Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 75: Jon Kabat-Zinn, Creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

Episode Date: May 3, 2017

Jon Kabat-Zinn was on a meditation retreat in the late '70s when he had an idea to marry science with mindfulness and bring the practice into hospitals, which then led to his redefining an important element of patient care. Kabat-Zinn is the founding executive director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the founding director of its renowned Stress Reduction Clinic, who created Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programs that are used in hundreds of hospitals, clinics and labs all over the world. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. All right, this guy is a giant. If you're meditating today, odds are,

it is indirectly or directly because of John Kabinzen. He is a, directly because of John Kabinzen. He is an MIT trained scientist who many decades ago had a brilliant idea, which was he took Buddhist meditation and he stripped all the metaphysical claims and the religious jargon out of it and he started teaching it in a fully secular way through something called mindfulness-based stress reduction, MBSR. And this was a massively consequential move because teaching it in this kind of eight-week, standardized protocol without any religious overtones allowed for what happened next,

which was scores of scientists to swoop in and to measure what kind of psychological and physiological changes happen for people when they meditate. And that is why I believe we now have millions of people who are meditating and are happier and healthier as a result. So I think John Capitzen is, as I said before, a giant and possibly even a historical figure. He's also an awesome dude. So it was a pleasure to sit down and talk to him and I think you're gonna Enjoy it. Just let me say from the outset that if you're interested in learning more about him He's got a bunch of great books including wherever you go. There you are, which is a classic in the meditation world. Here you are. John Cabinzen.

From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. How did you start meditative? Ever since I was a kid growing up in New York City, I've been interested in science and I've been interested in art. For a very simple reason, my father was like a super scientist, a Columbia medical school, and my mother was an amazingly prolific painter and completely unknown. So my father was like, really well known, my mother was an amazingly prolific painter and completely unknown. So my father was like, really well known, my mother was completely unknown, but I grew

up in that world where they saw the world differently, and I could see as a young boy, them seeing the world differently, and I was seeing the world through both of their eyes. And my mother kind of was seeing the world through, I don't want to exaggerate it, but something like Monetazise. She has sea, shadow and colour and reflection in glass and water and ripples. Somehow that transferred to me. While I was a relatively young boy, I kept wondering how you'd reconcile the scientific lens on reality and the artistic lens on reality and how it's shaped by imagination creativity, which is also true in science. And then when I was at MIT as a graduate

student in molecular biology, I saw a sign on the wall saying the three pillars of Zen talk by Philip Kaplow at the invitation of Houston Smith. Three pillars of Zen was a very popular thing. Yeah, but that was in 1965 as 21 years old. And I didn't know who Houston Smith. So, three pillage event was a very popular thing. Yeah, but that was in 1965, I was 21 years old. And I didn't know who Houston Smith was. I didn't know who Philip Kepler was. And I had no idea what Zen was, but I went to that talk. And three other people in all of MIT

went to that talk, aside from Philip Kepler. And yeah, three, maybe four. And Kepler, I mean, the talk, it was before the book came out, actually, that took the top of my head. And it was like a realization. This is what I've been looking for my whole, 21 years of my whole life. What did he say?

Well, it's not so much what he said, but it was like the focus on wakefulness, the focus on awareness, the focus on the present moment, and that the knowing is really far more than a conceptual knowing. And so when you understand that awareness is a form of intelligence that is different from and bigger than but not exclusive of thought and cognition and so forth, then it unifies what Wordsworth called in the Preludes discordant elements and makes the move in as he put it in one society.

So it was like a realization for me. A 21 on looking for this. And I started meditating that day and I've never stopped. Well, just Claire, dig down a little bit on that. What it was, you talk about awareness. That can be that that's a, I think for a lot of people, a bit of a nebulous turn. Yeah, right.

It's like, I'm aware it's snowing out, you know, okay, big deal. So what do you mean by it? And what did he say about awareness that got you so fired? Well, one of the things that he said was that, you know, he was at the Columbia University School of Journalism. And then he went and covered the Nuremberg war trials. And of course there you're hearing the most horrific things that human beings have ever done to each other. And he took it all in. And then he had all these sort of psychosomatic symptoms that were really problematic for him. It was a fairly young man, like including ulcers and headaches

and everything. So for some reason or other, it was like a crisis in his life and he moved to Japan and actually sat in a Zen monastery in Hokkaido, which is like the northernmost island in Japan, in a freezing cold monastery, not heated in the wintertime. And in six months of sitting, you know, very rigorous meditative schedule,

all his symptoms cleared up. And as a 21-year-old, I'm going, my eyes are just going, wow, and it's like I was really impressed. And it's stuck with me, not so much like his symptoms cleared up, but just this is really powerful stuff. And it looks a lot like absolutely nothing. So it turns out that what looks a lot like absolutely nothing when we're talking about wakefulness or awareness or this form of human capacity or intelligence, that it turns out it may look like much you do about nothing, but it turns out to be more like much

you do about what looks like almost nothing and turns out to be just about everything. So that grew in me for a long time while I was doing molecular biology at MIT in the lab of a Nobel laureate, and functioning on that kind of a level. But there was this other stream that was energizing me through my sitting meditation practice and so forth.

And then when I was also in those years during the Vietnam War and so forth, I then when I was also in those years during the Vietnam War and so forth, I wandered over to Boston and wound up in the Mats and Karate studio, Okinawan Karate, in these were all young Vietnam vets who were coming back and teaching Karate. And in the warm-up so the Karate they were doing this weird stuff that I just absolutely loved more than Karate and turned out to be Hatha Yoga. So within a year or two of, like, both meditation and Buddhist meditation practice and Hatha yoga, and together they were like, you know, completely transformed my life. And so I thought, well, all my friends are doing molecular biology. I'd like to do the biology of mindfulness and yoga and see what is going on because I can feel it in my own body.

