Barry Boyce interviews Jon Kabat-Zinn, who was a keynote speaker at the Creating a Mindful Society conference in New York City. (Click here to view the livestream).
Does mindfulness go beyond simply cultivating our attentiveness?
The ultimate promise of mindfulness is much larger than that, more
profound. It helps us understand that our conventional view of ourselves
and even what we mean by “self” is incomplete in some very important
ways. Mindfulness helps us recognize how and why we mis-take the
actuality of things for some story we create, and then makes it possible
to chart a path toward greater sanity, well-being, and purpose.
Why do you think a scientific approach is important in spreading the practice of mindfulness?
I am not really interested in “spreading” mindfulness, so much as I am
interested in igniting passion in people for what is deepest and best
within all of us, but which is usually hidden and rarely accessible.
Science is a particular way of understanding the world that allows some
people to approach what they would otherwise shun, and so can be used as
a skillful means for opening people’s minds. By bringing science
together with meditation, we’re beginning to find new ways, in language
people can understand, to show the benefits of training oneself to
become intimate with the workings of one’s own mind in a way that
generates greater insight and clarity.
The science is also showing interesting and important health benefits
of such mind–body training and practices, and is now beginning to
elucidate the various pathways though which mindfulness may be exerting
its effects on the brain (emotion regulation, working memory, cognitive
control, attention, activation in specific somatic maps of the body,
cortical thickening in specific regions) and the body (symptom
reduction, greater physical well-being, immune function enhancement,
epigenetic up and down regulation of activity in large numbers and
classes of genes). It is also showing that meditation can bring a sense
of meaning and purpose to life, based on understanding the nonseparation
of self and other. Given the condition we find ourselves in these days
on this planet, understanding our interconnectedness is not a spiritual
luxury; it’s a societal imperative.
Three or four hundred years ago, not so long in the scheme of things,
people practicing meditation did so under fairly isolated conditions,
mostly in monasteries. Now meditation is being practiced and studied in
laboratories, hospitals, and clinics, and is even finding its way into
primary and secondary schools. The people teaching and researching it
have in many cases been involved with mindfulness for ten, twenty,
thirty, or more years by now. They are not just jumping on some new
mindfulness bandwagon. And their work has resulted in many professionals
being drawn to mindfulness for the first time. That in itself is a
wonderful phenomenon, as long as it is understood that mindfulness is
not merely a nice “concept” but an orthogonal way of being that requires
ongoing practice and cultivation.
What are some of the new frontiers that mindfulness has entered in recent years?
The mindfulness work is spilling into areas way beyond medicine and
healthcare and also beyond psychology and neuroscience. It’s moving into
programs on childbirth and parenting, education, business, athletics
and professional sports, the legal profession, criminal justice, even
politics. For instance, Tim Ryan, a Democratic congressman from Ohio,
has become a major advocate of greater support for mindfulness research
and program implementation in both healthcare and education, based on
his own experiences with ongoing practice. In so many different domains,
it’s becoming recognized as virtually axiomatic that the mind and body
are and always have been on intimate speaking terms, at least
biologically. We need to learn to be much more tuned in to the
conversation and participate actively if we are going to function
effectively and optimize our health and well-being.
Does the synchronizing of mind and body bring benefits beyond functioning effectively?
The awareness we are speaking of when we are using the term
“mindfulness” also encompasses the motivations for our actions, for
example, the ways we are driven by self-aggrandizement or greed. In the
financial crisis of 2008-2009, we’ve seen the effects of greed played
out on a massive scale in the banks and insurance companies. Healing
that disease won’t just be a matter of bailouts, stimulus packages, and
magically creating greater confidence in the economy. We need to create a
different kind of confidence and a new kind of economics, one that’s
not about mindless spending but is more about marshalling resources for
the greater good, for one’s own being, for society, and for the planet.
Mindfulness can help open the door to that by helping us go beyond
approaches that are based on conceptual thought alone and are driven by
unbounded and legally sanctioned greed.
It seems that the notion that we can think our way out of our big problems has been tarnished recently.
That’s a key point. Even very, very smart people—and there are plenty
of them around—are starting to recognize that thinking is only one of
many forms of intelligence. If we don’t recognize the multiple
dimensions of intelligence, we are hampering our ability to find
creative solutions and outcomes for problems that don’t admit to
simple-minded fixes. It’s like having a linear view in medicine that
sees health care solely as fixing people up—an auto mechanic’s model of
the body that doesn’t understand healing and transformation, doesn’t
understand what happens when you harmonize mind and body. The element
that’s missing in that mechanical understanding is awareness.
Genuine awareness can modulate our thinking, so that we become less
driven by unexamined motivations to put ourselves first, to control
things to assuage our fear, to always proffer our brilliant answer. We
can create an enormous amount of harm, for example, by not listening to
other people who might have different views and insights. Fortunately,
we have more of an opportunity these days to balance the cultivation of
thinking with the cultivation of awareness. Anyone can restore some
degree of balance between thinking and awareness right in this present
moment, which is the only moment that any of us ever has anyway. The
potential outcomes from purposefully learning to inhabit awareness and
bring thought into greater balance are extremely positive and healthy
for ourselves and the world at large.
