first symptom.
Sometimes, with sudden cardiac death actually, the first
symptom is your last. But usually, there are all sorts
of prodromal warning signs, whether it's relationships or
relationship to your own body and health.
And if you're not paying attention to them, the body or
the world is going to up the ante to try to get you to wake
up while you still have a chance to come to your senses.
And it's the senses, in a sense--
it's the senses that are fundamentally the only way we
can know the world.
And there are many more than five senses. and the Buddhists
include mind itself as a sense, because you can see
without seeing.
If your mind is not tuned in, you can see all sorts of
things and not see them.
You can hear all sorts of things and not hear.
I mean, have you ever had anybody who loves you a lot
say, well, you never listen to me.
Of course, because we're just listening to ourselves, the
story of me, and where I'm going and how great it is, or
how depressing it is and how unworthy I am.
And it's like, me, me, me, I, I, I.
So the heart of this whole thing is to begin to
examine, who am I?
Because you're not what you think.
And someone once gave me a t-shirt that said,
"Meditation.
It's not what you think. " And it's true.
So one thing in medicine that's really important that
we train the medical students in a lot now, but it's amazing
how you have to even train people in this, because it's
not so common sensical.
Don't put a desk between you and the patient.
Don't sit back as the big authority and say, well, let
me help you.
Move in.
Cultivate a certain kind of appropriate distance, not
instant intimacy, but at the same time something even
deeper than intimacy, which is what I would call recognition.
Oh, a human being has walked in, usually in pain of one
kind or another, frightened, doesn't know what they have.
Just fixing them is not adequate medicine.
So medicine, as this man was implying, is changing
tremendously.
And I'll just say, as part of my little advertisement for
some of the dimensions in which we work-- because it's
much bigger than health care and medicine.
I started out doing this in medicine, in terms of bringing
mindfulness into the mainstream of institutions.
Medicine and meditation sound a lot alike, don't they?
They come from the same root meaning.
So there's something about being human that we have been
ignoring, and I would say up to now, at our peril.
And if we can bring being and doing together, the doing is
going to be much more magnificent, and at the same
time, perhaps much more balanced, much less smoke and
heat, and much more light, and clarity, and breakthrough.
And at the same time, we can do that in a way that's not
dualistic, like at the expense of our lives or of our
relationships, or our children, or, for that matter,
our health and our body, or other aspects of our mind that
we feel like are interests that we never have time for,
because we are so addicted to getting things done.
All right.
So how many of you are old-time meditators, whatever
that means to you?
Raise your hands.
How many of you are brand new to it, this is the first time
you've come to anything having to do meditation and you'd
rather be wearing a mask or something to disguise you.
OK.
Wonderful.
And then everybody in between.
How many of you used to have a meditation-- none of you are
old enough, maybe, or very few of you are old enough, I can
see, to used to have a meditation in the '60s or
whatever, and then fell off the wagon and wished you could
get back, but every time you try it's too
hard and you don't.
Anybody like that?
Yes.
Welcome.
OK.
So let's start from first principles, OK?
We talked about beginner's mind.
Let's just start from the beginning.
We only have moments in which to live.
The future is a concept.
A very useful concept, I'm not putting it down.
The past, memory, is also a concept.
But the only time in which our lives are unfolding is now.
And now has some very, very interesting properties that if
we learn to inhabit now more, with awareness, it's almost as
if the universe becomes your teacher.
Because there's no boundary to this, there's
no boundary to awareness.
You can't put your finger on where your awareness stops.
If you want to go and right now have lunch with somebody
in a restaurant in LA, even if the restaurant's not open, you
can open a restaurant, have dinner, lunch, dinner,
whatever, with that person, right now, because of
imagination.
No problem.
You can have a Google mind and just hold the whole world, and
everything that's being searched for right in this
moment in Google.
And you can go meditate on whatever that selective span
of Google searches is that's going on in the main lobby.
And it's only some fraction of what's really going on.
Even in your own mind, if you start to pay attention to
anything in your mind, it's only some small fraction of
the universe of things that are going on in your mind.
And yet if I ask you to show me your mind,
where would you point?
You'd point to the head.
Sorry.
Mind and brain may not be the same thing.
The brain we can point to.
The mind is a little more interesting.
That's why Zen masters will often say, show me your mind,
and then wait to see what you do.
It's a little bit like taking a number on one of those old
fashioned adding machines, and dividing it by zero.
And you still-- cachunk, cachunk, cachunk, cachunk,
cachunk, and nothing ever happens.
And that can be a very powerful way of waking people
up to these other dimensions.
OK.
So what we know, we have a body, relatively speaking, and
we're here now.