I can feel it in my own mind and heart. Who's looking at that and what the potential social benefits from that are, not just merely meditate and you know, reduce your own stress, but what would that mean if you really organized your life around what's deepest and best and most beautiful in yourself as opposed to just being lost in your head all the time and stressed out a good deal at a time running through your moments rather than inhabiting them? It took you a while though to figure out how to marry these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I got a lot, believe me, I got a lot of, I can't say it on the radio,

but a lot of stuff from my Nobel laureate thesis advisor, like I got a lot, believe me, I got a lot of, I can't say it on the radio, but a lot of stuff from my Nobel laureate thesis advisor, like I was wasting my life because I wasn't gonna, you know, sort of do the usual route to, you know, Nobel Prize winning success in science. But I knew by that time that this was my work, and the way I framed it in my second book, wherever you go, there you are.

I was like asking myself for a period of 10 years after I got my PhD. What is my job on the planet with a capital J? Meaning, in other words, what would I love so much? I'd pay to do it. Redefine work that way. And I spent 10 years getting all this crap from people, my father, everybody.

What are you doing with your life? You're not doing what you're trained to do. What are you doing? What are you doing? And then after about 10 years, I had an insight on mindfulness retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Barry Mass, which I know you know well, sitting on a, you know, ten-day, two-week retreat, and on the tenth day, it had stalled all those fifteen years of practice at that point just came

together in that question of what was my job on the planet, and what came was a kind of instantaneous recognition of the possibility of taking this into hospitals where people are suffering like hospitals' functions, kind of duke magnets in the society. Duke, do we just translate that? Duke is the Buddhist term for suffering. Duke is the Buddhist term for suffering. Suffering, anguish, the human condition, and what better place so to speak to train medical patients, not getting full satisfaction from the healthcare system the way it was then in 1979, to challenge them to learn to do something for themselves that no one on the planet could do based on these deep meditative practices

and see what would happen. And so that's how mindfulness-based stress reduction came about. So I would argue, and I don't know, this may make you a little uncomfortable, but I would argue that moment of insight you had, and I believe the second floor of one of the buildings that insight of meditation society, you prefer to know the room.

I probably do the room. In the Catskills, which is one of the buildings there, it changed history. It was a historic moment that moment, on many levels, let me look on a super selfish level, that moment changed my life because I would never have started meditating had you not had this idea to marry science and meditation,

because you then made what happened after that awakening or after that insight moment was you then created mindfulness-based stress reduction, which was an eight-week protocol to teach meditation without the Buddhist lingo and metaphysics. It then became studied, that protocol allowed it to be studied in labs all over the world which allowed me as a skeptical ornary uh... neurotic news reporter in the late uh... two thousands to uh... say oh maybe i would do this this thing that i always thought was weird so it's a story on a very super on a narrow uh... selfish level but it has opened up meditation as a practice to so

many more people millions of people who would otherwise have rejected it. And I know I know this makes you slightly uncomfortable because I'm kind of you talking about yourself is not your favorite subject, but I honestly do think it was a enormously consequential moment. Well, I certainly honor that and appreciate your saying it and actually didn't know that you appreciate you're saying it. And I actually didn't know that you in your mind you have that kind of association. Oh, you are the sine qua on out of my meditation practice. Well, I can't tell you what that means to me because the whole point of doing this was really to touch people

in such a way as that it was it's not that they would be interested in me as the sort of in such a way as that it's not that they would be interested in me as the sort of progenitor of anything, but they would be interested in them in a way that's novel, not narcissistic, not self-promotional, but in a way that as many of our medical patients say after eight weeks of training in this, where none of them come to the hospital to learn how to meditate. They are the coming to the hospital because they are suffering and the medicine is not doing it for them. These are people falling through the cracks of the healthcare system. And that was in 1979.

Now 38 years into it, medicine is evolved to the point where what used to be cracks are now like chasm, the grand canyon. I mean, there are lots of people in that getting satisfaction. And this is redefined some, an element of medicine to become more participatory, that we have to engage as a participant in our own trajectory towards greater health than we'll be in, whether we're one day away

from being dead, but still breathing and still alive, or whether we have our whole life in front of us, but we've settled with this kind of diagnosis or that kind of condition or that kind of suffering. And it comes in, as you know, innumerable different forms, no one asks for it, but what do you do when you can't just magically take a pill in a ethical way or cut it out through some kind of surgical procedure? So I honor that. And I think basically the, I think the most important point for your listeners is one that the change that you experienced that you're attributing to like, you know,

that, that sequence of events, it's still, it's yours. It's your, you took responsibility for something and it was something resonated with you and it transformed your life. And this, we see this happening for thousands and tens of thousands of people. And each one, nobody's imitating me or some guru or hero of the moment. Everybody's through the way we train people in mindfulness, they're understanding that there's no one right way to do this. And there's no special state, mindfulness, and this ought to be really helpful to your listeners. Meditations, not about achieving some one special state where everything falls together or

falls away, and you just have like a permanent quote-unquote enlightenment experience and all problems fall away, and you don't care anymore, or you're infinitely compassionate and turn out to be, you know, pal of the Dalai Lama. That's all like a fantasy. The beauty of it is that rather than looking for some special experience, it's the flipping of that and recognizing that everything you're experiencing is unbelievably special. And yet, as long as you only are seeing it through the lens of what you want, what you don't want, what you're afraid of, and what you're, you know, so forth, that you're actually not experiencing your life, your experiencing a narrative filtering of your life that always reduces its dimensionality.