On the other hand, if we continue to dominate the planet the way our
species has for the past six or seven thousand years, it could be very
unhealthy. Regardless of the beauty that’s come out of civilization, we
could continue on a path of colossal upheavals that basically come from a
human mind that does not make peace with itself—war, genocide, famine,
grossly inadequate responses to natural disasters. These upheavals could
destroy everything we hold most dear.
Earlier you talked about the promise of mindfulness being much greater than simply focusing attention. What are some of the keys to bringing about the profound effects of mindfulness that you’ve been talking about?
Ultimately, the path is uncertain. All we can do is listen deeply to
the calling of our own hearts and of the world, and do the best we can. I
emphasize the universality of the power of mindfulness and awareness,
but I’m not talking about a universal church or a universal religious
movement. I’m talking about understanding the nature of what it means to
be human. I don’t even like to use the word “spiritual.”
Can we simply address what it means to be human—from an evolutionary
point of view, from an historical point of view? What is available to us
in this brief moment when the universe lifts itself up in the form of a
human sentient body and being, and we live out our seventy, eighty, or
ninety years (if that), and then dissolve back into the undifferentiated
ocean of potential? A lot of the time we become so self-absorbed, so
preoccupied, that we don’t pursue the kind of fundamental inquiry
Aristotle proposed when he made the comment that “The unexamined life is
not worth living.”
In addition to developing a universal, nonreligious vocabulary, I have
tried to stress the critical importance of the non-dual aspect of
meditation by emphasizing that it is not about getting anywhere else.
This of course immediately brings up a lot of bewilderment in people,
because almost everything we do seems to be about trying to get
somewhere else. Why on earth would you not want to get somewhere else?
If you’re in a lot of pain, or if you have some kind of illness or
whatever, you always want to get back to where you were, or get to some
better place in the future. It sounds almost un-American just to settle
for what is, but that is a misunderstanding of the potential for living
in the present moment. It’s not a matter of settling. It’s a matter of
recognizing that, in some sense, it never gets any better than this.
What do you mean?
Quite simply, the future is not here, even though we can create as many
illusions about it as we’d like. The past is already over. We have to
deal with things as they are in the moment. So, it’s most effective to
deal with them if you don’t perpetrate illusions on yourself about the
nature of your experience, and then fall into wishful thinking or
ambition that drives you to create more harm than good.
When we delude ourselves about the true nature of our experience, we
not only harm other people. We also harm ourselves, because we don’t
befriend certain elements of who we are, of our basic connection to
others and to our environment. That’s very sad and very unsatisfying.
Healing and transformation are possible the moment we accept the
actuality of things as they are—good, bad, or ugly—and then act on that
understanding with imagination, kindness, and intentionality. This is
not easy or painless, by any means, but it is both an embodiment of and a
path toward wisdom and peace.
In this regard, we are trying to create a way of speaking about
mindfulness as a practice, a way of being, and also as the culmination
of the practice in any given moment that is so commonsensical that
people will say, “Of course, that makes sense. It makes sense to be in
the present moment, to be a little less judgmental or at least be aware
of how judgmental I am. Why didn’t I notice this earlier? It’s so
obvious.”
Who can we rely on to do the work of bringing this message to more people?
This is a huge challenge, given how imprisoned we are and how blinded
by our own conditioning. There simply aren't enough great teachers to go
around. Plus, not everybody can hear it in the language of the
traditional meditation vehicles. So perhaps we need many highly
dedicated and skillful meditation teachers, steeped in their own
practice, to fulfill the need that’s waiting out there. There’s so much
suffering in the world. Who are we not to respond to it in some way?
That is why a lot of our efforts in MBSR go into professional training,
toward developing a whole new generation of people deeply grounded in
this universal dharma expression and committed to bringing it into the
world in various ways as a skillful means for healing and transformation
at a time that the world is crying out for kindness and wisdom.
What’s required to teach mindfulness other than a good human heart?
If we are teaching mindfulness in one setting or another, it really
needs to be grounded in our own first-person experience. It needs to be
grounded in humility and not-knowing, an openness to possibility but
also a deep seeing into self and other. Since it’s available to all of
us, it’s not really such a big deal or a special private possession.
Of course, some people will take mindfulness and other practices and
put their own stamp on them. Some people are going to make a big
campaign out of it without really understanding the depth of it, or
understanding mindfulness only in a partial way. The inevitable
possibility that some people may approach or exploit these teachings and
practices in misguided ways is part of the price of the success of
bringing mindfulness into the larger culture.
One of the big responsibilities of those of us who are doing this work
is to nurture and mentor the younger people and those who are coming to
it for the first time. We can remind them, or clarify for them, that it
is not just a fad or merely a smart career move at the moment to become a
mindfulness teacher or exponent. The value of mindfulness is both
profound and unique. It calls us to take a deep look into the nature of
experience itself, and the nature of our own minds and hearts. This is a
kind of scientific inquiry, since the mind is really a huge mystery
from the scientific point of view.
All of this work hinges on appreciating how awareness can balance
thought. There’s nothing wrong with thinking. So much that is beautiful
comes out of thinking and out of our emotions. But if our thinking is
not balanced with awareness, we can end up deluded, perpetually lost in
thought, and out of our minds just when we need them the most.