So let's see if we can tune in to now, for no other reason
than just for fun.
OK?
Just not to get anywhere, to be more relaxed, to become a
great meditator, to break through some problems that
you're having, whatever it is, but to just see if you can
hold this moment in awareness.
You don't even have to shift your posture.
Just hold this moment in awareness.
Now, there's a lot going on, because as I said, I mean even
if we limit it to five senses, if your eyes are
open they're seeing.
Your ears you can't close, so there's hearing.
Your nose you can't close, so there's some kind of sensing
going on through the nose, some aroma of rug and wall.
There's whatever the sensations are in the mouth.
And there's the contact of the back with the back of the
chair, and your butt with the chair.
And if you're on the floor--
so there's what's called proprioception.
Let's see-- and there is, of course, one aspect of
proprioception which is, interestingly enough, without
any effort on our part-- thank god, because otherwise we
would have died long ago for just like forgetting, getting
distracted.
We're breathing.
If breathing depended on the conscious mind, as I said,
we'd all be dead already.
Oh, I got busy, forgot.
Oh, yes, I'm supposed to breathe.
Luckily, the nervous system, the design of the nervous
system, is much too clever to leave that
to conscious control.
Yes, you can fiddle with it a bit, but what's being
suggested is, see if we can just drop in on the sensations
of breathing without fiddling with the breathing at all.
It knows how to do it really well, much better than you.
So see if you can just feel yourself breathing, without
intentionally drawing an in breath or an out breath.
If it helps, and of course the breath is in some sense
constrained or formed by how we're sitting, so if you're
sitting like this, it contracts the chest. And so
there may be a natural tendency to sit in with a
spine that's elevated and erect, in a position that
embodies dignity, just so that you can meet this moment in
its fullness with alertness, whatever that means to you.
It could be lying down.
It doesn't have to be sitting.
It could be hanging from your toes from the ceiling.
And let's see if we can feel the breath.
Not think about the breath, but just feel the breath
moving in and out of the body, as if we were in some sense
approaching a shy animal sunning itself on a tree stump
in a clearing in a forest. It's like, we want to approach
gently, and just drop in.
And ride the waves of the breath in the body, maybe down
in your belly, where there's all sorts of stuff going on,
on the in breath and the out breath.
You're not breathing deeply.
You're not pushing.
You're not pulling.
And if you'd like to concentrate more, focus on the
abdomen or wherever the sensations are most vivid, I
invite you to close your eyes if you care to.
It's not at all necessary.
And just ride, surf, on the feeling, the sensations, of
the breath moving in and out of your body, moment by
moment, by moment.
And let everything else going on in the mind, in the room,
the sounds, everything, just be in the wings.
You're not suppressing anything.
You're just featuring the breath center stage in the
field of awareness, as is your life depended on it, of
course, which it really does, in more ways than one, in more
ways than you can even think.
Now, whether you've been meditating for years, or this
is really your first exposure to what you might call formal
meditation instruction, it doesn't take long before you
realize that, having just given yourself this very, very
simple assignment to feel the breath moving in and out of
the body, and resting in that awareness, attending to the
sensations, that the mind kind of has a life of its own.
And it won't just stay on the belly, or the nostrils, or
wherever you're following the breath.
And it'll start commenting on your experience, that maybe
you're already wishing you hadn't come, and are looking
for a graceful way to get towards the exit while our
eyes are closed.
Or that this is stupid and boring, and how could this tap
into anything useful?
Or, the mind may just kind of drift off into reverie, or
thinking about how much you've got to get done by the end of
the day, and going through your to do list and maybe
getting more anxious.
Or feeling so happy you're here that you don't want to go
back to work, and thinking you'll take the
rest of the day off.
Whatever it is, you've lost touch with the breath.
That's for sure.
So it's important that you know, whether you've been
meditating for 50 years or more, or this is your first
experience of it, that this is just the way the mind is.
It's normal.
There's nothing wrong with you.
And it's not like, oh, you'll make a bad meditator because
your mind is unruly.
That's the nature of the mind.
It's just like the Pacific Ocean.
It waves, depending on the atmospheric conditions.
But even when it's at its most tumultuous, if you learn to
drop down 20 or 30 feet under the water, there's just gentle
calmness, undulation, stillness,
and it's always present.
And it's the same with the mind.
The surface of the mind can be very agitated, embroiled in
thought and emotion, but awareness
itself is like the depths.
And although we've never been exposed to this in any
systematic way, you can learn, by just coming back to the
breath over and over and over again, that it's
not about the breath.
It's about the awareness.
That includes knowing that your mind wandered in the
first place, and what it got embroiled with.