So therefore, in terms of transformation or healing, what you're reporting in terms of your experience, that's generalizable and through the practice of the cultivation of mindfulness, and we should probably say what it is or what we go for. But that through the actual practice, the cultivation of mindfulness, it's not a good idea, it's not a philosophy, it's not a cataclysm, it's not a religion, it's a way of being in relationship with experience.

Through that, what you engage in is a kind of ongoing experience of learning inwardly and outwardly because you're paying attention. Through the learning, you can't help but grow because that's what human beings do. That's what life is about, it's growing. And then through the growing, you can't help but have a different relationship with the unwanted, with what's most stressful and what's most painful, whether it's physical or emotional.

And that's my working definition of healing. That healing is coming to terms with things as they are. It's very different from fixing in the medical model of what we'll just cut it out or we'll fix it or put it in or remount the carburetor or whatever it is. No, it's like that we are a self-healing organism. So healing is coming to terms with the actuality of things which is very far from passive resignation or just surrender or giving up and going hopeless. And then out of that healing comes a profound transformation that is not like something that you have to go the mountaintop and wait for 20 years and follow your breath.

But it's here in every moment the potential to actually recognize that your awareness is bigger than your story about how bad things are or how good things are. And therefore, it gives you a new degree of freedom, or many new degrees of freedom, to deal with your reactive emotions, to deal with your self-centeredness, to deal with anger, frustration, depression, oneriness, whatever it is, in a way where you're already at home. Why did it take 30 or 40 or 50 years to discover that it doesn't get any better than this? You just get older. But what about if we really learn to inhabit the present moment,

then there's a certain way in which you're already home. And the Zen people, or the Buddhist, might refer to this as like, you're actually in touch with your true nature, or who you actually are, as opposed to who you think you are, want to be, don't want to be the story of how inadequate or, you know, sort of, traumatized or whatever, not that the stories aren't true, and a lot of us are seriously traumatized, but that when you befriend even that, you turn towards what you most don't want to have and you want to cut out or run away from it, it turns out there's a certain kind of transformative and healing potential in that. And since there really is no other sensible thing to do, because we have to learn how to

recognize and accept the actuality of things, even if we don't like it, that allows for kind of healing and recognition that whoever you are, and this is where the personal pronouns come in, you as a personal pronoun, whoever me, whoever I am, it is much, much bigger than who I think I am. And it's trustworthy, and it's healing, and the body now, through the science, to loop back to the science, it turns out that through all these meditative studies

and neuroscience and epigenetics and so forth, back to the science. It turns out that through all these meditative studies in neuroscience and epigenetics and so forth, it turns out that we're learning that the body and the brain and the whole organism is unbelievably plastic. It's continually regulating and changing itself, including the brain wiring and structure on the basis of how we actually live our lives for a moment to moment and how we conduct basis of how we actually live our lives from moment to moment, and how we conduct ourselves, and how much we repeat the same old things that get us into trouble versus more virtuous activities that actually, it turns out, can transform virtually every aspect of our physiology and our genetics. So it turns out that telomeres, for instance,

that the repeat DNA subunits at the ends of all of our chromosomes, they are rapidly degraded under stress. And when you practice mindfulness, they are much, much less rapidly degraded, or they actually get longer, which means that, and that's the biological mechanism of stress-reducing longevity, shortening our lifespan.

And we often say, you know, wow, that experience took years off my life, you know? People say that. It turns out it's absolutely true. And Elizabeth Blackburn, one at UCSF, one the Nobel Prize for that in 2009, and her colleague Alyssa Eppel, and she just wrote a book called The Telemere Effect, it hasn't come out yet, but it like documents how we have actual control over the rate at which we are going, you know, our cells are biologically are dying. And also in terms of what's called functional

connectivity in the brain, all sorts of studies now showing that mindfulness can actually enhance connectivity in the brain between, say, emotional, you know, sort of the hippocampus and the center for learning and memory and emotion regulation and executive functioning in different areas of the brain. It's like the brain is like an orchestra and when it's in tune with itself, it's like all the different instruments are talking with it itself, it's like all the different instruments are talking with each other, but the conversation is larger than the individual notes and the individual pieces.

Well, you know, if we're walking around each one of us with that inside the cranium, the vault of our own skull, maybe we should recognize that no matter how bad things get, you know, we're miraculous beings, I mean, in a virtual everybody is a genius. And yeah, we're not taught that way or treated that way in elementary school. But this is good news, and it's something where even if you do wind up in the hospital, and that's your first encounter with mindfulness, a lot of people tell me, you know, after eight weeks, this actually saved my life, not surgery, not drugs, but that capacity to self-regulate. So let me just say what, if it's okay, to say what mindfulness is,

I was just gonna ask you, so, and how do you practice it? Because I think we've talked about it, you've been talking about it on a, somewhat theoretical level and a scientific level. It's abstract, yeah, well, to a listener, it's like, what the hell's abstract. Yeah, well listen to a listener. It's like, what the hell is he doing?

Yeah, let's make it concrete. Okay. So reporters often ask me, like, give me one word. What is this old mindfulness stuff that everybody's hearing about now? And, you know, and there's a lot of corruption of it and commercializing of it so that it's all about like mindful bread or mindful bracelets.