So the added instruction at this point would be any time
you notice that your mind is no longer in your breath, let
your awareness take note of what's on your mind.
Sooner or later it will, and you'll have a little mini
realization.
Oh my god, I'm supposed to be on the breath.
I thought that was so simple to do, and I've been off
someplace for who knows how long.
Not a problem.
Guess what?
It's still now.
So in this moment, just--
your body's still breathing.
Can you reconnect with featuring the breath center
stage in the field of awareness?
It's not about the breath.
It's about the awareness.
And the breath is simply a skillful means for befriending
this deep capacity of the heart and mind that is
sometimes called awarenessing.
I sometimes call awarenessing too, in
distinction to thinking.
It's just bigger than thinking, because it can hold
thought, as well.
So if the mind wanders, you know what's on your mind.
You bring it back.
If it wanders 10,000 times, you know what's on your mind
10,000 times.
And without judging, condemning, forcing, blaming,
just come back to this moment, this breath.
Each breath, a new beginning.
Each out breath, a complete letting go.
And voila, here you are again, right here, and no agenda.
Just this moment.
Just this breath.
Just this sitting here.
Outside of time, if you will.
Ensconced in the now.
Timeless.
In awareness.
So this sounds simple, and it is.
But it's not easy.
This is a very, very challenging discipline,
actually, because the mind is so unruly and so conditioned
to fall into liking and disliking, and wanting to be
entertained, and so highly conditioned, that to just get
really basic and befriend any aspect of experience and
sustain that attending with a certain kind of tenderness, as
a radical act of love and kindness, just towards
yourself, simply to stop and to be, requires a certain kind
of motivation to befriend your experience in this way, the
moments that you do have while you're alive, wherever you
are, whatever is up for you.
And silence, this kind of silence that's pregnant with
awareness itself, with what you might call pure awareness,
is available 24/7.
Whether you're in front of your computer or not, whether
you're at home or here, wherever you are, it's part of
the repertoire, and a very fundamental part of the
repertoire of being human.
Silence.
And I apologize for talking so much about silence.
Ultimately, the more you practice the less there is any
need for talk or thought.
And the meditation practice winds up doing you much more
than you are doing the meditation practice.
And the world, and everybody, and everything, becomes your
teacher, and not in any grandiose new age bullshit
kind of way.
Just obvious, basic.
So let's play in the few remaining moments that we'll
stay with this guided meditation, keeping in mind
that my voice is merely meant to be like pointing out places
to look or to feel or to see, and so if you don't find it
helpful, than just finding your own way to be in
relationship to the present moment.
But remembering that I'm not trying to give you any
experience, certainly not relaxation or a sense of
well-being or anything.
It's not about that.
It's simply reminding you, and in a sense, hopefully also,
although you can't say it in English, re-bodying you to
rest, to learn, to remember how to rest in awareness, an
awareness that can hold anything and everything in
this only moment we ever have for knowing, for learning, for
loving, for working, for seeing beneath
the surface of things.
So let's play with expanding the field of awareness around
the breath, wherever we've been featuring the breath
sensations, until it includes a sense of the body as a whole
sitting here breathing.
And if you've sort of slumped or collapsed in your posture,
at this point why don't you see if you can reestablish
yourself in a posture that embodies dignity, to your full
dignity and wakefulness to you, whatever that means.
Not in any kind of idealized way, we're not talking West
Point or military academy, we're simply talking about
letting awareness fill the body, and find, if you will,
an optimal way to be in this moment, sitting.
So that the breath flows most freely and most unimpeded.
So that the mind has a quality of lightness to it, and a
light touch.
And seeing if you can feel your skin breathing, perhaps,
because of course it does.
And if you can't, just imagining that you can feel
your skin breathing or just feel your skin, the envelope
of the body.
And all of the sensations within the body, however they
are, just let them be what they are, held in awareness.
The breath of course is a part of that, so the awareness can
be very narrowly columnated, where the attention is very,
very one-pointed, or it can be much broader, like a
wide-angle lens, 360.
And let's actually allow the awareness to also include
sounds, since the ears, as we said, were open.
And they're happening in this moment as well, so we're not
excluding anything.
Body sitting, breathing, and hearing.
And the awareness can just already hold it.
You don't need to know how to do it.
It already knows how to do it.
It does it all the time.
But we're not aware of awareness.
So this is new, perhaps.
And then why stop here?
Let's allow the field of awareness to include any
thoughts or feelings that it might be flitting through the
field of the mind, which you might think
of as like the sky.
You know, vast, and, in some sense, boundless.
So thoughts come, they go.
They're usually associated with emotions of one kind or
another, pleasant, unpleasant, neutral.
Intense, mild, moderate.
And just let your awareness take in the whole thing,
without pursuing anything, without rejecting anything,
what you might call resting in a choice-less awareness.
Now, not focusing on any object, but just allowing
whatever objects of attention arise to be seen, felt, and
known in their arising, in their passing
away, moment by moment.
So it could be just the breath.
Or it could be just this vast panoply, and you can decide
where you want to focus your attention, on the objects, or
on an objectless awareness, a choiceless open spaciousness,
that you could think of as awareness without objects.
Pure, and filling the body, surrounding the
body, filling the heart.
Calming, if you will, the agitations of the mind simply
by this tenderness in the attending moment by moment, by
moment, by moment, by moment.
Without any judging of your experience whatsoever, no
condemning, no pursuing, no pushing away,
no liking, no disliking.
Of course, that's a fantasy.
You'll have all sorts of likes and dislikes.
But just allow your awareness to know the liking and
disliking, without judging even that.
Resting in an awareness of awareness itself, moment by
moment, as we sit here breathing, fully awake.
If you get lost, you can always come back to the belly
and to the breath.
And remember it's not about the belly or the breath.
It's about the awareness that is, in some sense, re-invited
to the table by focusing on the object.
But it's actually always here.
You're just not used to taking up residence in awareness,
because we are so in our heads, so carried away by the
thought stream, and by emotions that we find
difficult to deal with, and that reinforce the sense of
me, my problems, my life, my ambition.
The story of me, and where I'm going, which is just a story.
It's just more thought.
How about letting your awareness be part of who you
are, maybe a much bigger part than the stories you tell that
are intrinsically limited, limiting, and inaccurate.
I'd like to invite you, if your eyes are closed, to allow
your eyes to open while maintaining the same quality
of awareness.
So nothing is any different, it's just that now if your
eyes were closed, there's also sights.
But you can maintain the same awarenessing even as you turn
your head or shift your body or stretch.
And just to kind of formalize the close of the formal
practice, guided practice, I'll just rings some bells.
We should just--
you won't hear the bells, what you'll hear is [CHIME].
Nobody hears bells.
What you hear is sound--
[CHIME]
and the spaces between them, and the silence inside and
underneath sound.
So although the formal meditation practice, in some
sense, comes to an end, and has to, the real meditation
practice never comes to an end.
It's your life.
It's no more at an end than, say, your breathing.
OK.
We've finished meditating, stop breathing.
No.
Breath will go on.
Sensations will go on.
Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching,
proprioception, knowing, thinking.
And so the real meditation practice is your life, and how
you carry yourself in each moment.
Now that's, oh, great.
Then I don't have to meditate.
I'll just go out and do mindfulness in daily living,
and it will be great.
You get to the door without forgetting.
You get carried away and entrained into whatever is
next on your to do list. So there's something very
beautiful about the combination of formal
meditation practice, even if it's for 30 seconds or 5
minutes every day, but the fact that you will anchor it,
that you will at least tune a little bit before you play the
great symphony, and then see what happens.
And I'm sure you will find, and many of you can probably
talk about-- and I'm going to now converse about that,
because the outer counterpart of meditation, especially--
how many of you sit in meetings during the day?
Do you meet with other people at Google, or has the computer
done away with that, only virtual meetings?
Well do you sometimes find yourself in meetings and just
like wondering what the hell this meeting is about?
They go on and on sometimes, even at Google.
And it's like, you don't get to the point, or everybody's
got to shoot their mouth off about their own favorite
thing, and be an obstacle to getting anything done.
Does that happen here?
OK.
So imagine if people tuned before they walked into a
meeting, or took--
I often give CEOs or department chairs, whatever, I
give them a set of these bells.
And I say, hey, listen.
Why don't you take the first 5 minutes of a 30 minute meeting
or an hour meeting and just [CHIME]
ring the bells.
No meditation instruction, the instruction is just sit and
watch your mind, and be aware of the
people around the table.
Five minutes of that, [CHIME]
then have your meeting and see what happens.
It may turn out to be a totally different meeting,
because people will be there.
Most people, they're in the meeting,
but they're not there.
They're text messaging under the table, or Googling, or
whatever the hell you people do.
But you're not fully present, if you're [INAUDIBLE], what's
the point in having a meeting?
The meeting is about meeting, so that something can happen.
But for that, you have to show up.
Turns out showing up is non-trivial.
It's the hardest thing in the world, to show up.
Even in your body, most of the time we're
like, not in our bodies.