Because it's hot. So, you know, they're going to be unscrupulous people that are always going to, they can't even spell mindfulness, but they have the big experts in mindfulness and they have no idea that it's actually a discipline. It's something you have to work at. It's like exercising a muscle and a lot of the time you don't want to exercise a muscle. It hurts to lift the weight. And so you have to have kind of the right motivation and intentionality and so forth. So the one word response is I've developed a few. So one is, you know, mindfulness is another way to say awareness. But awareness, you know, as you said at the beginning, like, oh, big deal.

You know, I mean, what's the big deal about awareness? Well, the fact is, awareness is a huge deal, and we never recognize that it's a form of intelligence as much bigger than thinking. Because you take any thought, no matter how big, the thought of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which was like a hundred years old this year, 1916-2016, and this year they actually detected waves in the structure of space time, gravity waves from gigantic, unimaginably big black holes, massive black holes that collided billions of years ago, and finally the vibrations came here, and there are two observatories that call them that measured

the same fluctuation, like the tiniest fraction of a kind of width of a hundredth or a thousandth of an electron, and they could detect it in two places at once, two thousand miles away. So that's pretty cool, you know, that we can be that sensitive. So awareness is much, you could take that thought and you can hold that in awareness. So no matter how big the thought it could be held in awareness, no matter how horrible the emotion,

it can be held in awareness and that make you new ways of working with it. So can I just jump in on that for a second? It took me a while to wrap my head around this, and I'm not even sure I have, but we all know that we're thinking all the time, but knowing you're thinking, that's awareness. People don't know that they think that.

Well, that's the first discovery when you say, get your butt on a cushion or a chair, and you start to meditate, and I'll say something to you like, you know, Dan, let's just see if we can feel our body breathing. Anywhere in the body you want, can you feel the body breathing? You say, oh, that's a cinch. No problem. I do that, John. No worries. And so you direct your attention to someplace in your body. Let's say the tip of your nostrils or down in your belly and you feel the movement of the belly or the

air moving at the nostrils and you ride on the waves of the breath with full awareness. Easy, no sweat. And within a fraction of a breath, you'll forget that you decided to do that and something will distract you. Okay, and it'll be a thought. The thought might be in the form of like, I better check my, you know, see if any texts have come in or whatever it is, but we are infinitely self-destracting. Never mind the outside world distracting us as well. So it turns out it's not so easy to just attend moment by moment by moment to any aspect of experience. So that's where the discipline comes in. It's like weightlifting, you know. The breath comes in, the breath goes out, you're following the breath coming in,

breath coming out, breath coming in. You mind gets trapped, you know, carried away by some thought stream, you know, fantasy, memory, anticipation, worry, and pretty soon like you forgot that you're breathing. Well, this is illuminating for most people because they don't realize their mind is thinking all the time. They just don't realize that. So that is, I'm using the word, it's a realization. It's really a moment of enlightenment

because especially for the first time, it's like you are droppingly amazing. My God have been thinking my entire life and thinking that my thinking is my life, because I'm so much a prisoner of it, so caught in it. And then of course thinking is deeply wedded with emotional reactivity. So you think thoughts that spiral listen to depression, anxiety, and anger, and all that. And it's all like extra. Like, most of it has nothing to do with reality.

It's just thinking. So that's a kind of moment of awareness. That's powerful. And that says, oh, maybe there's some value in actually learning who am I if I'm not my thoughts, the constructed reality that I'm making for myself at a habit that I don't even realize, well, that's a really good question.

And rather than answer it, why not just keep asking, who am I really? What am I really? And this is kind of direct path into a kind of inquiry where you ask the question, then you just open. You don't try to think your way through that question. Just listen. And that listening is mindfulness. It's wakefulness. It's awareness. So one word for my one word to answer what is mindfulness is awareness, but we don't appreciate what awareness is. Another is that is relationality. Because like even we say like, well, you're following your breath and

we say, yeah, I'm following my breath. Who says it's your breath? I mean, if it was up to you to be breathing, you would have died a long time ago. Good luck. I got carried away, distracted, dead. So we're not allowed anywhere near the real brainstem mechanism that controls the front neck nerve and the diaphragm.

Forget about it. We're not reliable enough to keep ourselves breathing. But we're still willing to claim it's my breath. That's nonsense. It's a little bit narrow. So then if, well, if it's not your breath, who's even saying that's my body? Is it the body saying that? Who's thinking that?

Is the brain separate from the body? What about the mind? Then it becomes really interesting. Why don't we learn this in elementary school? That we don't actually know who we are except we're given a name. So, oh yeah, I'm John. But who is that? And so this is like one of the most profound things that we can do is be who we really are as opposed to the propaganda that we generate about ourselves, much of which is unbelievably painful because we all feel inadequate. And what if you flip that and said, like, no, you're actually, and the Buddhists would talk

about this, you're actually a Buddha. You're actually perfect just the way you are. And if you went to law school or you're really smart like kids, they'll say, oh, you don't know who I am because if you knew who I was, you'd never think that I was perfect the way I am. And I would flip that and say, yeah, you're actually perfect with all your imperfections. That's the real perfection. So can we just accept that as a kind of starting point and then see what happens if you actually

radically accept yourself and just love the unfolding as a big adventure because we don't know what's going to happen next except that when we dig those kinds of thought routes for ourselves usually what happens next is what happens a thousand different times and finally your spell says to you you know you haven't grown any in 20 years you say the same old thing the same old reactions reactions, same old ruts, ruts, ruts. Why do you think the divorce rate is 50 percent? It's like, because we're not learning and growing. So this has deep applications. Let me give you the, let me give your listeners the my working definition of mindfulness. So I use the two words like awareness. If you want just one word, it's awareness, and that's not trivial. It's like only the most amazing thing about humanity.