There's this wonderful line in James Joyce's Dubliners--
it's a book of short stories--
that starts out, Mr. Duffy lived a short
distance from his body.
So let's have a conversation about what
your experience was.
And I just want to say that if you read business books,
leadership books, like Peter Senge at the Society for
Organizational Learning, and think about organizations and
how they have-- like they're organisms, and they learn, and
they grow, and they have heads and tails, and they can orient
and move, in time and space, and beyond time and space--
that that's the outer counterpart of quiet
meditation.
It's like when you get 30 people in a room around the
table, and they do this kind of tuning, then the dialogue
is very, very different from if you think you're going to
be in discussion.
Discussion, for instance, like, oh, we'll get together
and we'll discuss this problem or this issue--
discussion, I would just remind you, comes from the
same root as concussion, and percussion, and succussion.
It's all about shaking violently apart.
That's the root meaning of discussion, is to shake
violently apart, maybe something
will sort itself out.
But what about dialogue, where everybody is really tuning,
and not like totally in their ego, but a kind of inquiry.
What is this?
What is our job?
What is the purpose of this meeting?
What could we do together that we can't do alone?
And maybe if I don't know everything, or I take my big
pet, whatever favorite thing it is, and for a moment just
bring don't know to it, so it's not like, yes, I've got
to come out of this meeting with an agreement from
everybody that I'm the greatest person in the world.
My idea is the best idea.
Out of that, what happens when minds do this together, you
get some kind of property emerging that's bigger than
any of the individual minds in the room, and [SNAP]
something.
That's beginning to become more and more recognized in
business and in all sorts of organizations, because the old
models are just like Tyrannosauruses and
Brontosauruses swishing around and banging each
other's tails and dying.
OK.
So anybody want to comment on your experience of this, or
anything that you experience?
Let's keep it not like-- let's not go into speculation about
meditation and its value in the world.
But more like, what did you experience during the guided
meditation, first person experience.
AUDIENCE: So, Dr. Kabat-Zinn, I have been a practicing
mindful meditator for almost 10 years.
And by practicing, I mean, I struggled with the same thing,
and continue to struggle with the same thing, which is, I
fall asleep, all the time, and it happened to me here.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Anybody else fall
asleep during the session?
Raise your hands up high.
There's nothing embarrassing about it.
I mean, basically we're all more or less asleep anyway,
even if you're here.
It's the same thing as in school.
The bodies show up but that doesn't--
And yes, so as soon as we get calm and still, we go, plop.
First of all, how many of you would say that you're
sleep-deprived, just on the purely Monday level.
Of course we're sleep deprived.
Google doesn't expect you to be sleeping.
That's for the next lifetime.
I don't know.
So what are the practical things that you might do?
So I get very basic around sleep.
Sleep is an occupational hazard of meditating.
And in the hospital, we don't ask
people to meditate sitting.
We get them down on the floor, doing what's
called a body scan.
So you get more and more relaxed, the first thing you
do is go, plop.
So you hear a tremendous amount of snoring in the room.
We do this with sometimes 200 people on
our day-long retreat.
And people take offense.
I'm trying to meditate here, and I've got a snorer over
here and a snorer over there.
It's an occupational hazard of meditating.
Meditation is all about falling awake.
But the first thing people do is fall asleep.
What can we do?
Well, to one degree it's like I would ask you about your
motivation?
How motivated are you to actually be awake?
OK?
If you are, have you ever been driving down the highway late
at night and falling asleep?
OK?
I mean, sometimes when it's really bad, I've had to slap
myself across the face.
Why?
Because I could crash into a tree.
I mean, it's like, oh, you're so violent.
Well, under the circumstances it's better to slap myself
every once in a while, or turn on some great rock and roll
and open up all the windows, to stay awake.
In other words, whatever is necessary.
So one thing you could do--
do you do this early in the morning, as a rule?
AUDIENCE: I've tried everything.
I've tried early in the morning.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Have you tried a cold
shower before you meditate?
I'm not joking.
AUDIENCE: No.
I have not tried that.
JON KABAT-ZINN: OK.
Try a cold shower.
See, if this is really important, if this is really
about life or death and sanity, and I believe it is,
then do whatever the hell it takes to wake up.
And then be gentle with yourself when
you fall asleep anyway.
OK?
Because part of you knows you're falling asleep, so
another thing to do is, while you're falling asleep--
and this I wouldn't recommend driving--
but while you're falling asleep, bring awareness to the
feeling of falling asleep.
And ask yourself, is my awareness of
falling asleep asleep?
And look at it, feel it, see for yourself.
And you may find part of you is still awake.
And instead of struggling or battling
with I'm falling asleep--
how many of you have had the experience of one moment you
were just asleep, and the next moment you
were completely awake?
We've all had that experience.
It's a repertoire of different kinds of things.
So motivation has a great deal to do with it.
And then also, do you blame yourself for falling asleep.
Are you frustrated by it?
Do you think you're a bad meditator?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
JON KABAT-ZINN: OK.
You're not a bad meditator.
Everybody falls asleep.
I mean, if you go and read a book about the San Francisco
Zen Center in the old days, called Crooked Cucumber,
there's a very interesting little chapter in there where
they invited all these great Zen masters from Japan to come
to inaugurate some temple at the San Francisco Zen Center.
And there were like six or seven of them there, with
Suzuki Roshi, every single one of them was
nodding off on the cushion.
They're not supposed to do that.
They're like samurai meditators.
That's why the young people are supposed to study with
them, and they're [SNORING].
So as long as you're thinking there's some kind of ideal
here, where like if I was really meditating I'd never
fall asleep.
Nonsense.
Maybe they were jet-lagged.
Maybe they were old.
Maybe they were dead.
Who knows?
But you're not, so [SNAP]
what can you do?
So in a sense, by asking yourself the question and
being spacious and bringing a sense of humor to it, falling
asleep is not even a problem.
The part of you that knows you're falling asleep isn't,
and that's the part that we're interested in.
And it's by moment by moment, so it's not, oh my god, now
I've fallen asleep.
As soon as you wake up, that's it.
You're here.
It's another moment.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: I'd just like to add to that.
My wife's a pediatrician, and she studies sleep deprivation
among all sorts of young people.
So when we got married and I was meditating and falling
sideways, she fixed it.
She said get your eight hours' sleep.
There may be a conflict with your work, but it's also a
critical element of your longevity, your sanity, your
health, so--
JON KABAT-ZINN: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Lack of sleep, I think, is a big issue.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Although you'll also find--
I've certainly found over the years.
I've been meditating now since I was--
I got into it when I was 22.
And I'm 63, so I guess that's 41 years.
It seems like 41 seconds.
But when you really devote yourself to meditation the
kinds of ways that I'm suggesting, and then every
once in a while you periodically go off on
retreat, and say maybe do this for 10 days, 18 hours a day,
and in places like Spirit Rock--
I mean, there's no better place in the world to do that
than in the Bay Area, where you can really cultivate
mindfulness in this kind of laboratory where you're
simplifying life, and you leave your computer and your
cell phones at home.
That itself is very hard to do, but you nest it in a
certain way.
I've found over the years I don't need this as much sleep
as I used to need.
Now part of that is just getting older.
But part of it is that there's a kind of rest that happens in
wakefulness that you don't get even in sleep.
And now of course--
I don't have time to talk about it.
When I was here last I gave a slide talk with some evidence
from neuroscience about what's going on in our patients and
other people when they meditate.
But it's activating regions of the brain that ordinarily just
aren't ever trained.
And there's a phenomenon now, for the past 10 or 12 years,
in neuroscience called neuroplasticity, which is
demonstrating that the old dogma that your brain just
loses neurons from about the time you're two and it's just
downhill from then, that's not true.
We're making functional neurons in very important
aspects of the nervous system right up until the day we die.
And they're driven by a kind of repetitive attending.
Physical activity is a huge part of that.
So it's not just meditation on the cushion.
I mean, running could be meditation.
Swimming could be meditation.
Cooking can be.
There's nothing that isn't meditative.
Making love, I mean, it helps to be there.
[LAUGHTER]
JON KABAT-ZINN: I'm making a joke of it,
but I'm deadly serious.
So this is the kind of thing where life itself can actually
inform you.
And then yes, over time, you'll find how to fall awake.
You will find it.
It will find you, so to speak.
But the more we bring baggage to it, the better.
And if you do need to sleep, for god's sake, sleep.
Don't meditate.
Yes.
Where'd the microphone migrate to?
Thank you for that.
We've only got a few more minutes.
I didn't maybe time this quite right, but
at least until 12:00.
But I do want to give you an opportunity to talk about your
experience or ask questions.
And if you want to stay past 12:00, I'm not going anywhere,
I don't think.
MENG: For half an hour.
JON KABAT-ZINN: For half an hour.
OK.
AUDIENCE: I find that when I'm meditating, I'm so excited
that I'm actually meditating that I can't stop thinking
about the fact that I'm meditating.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Oh, yes.
That's a big one.
I'm glad you brought that up.
AUDIENCE: And all the good things it's doing for me.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Yes, the internal commentator about how
great it is to meditate.
Wow, I'm meditating and my mind isn't wandering at all.