Or relationality. So relationship to the body, relationship to interior experience, thoughts, emotions, sounds, whatever. Relationships, social relationships, world relationships, the environment, the global warming. I mean, you know, we can relate with our thoughts too, so we know about global warming and the science of it. It's like, it's a form of awareness that we can act on if we have, you know,

and social connectedness, so economic awareness. I mean, there's no boundary to awareness since one of its beauties. So my working definition or what I call operational definition of mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgmentally. I'll say it again because it's hard to take it all in. It's the awareness that arises or can be invited through paying attention. So there's nothing particularly magical, mystical, or meditative, or weird, or Eastern, about paying attention.

All teachers would love to have the kids pay attention. But rather than teaching them how, they yell at them to pay attention, it's not the most skillful thing. So paying attention on purpose. It's like, oh, not like something catches my attention, but I purposefully direct my attention. But I purposefully direct my attention. And I can do it through touch. I can through it through sight. I can through

it through hearing, listening. I can do it through tasting. I can do it through smelling. So that's why the senses are like really put us in touch to use, you know, the sense of touch with dimensions of experience. So the awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose, through all those sense doors, in the present moment, because that's the only moment we could ever pay attention, and then the kicker is non-judgmentally. And that doesn't mean we won't have judgments. What it's saying is like notice that we have almost nothing but judgments, ideas about this and that.

I like this, I don't like that. I like her, I don't like him. I used to like him, but now I don't like him. You know, it's like endless evaluating of everything. And so non-judgmental means we're going to suspend that to the best of our ability. We're just to suspend how judgmental and ordinary we are about virtually everything. And then see what that feels like. And then not judge how judgmental we are. And that turns out to be, you know, I mean mindfulness is spoken of by the Buddha,

it says the heart of Buddhist meditation, and it is the heart of Buddhist meditation. It's all in the Satyipatana Sutra, which is, you know, the great Sutra on mindfulness, and it's all in another Mahayana Sutra called the Heart Sutra, which is unbelievably profound and is really a kind of recognition of this and that is a certain dualism that is not an accurate representation of reality. That's always confused me. Buddhists are always kind of, this may be too strong, a verb, but railing against duality, you know, the separation between me and you or this and that, the observer and the observed.

Yes. I don't actually, this is, that's a very hard thing to understand. I'm glad we've wailed down to this one because especially observer versus observed, because if you're people listening to us and they're thinking, oh, I think I'll try that, you sit down and I would use the language. I observe my breathing. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or Du Moir or in court.

I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Disantel, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama,

but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast.

You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app. Okay, so there's me or the observing function. There's me, whoever that is, there's the observing function and then there's the breathing. Okay? So, yeah, conventionally speaking, whoever it is that is doing the observing, it's not you, it's me in this case, unless you're doing it too, then it would be we, but there's a separation between the observer and the observed. And that is kind of relatively true, but ultimately, and this is one of the beauties of the English language, if we just say, if we agree that rather than saying there's me observing the breath, there's simply observing. Okay? Then we do away with the subject, object duality right there. And the English language can do that. There are other languages that have a much more difficult time of it.

So there's breathing. But there's no breather, because as we said, I mean, if the breather would be asleep at the wheel and you die. So there's no breather, there's no witness sir, but there can be witness sing. So the subject-object separation is relatively true, and it's convenient. You're sitting on that side of the table. I'm sitting on this side of the table. There's no question.

But actually something else is for happening is that we're in conversation where our minds are actually not separate. You're listening to me. I'm speaking, I don't even know how I'm doing this and none of us do. How we generate grammatical senses. Some of them very long by wagging our tongue and moving the air out of our lungs and moving the lips in such a way that I'm not biting my tongue and it's coming out and so far it's grammatical and we don't know where it's going but it's gonna work out in somewhere or other. I mean every sentence is a kind of miraculous

event You know that it completely obeys Chomsky's, you know, sort of, generative grammar. We don't recognize the genius of this kind of thing. And when we hold in an awareness, then there's no separation between you and me in this moment. But what is this lack of separation, which can sound a little theoretical philosophical? Or a fairy. Right. But also, okay, so how does it land in an actual human life? What difference does it make? Well, this is where wisdom comes in, okay? Mindfulness is not all about like stress reduction or healing, your emotional pain or whatever. It's actually recognizing the deep structure of reality

and that everything is interconnected. We live in an interconnected universe. So let's just take the fact that, you know, on November 9th Trump was elected president, okay? So a lot of people have very strong thoughts about it. In fact, the country seems to be like equally divided. Yeah, some people love it, some people absolutely hate it. Exactly. Exactly. And for very good reasons, I mean, if you start to hear the racism and the sexism and

all of the stuff that was out there during the campaigns and during the election and so forth, it's something that we haven't experienced that in our face, at least in my lifetime in the political arena. I mean, it's a certain kind of, like he just pulled the rug out from under all the standards, if you will, and actually won. So let's say the people who, not happy that he did it and are terrified, or that, you know, he may wind up being, you know, demagogue, or, you know, sort of whatever, and harm the country in enormous ways.

Well, you could lose your mind over that one and get much more into like a dualism of us versus them. And of course, we're the good guys, whoever we're always the good guys. We don't know who we are, but we know that we're the good guys. And they, they're the bad guys. As soon as you do that, we've been doing this for only like 9,000 years, the tribalism, you know, where it's us against them. Only now it's tribalism with nuclear weapons,

the tribal mind with nuclear weapons. The stakes are very high for the species and for global warming and the well-being of the planet. So there's only one planet. So there's a unity. We're all part, you could say, cells of one body, the body, the politic of the planet, or the ecosystem, or whatever. But, you know, we function more like ecosystems rather than ecosystems. So that's what I mean about

the non-separation of self-another. And that's where love arises. I mean, anybody who has ever experienced love, not a quizitive kind of love. I want that, you know, and you objectifying the other to satisfy a need of your own, but a real authentic recognition of a certain kind of marvel, certain kind of awe, certain kind of beauty. And you can fall in love with a tree or a landscape or the sunrise or a human being or your daughter or son or granddaughter. And there's something mysterious about it. It goes way beyond sort of just me and you. It has to do with a certain kind of we, It has to do with a certain kind of we Because in a sense like

Life is One seamless whole expressing itself and we have the kind of Conceit that we're special, you know The DNA worked out to be me, you know, and I'm real special and the only thing I really care about is more for me getting ahead, how many tweets do I send out and how much people love them? Seems Trump is a lot like that, you know, he really wants to be loved, you know, I mean, it certainly appears that way. And there also it's a psychiatrist and psychologist out there who were very happy during the, you know, the, in the lead up to the election to diagnose him, you know, just from what he's saying in the newspaper and so forth.

But my point is not so much about Trump, but how easily we can fall into an awesome mentality. And there's something about that that is lost, and that is the underlying unity. And what would the skillful political wisdom approach be to that in a time where you're also very well aware of the very, very high level of danger? So what would it be? Because I mean, there is so much disagreement on both sides. So I don't even... First of all, it would be like not knowing, recognizing that maybe you don't know. Maybe thinking's not going to, you know, resolve know. Maybe thinking's not gonna, you know, resolve this. Maybe that's not up to it. Maybe we need deeper intelligences.

We need multiple voices. And this is something that will be a collective enterprise in learning and growing. Unfortunately, like, you know, hopefully, hopefully won't lead to like levels of suffering that are extremely imaginable, but that may be so imaginable, we don't want to go anywhere near it, so unimaginable. That's the risk, but that was actually a risk if Trump had lost, but we would be more asleep, at least part of it, us would be more asleep, and the other part would be more

disgruntled, and feel like the country doesn't care about them. And they're being sort of destroyed by globalism or the digital world or whatever it is. See what it is, we're learning how to be human. And all of this is part of the curriculum, why? Because it came up, it arose. That's the thing about meditation. It's not about finding some special state. It's like whatever arises, that's the curriculum for this moment. Don't

like it. Tough nougies. I mean, it's like, it's here. You want to spend the rest of your life denying it. So that's true for what, you know, some tiny little thought or emotion that goes through you might. And it's also true for the country. And it's true now for the world. So this is the way I frame it, and this is the way I see it. We call ourselves the species, that we call ourselves as a species, homo sapiens, namely the species from the Latin sapere, which means to taste, so a sense or to know. And the Buddhists talk about awareness as a sixth sense, another sense, it's sense. So with a species that knows and knows that it knows, in the sense of not cognition and meta-cognition, but awareness and meta-awareness, that's what it really means.

But that's a very precocious name to give to ourselves. I don't think we've quite lived our way into it in the past, and we haven't been around very long in civilization, human civilization, 400 generations, 500 generations, 600 generations since the last ice age. That's not that many generations. So we have a lot of learning to do to grow into that name we gave ourselves the species that knows and knows it away. The species that has, and the way to do it is by cultivating wakefulness, by cultivating intimacy with awareness, with the good, the bad and the ugly, in a way that doesn't get caught in that dualistic divide, because we know that that leads to delusion greed hatred all in the guys of like well of

course I'm right and they're wrong. Yeah, but how do you take a stand for it? So say your pro Trump and angry at all the protesters who or your angry at maybe Democrats in Congress are going to stand in in the president's way or your anti Trump and your upset about him putting people on an EPA who deny climate change. Absolutely. So how do you take action within this, with the spirit of non-separation that we're all on? That's the colon. That's the puzzle. That's the challenge of the moment. I cannot answer that question because my answer would be a mere cognition or philosophy in the meta-held, smart I was.

It's not possible to answer it. It will be an emergent phenomenon that will be in some sense shaped by every single one of us to the degree that we're willing to show up, stand up, and do what we think is in alignment with our deepest values, and talk with people who are different from ourselves, and see what emerges. I'm of the persuasion, and it's very optimistic, that the actual trajectory, the arc of human evolution over the past, you know, five, six, seven, eight, nine thousand years, is in the direction of less violence and greater wisdom, greater less harm.