I'm on the breath, down breath, in breath, out breath.
Wow, this is great.
Aren't I great?
I'm meditating away.
and really there's no meditating at all.
It's just commentary.
It's just more thinking, but now the content of the
thinking is meditating.
Wonderful.
Now, who knew that?
You don't know, right?
So, you see the power in not knowing?
Yes, some part of you knows that there's all this
commentary going on, and you can laugh at it, and it ain't
what it's really about.
But yes, of course, that's the way we live our lives, is
we're always commenting on how we're doing.
We're continually taking the temperature and the wind
changes, and how am I doing, and what do
people think of me?
I was in Finland not long ago, teaching, last year.
And every culture has its own stereotypes.
And I don't want to fall into generalizations and
stereotypes, but a lot of the Finns told me that their
biggest insecurity is, what do you think of me?
They're a very shy culture.
And they always wonder what do you think of me,
but they never ask.
Se everybody is worried about what
everybody else is thinking.
Feynman one of the greatest scientists on the planet wrote
a book called, What Do You Care What Other People Think?
But he could have called it, What Do You
Care What You Think?
It's the same kind of thinking.
Our opinions about ourselves actually get in the way of
being ourselves.
So that's perfect.
This is like you're meditating on awareness of the commentary
about meditating.
At a certain point, you'll get tired of it.
And it's like touching a soap bubble.
What awareness does is it's liberating.
Not like if you go to a cave in Tibet an study with these
great Tibetan masters.
It's liberating just by virtue of the seeing.
Touching a thought with awareness is like touching a
soap bubble with your finger.
It self-liberates.
It goes poof, because it's seen and known for what it is.
So it's not like you have to shut off the commentary.
This is the deepest misunderstanding about
meditation, is that meditation's about making your
mind blank, shutting off your thinking.
All you'll get if you try to shut off your thinking,
whether it's commentary on meditating or anything else,
is a headache.
And then you'll start to say-- the little thoughts will
secrete themselves, and your mind says, I can't do this.
I can't meditate.
I'm no good at it.
Everybody else is good at it, but I'm not good at it.
That's bullshit.
It's just-- well, I won't call it bullshit.
That sounds a little judgmental and I'm talking
about [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
What it is just thinking.
It's thinking.
And if you do awarenessing, you will see the thoughts with
much greater clarity, and they will have less of a
stranglehold on you.
So that's just part of the curriculum, the commentary on
how your meditation practice is going.
Ultimately, it is never about the meditation practice.
That's not the problem.
The problem is the I that's claiming to be meditating.
So I'll just throw that out.
That's a provocative statement.
I don't expect you to necessarily get it, but to
keep asking yourself, who's meditating?
Who is this?
And you might say your name, your age, all of your
credentials, your CV, all sorts of things can come
online in that moment as who you are.
None of them are really who you are.
They're all just accretions so to speak.
They may be aspects of who you think you are, but you're much
bigger than that.
Usually we think we're so small that we have to build
ourselves up with CVs, story, how great I am.
But what if you were infinitely bigger than what
you think you are?
Walt Whitman said that-- "I'm large.
I contain multitudes."--
in Leaves of Grass.
This is really big.
It's about understanding what it means to be really human.
And of course, we don't know what it means
to be really human.
But the understanding comes from intimacy, from
cultivating intimacy, or what the Tibetans call
familiarization.
In fact, the word in Tibetan for meditation is
familiarization.
Anybody else?
So thank you for that.
MENG: One last question?
JON KABAT-ZINN: OK.
It's the last question.
I'll let Meng exercise control.
AUDIENCE: I just wanted to say I think there's something
really funny about those whiteboards being
up during this talk.
Jut giant salaries, no deal, and all that
stuff all over it.
JON KABAT-ZINN: JON KABAT-ZINN: Oh, yes.
You were reading them.
I didn't read them.
It's hard not to notice.
Yes, well, the world is multidimensional and complex.
And so did they trigger a lot of thoughts for you?
AUDIENCE: I feel like somehow meditation is
the opposite of money.
JON KABAT-ZINN: Oh.
Well, be careful, because the mind is now creating opposites
and maybe obstacles, whereas, in a complex universe, that
may just be another opinion or another thought.
Seen one way, yes, it's us against them,
and they are no good.
But seen another way, we're all part of the same thing,
and you wouldn't be here if someone wasn't thinking about
money, and I wouldn't either.
Not that I'm getting paid, but that's not the point.
I mean, I had to pay for gas.
It's all interconnected, so it's very useful to look at
our own likes and dislikes, as I was suggesting, whatever
they are, whether they're principled or not.
And that's not to say we shouldn't have principles.
If nothing, it's a totally ethical way of being.
If it's not ethical, it isn't mindfulness.
But that requires a certain deep contemplation to
understand what ethical behavior is, because
sometimes--
And I see Philip Lombardo is coming to talk about the
banality of evil.
I mean even in his own Stanford Prison Experiment, he
got so pulled into the experiment--
I don't know if you know about this, but you should go and
hear his talks--
back in the '60s that his laboratory technician had to
tell him to stop the experiment after six days,
instead of the three weeks that it was supposed to be
happening, because these staff and students, who were divided
up into prison guards and prisoners, the guards were
abusing the prisoners.
These were all just Stanford students, but they got into
that mentality, and they would have killed people.
They were creating huge harm, unbelievable abuse.
You think it's just at Abu Ghraib?
I mean, the guards at Abu Ghraib, they're just like
Stanford students.
They're just 18, 19, 20 year old Americans who don't get
why they're there.
And yes, so see, as a rule, I tend to stay away from the
word evil, and I prefer ignorance.
So when we're ignoring certain aspects of our own experience,
and how easy it is for anybody, even ethical people,
to get entrained into a situation where they will do
seriously immoral things.
That's important to be aware of, because it's not like, oh,
just them, those people out there who
don't have moral fiber.
That could be you, if the circumstances were different,
unless you've really developed an unwavering sense of
stability in your own authority, even if everybody
else is saying that you're wrong.
That's a really hard thing to do in a place like Nazi
Germany, or in a place like Burma, or in a place like
Rwanda, or anything else where your family could be wiped
out, or may have already been wiped out, by you just like
looking the wrong way or belonging to the wrong tribe.
So this has profound implications not just for
economics, and running a business like Google, but for
a place like Iraq, where--
war.
You walk into a culture.
You have no understanding of that culture.
And then you're going to make the world safe for democracy.
And we wonder why America is not more liked, since we're
obviously the good guys in the world.
What's the matter with us?
We're like chickens with our heads cut off.
We're idiotic.
We're not making use of the full repertoire of our
capacities.
So this mindfulness, it's not just about having a good
experience, lowering your blood pressure, improving your
T cell count, or anything like that.
There's a full spectrum of true
authenticity in the world.
And I might say, and I'll leave it at this, asking
yourself on a deep level what is your work in the world?
I know Google hired you to do something, but still.
Really why they hired you is because of who you are.
And they need you to be you, in order to know how you can
fit into the larger picture and contribute in the
imaginative ways that are really unthinkable.
That's what they want.
They want the unthinkable that is actually doable.
So how do you get there?
Often it's not just by thinking.
It's by trusting in certain aspects of yourself that we
just don't get educated around.
That's what this can develop.
And now as I understand, and I'll leave it at that, there's
an MBSR program, Mindfulness-Based Stress
Reduction-- just what Meng was talking about, with full
catastrophe living--
here at Google.
And there are going to be more programs in the Google
University around emotional intelligence, and mindfulness,
and business, and leadership, and je ne sais quoi, but
that's a very kind of interesting work environment,
where many people among the leadership really feel like
this kind of nurturance is not second order fluff to keep its
workforce happy, but, in fact, absolutely fundamental to the
core principles of the business.
So I want to thank you for your attention.
And just leave expressing the thought that if anything that
I said, even one word, or even not any words, but just what
was pointed to underneath the words, rings true to you in
some way or disturbs you in some way, trust that.
And see if you can pour a little bit more attention into
it and over time wonder, perhaps, whether there's not
something inside you-- it has nothing to do with me.
It has nothing to do with meditation or Buddhism or
anything like that.
But whether there's not something here--
I won't say there--
that really is important to attend to.
And then attend to it with tremendous kindness and
self-compassion.
I don't think that you can--
it's impossible to go wrong if you take that kind of attitude
towards it.
This is not attaining some ideal.
This is recognizing who you are already are, and the
beauty that's already you.
So I'll leave with a little poem.
Would that be OK?
One of my favorite poems, by Derek Walcott, who is a Nobel
laureate in literature, from the island of Saint Lucia,
Afro-Caribbean heritage.
He writes very, very long poems, most of which I have
never read.
But this is a very short poem, so try to drink it in in the
same way as you were drinking in the breath, and the sounds
in the room.
The time will come when, with elation, you will greet
yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and
each will smile at the other's welcome and say, sit here.
Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine.
Give bread.
Give back your heart to yourself, to the stranger who
has loved you all your life, who you
have ignored for another.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the
photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image
from the mirror.
Sit.
Feast on your life.
Thank you, folks.