But we have the potential to reverse that with one nuclear weapon in the city. And don't forget, we're the only country that ever dropped nuclear weapons on cities and we did it twice. And those things are arguable, but we need to remember that not everybody sees us as the good guys in this particular world, and the kind of decisions that we made, and I don't want to get too into politics, but not everybody in the world sees us legitimately as like the people on the white, you know, the white nights on the white horses, you know, saving the world from itself. There are other viewpoints. And we have to learn to

sort of befriend the other and not other people, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement is all about othering and feeling like we've never really been seen and if I'm driving around in a neighborhood with a tail light out in my car and I happen to be black I met great risk for being shot. If I'm white and I have a tail light out I'm not a great risk for being shot. These are fundamental things that it's very easy to miss when you're white, when you're privileged, when you're... And this is part of mindfulness, is waking up to the ways in which we've been asleep to the suffering of others. And until we, as a species, learn that we are 99.99%

the same genetically and in terms of how we see the world. We're going to continue to kill ourselves over our differences, but with nuclear weapons and the kind of power that we have now, that really would be a very sad chapter in the history of humanity. So who's going to take responsibility for that? Only all of us who care. And to me, that would be a radical act of love

and a radical act of sanity, and again, outside and beyond ideology, but never giving up your human core values. So it sounds like you think of a Trump administration as a massive opportunity to practice mindfulness. Well, we don't have any choice. And since not practicing mindfulness as a massive opportunity to practice mindfulness? Well, we don't have any choice. And since not practicing mindfulness

was never a good idea, because if you're not mindful, you're actually missing your moments. If you miss your moments safe at 20 or 30 years, you might miss your children and growing up and you might really see more of your ideas of who your children are rather than your children, that generates an awful lot of resentment further down the road.

All sorts of things like that, if we were to actually show up in our lives and be more present and let awareness or mindfulness become the default mode and kindness and compassion as well, because they're not different, then rather than mindlessness and reactivity and ushing in theming, then I think we stand at least the Snowballs chance in hell of making it through this and owning the beauty and the wisdom and the creativity and the generativity that happens in our concert halls, that happens in our science labs that happens in our painting studios that arises in the great poems of the world. I mean, when the human mind knows itself, you get all that beauty.

And when the human mind doesn't know itself, you get Auschwitz, you get the killing fields of Cambodia, you get racism, rampant racism, rampant sexism, rampant violence, and we always think it's someone else that's doing it, but there's a certain way in which we have to own the fact that, hey, I'm capable of violence under the right condition. Yeah, well, one of my favorite Buddhist writers, Stephen Bachelors says that if you look into your own mind,

you're going to see a rapist in a kennel. And you see see that's the beauty of it because then you're not othering. And then when you come to terms with that, that was my definition of healing. You actually see that in yourself. Then that's going to change how you conduct your life. You know, because you can always make a choice. Yeah, I might be murderous, You know, because you can always make a choice. Yeah, I might be murderous, but that feeling doesn't have to result in pulling a trigger. I've worked with people in prison who the whole life was changed by one moment where they made a decision, usually when they were out of their mind that landed them in prison, if not dead or shot or machine gunned, and I met met people with, you know, doing yoga and like, oh, I can't lift my, I would, you know, sort of, I remember this very, very, very,

very kind of pulled up a shirt and show them you've been machine gunned across his chest and lived to tell about it, but he couldn't actually do the, you know, the bridge posture the way, you know, he thought he should. And I said like, this is fine. However you're doing it. You get a pass. But, but that's it. I mean, I feel like in a certain way mindfulness

is not a luxury. It's an absolute necessity. And if it was an absolute necessity, I always thought it was based on all the science and the medical results and so forth on November 8th. And it's infinitely more that way since November 9th. And that's in spite of all the hype, and if I can say, on the radio bullshit, and so worth it, that is accruing to mindfulness.

The essence of it, the heart of it, is not denaturable because it's been around for a very, very long time, and it's weathered many, many cycles of dissolution and, you know, so we don't need to sort of promote mindfulness. What we really need to do is embody it in ourselves and see what happens. And to just say, to complete it, that in all Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are the same word. So if you hear me saying the word mindfulness in English and you're not in some sense healing or feeling heartfulness as well, hearing it. Then you're not understanding it because there's an element of kindness and self-compassion that's completely woven into the attending itself. And let's not forget the doctors who see patients in the hospital, they are called attendings.

And you know, and we take training our medical students to not forget the patients, so they mistake the diagnosis for the patient and to really lead with compassion, to lead with kindness, to lead with their own presence, and to listen. All of that's mindfulness. We just want to get back to something you said a couple sentences ago about the BS and the hyper- hyperets around mindfulness You know in some ways you set this whole thing in motion Yeah, so people blame me for a lot of it. They give all especially the Buddha's call old school Buddhists

They they they have some problems. I'm willing to take that I'm well, I think the I think the the wholesome as they would say it or the good so far outweighs the unwholesome and negative that if they want to come after me, that's fine with me. When people, just to fill in listeners, we may not be familiar with this debate. There are, as you well know, some folks in the Buddhist community who are upset about what they call mick-mindfulness, that it's become secularized and that something has been lost in the process and they point at people like you, they also point at people like me, by the way. No, I'm sure they do.

And say you're creating the problem here. Well, I'll tell you one thing about, since you brought up the word secularized, and I know Steven Bachelord would say something different about this. But I've started more and more to stay away from using the word secular and describing mindfulness. I know why people do it, because they want to differentiate it from Buddhist meditation practice. But it is the heart of Buddhist meditation practice.

But it's also non-dual, and the Buddha wasn't a Buddhist. So, you know, it's incontrovertible that this is really universal. And when you say the Buddha wasn't a Buddhist, I love that point because the Buddha didn't think he was starting a religion home. He was teaching people some mental exercises to make fundamental changes. Yeah, and we make it. And this is like one of the Nanduul pieces as well.

See, so if you make Buddhists, Buddhism buddhasms all about non-dual, seamless wholeness of reality. So, but then if you make buddhas and non-buddhas, you've already made a separation. It's fine in the conventional world because you need to separate, like, and it's good because you appreciate the other different kinds of temples, different kinds of religious traditions,

different, but the essence of it is human, it's not Buddhist. You know, Christ wasn't a Christian either when you come right down to it. I mean, I've said that on the airwaves before on television. So we have a certain way of creating separation when even our greatest teachers on the planet were pointing to non-separation, to that kind of a beauty. And I'm trying to loop around in my mind for this thread that I was saw at one particular moment that had to do with secularism. Yes, secularism. Thank you. So I've staying away from the word secular now because it's dualistic. As soon as you say the word secular, then it separates it from what's the

opposite of secular, it's sacred. Okay? And I'm not willing to give up the sacred. If you sit down to meditate, I see that as a radical act of love. And I would say that as sacred as say the Hippocratic oath is sacred in medicine. Yeah, but at least as you start talking about the sacred, it's hard to get the practice into schools and other public spaces. People get nervous. Yeah, that's true. That's why they use the word secular. But I would prefer that they use the word mainstream. Okay, because then it doesn't create the same kind of dualism.

It may create another dualism that I don't recognize, but I've started to sort of talk much more about the mainstreaming of mindfulness because it is universal and it always was universal. And the reason I don't want to give up the word sacred, and it's not just about like hard to bring into schools, because the fact that a matter is that not just the, we talk about the Dr. Patient relationship is being sacred. There's nothing kind of aery-faire or religious about that or spiritual even.

It's sacred. You want your doctor to be present and pay attention to you, listen to you, and not treat you as an object. So that's sacred. Love in some sense, when it's not a quizitive, is also sacred. Our relationship with our children is sacred. And in the last line of the Declaration of Independence, it says, to which we dedicate our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Okay, so that's why I'm not willing to give up the word sacred.

And I see it as kind of a very American and very political and not really see the spiritual or religious but representing kind of wisdom, a kind of reverence that is related to wonder, to awe, to a recognition of what really makes us human and what we would actually stand up and die for. And I see that as beautiful and as sacred, and rather than just go up and, you know, be

shot on the firings by a firing squad or something, why not live that way and let there be no separation between your meditation practice and your life. So that the real meditation practice is not sitting in a cross-legged posture or in a chair and attending to objects of attention and resting and awareness. That's incredibly important. And I hope people pursue it or out there listening to this. But the real meditation practice is how we live our lives moment by moment by moment. How we walk in the door at the end of our work day.

How do we say hello? How do we hug our children? Are we there or are we on the way to something else while we're hugging the kid, but we're also like doing something else. So we're multitasking even at home. And we distract it. Of course, the kids know that instantly. And your spouse or partner knows that instantly. So there's where the rubber meets the road.

Can we be mindful at home? Can we be mindful in the car driving? Can we be mindful when we're out running, rather than distracting ourselves as we're running? What about, I've trained Olympic, the Olympic rowing team in meditation and all sorts of world-class and Olympic athletes in meditation. They don't distract themselves while they're working out

and running. They're tuning in rather than tuning out. It's very, very powerful. So ultimately, the Chicago Bulls practice mindfulness in their championship years, the Los Angeles Lakers, Kobe Bryant, you know, they all practice mindfulness and you know they're all millionaires, they're all very tall, they're all incredibly accomplished at basketball. Why would they do such a thing? Because they're very competitive.

And if they think something's going to give them even a like 10% edge, just pull a figure out of the air. Or even a 1% edge, very competitive people are going to want to go for that. But they recognize that all of the evidence suggests that that's not some very very nonsense thing that five years and now everybody's going to laugh at them. This is like they do it because they can feel that they are more on their game when they are 100% present. And especially in the face of adversity, you're like how you come back after a loss or anything like that. This is like so, whether it's sports or whether it's art, whether it's music, or whether it's science, or whether it's poetry, or whether it's whatever it is. There's in some sense no substitute

for living our lives moment by moment as if they really mattered. And you know, a lot of people say I'm like, worried about dying, you know, and Oprah once asked me, like, total surprise, she said to me, out of the blue, she said, what do you think about life after death? And I said to Oprah, that question is really the wrong question to ask me. I'm not concerned with life after death. I'm concerned with whether there's life before death. And Thorough was very famous for saying in Walden, I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what they had to teach and not when I came to die, discover that I hadn't lived.

So, you know, and if you read Walden, I mean, it's like a rhapsody of mindfulness. He would stand, you know, in the pond, in Walden pond, up to his nose, and just watch the life of the skimmers and the insects and the plants and the birds and stuff. From that perspective, where sitting is the doorway of his home for hours at a time and just listen to the soundscape. This is not becoming more stupid or idiotic. This is not something that's going to make you more less functional. It's going to help you reclaim dimensions of your life that you didn't even know existed.

You're pretty good at this. I think you have a future. I'm too old for a future. I'm happy with just this. What a pleasure. Hey, me too. I mean mean this has really been a huge treat you know I wanted to see you again but it's just like I

had no idea that we'd have this kind of a conversation and listen so deeply to each other I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. John Kabison thank you very much. Okay there's another edition of the 10% happier podcast if you liked it please make sure to subscribe rate us and if John Kabazin, thank you very much. Okay, there's another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. If you liked it, please make sure to subscribe, rate us, and if you want to suggest topics we should cover or guess we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. I also want to thank Hardly, the people who produce this podcast and really do pretty much all the work.

Lauren, Efron, Josh Kohan, Sarah Amos, Andrew Calp, Steve Jones, and the head of ABC News Digital Dance Silver. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free

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