Everyday Mindfulness Meditation by Jon Kabat-Zinn

When MBSR started, Jon Kabat-Zinn had no detailed plans, only enthusiasm and hints that it would come in handy. He recently talked to Mindful about his new master class and shared thoughts on mindfulness and meditation.

Who is Jon Kabat-Zinn?

In 1979, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a microbiologist who works at the School of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester (the School of Medicine of Umar), MA, began a modest eight-week program called MindfulfLoid-based on Stress, inviting patients to take some time. By self-care in the hospital basement. More than forty years later, MBSR teaches the world and has become the gold standard to apply full attention for the tensions of daily life and to investigate whether the practice of full care can improve mental and physical health.

Kabat-Zinn is also the founder of the center for full attention in medicine, medical care and society at the UMASS School of Medicine. He is the author of the full life of the catastrophe: to use the wisdom of the body and mind of him to face stress, pain and illness; Wherever I go, there you are there; Come to our senses; and full attention for beginners. He brings, teaches and conferences around the world in full-minded applications and is a professor of medicine emeritus at the UMASS School of Medicine.

Kabat-Zinn emphasized that mindfulness is not a psychological technique. On the contrary, it is the basic human heritage that is vital to life. In Kabat-Zinn's view, we need to be fully aware of who we are, where we are, and our desire to survive as individuals and communities, and even as a species.

Jon Kabat-Zinn MasterClass

Jon Kabat-Zinn and Mindful founding editor Barry Boyce talk about his new MasterClass and the true meaning of not mastering 

Barry: Let’s start with a very basic question: Is mindfulness a mindset, basic ability, practice, etc.? In an era when this term is widely used, it is much more than in 1979. What do you think is the most important thing about mindfulness, what is it, and why is it important?

Jon: Well, this is a formal meditation practice with many different dimensions and aspects. It requires a certain investment of time and energy to stop and fall into the moment when we must live. Usually, when we take a to-do list from our desk or anything else, we will rush to a better time at some point in the future. One is that mindfulness is a set of formal meditation exercises designed to cultivate non-judgmental awareness of every moment. By the way, not judging does not mean that you will not like or dislike, or that you are completely neutral about everything. Not really judging means that you will realize how picky you are, and then you will not judge it, look at [you can let go], at least for a few minutes, filter all restrictions or dislikes through our likes, dislikes or wishes . . So this is already a great exercise, a great cause, to cultivate that kind of mindfulness and that kind of awareness, and learn to be within yourself.

Then, another aspect of full attention is pure consciousness, it is not only the practice of formal meditation, but in a certain sense life at every moment that we have it to live. 

So it means bringing the practice of formal meditation in the world and let life become life. Professor of meditation and practice, time at the moment, regardless of what comes up. What makes it very challenging because many things can arise in life that create obstacles and problems and stress and emotional pain and physical pain and everything else. Then, this is an important company.

This is not a specific state, if you are really good at meditation, you will be there, and then you can come back to it at any time. That is your base camp where you never get lost. If you try to approach it in this way, you will always strive to achieve a certain special state you imagined. This is the full meaning of mindfulness. In fact, you will lose how special the current situation is anyway. An example is if you listen to this with your ears, the miracle of listening, it is not trivial. How do we really decode the vibration that reaches the ears and activate the tympanic membrane, tympanic membrane, and finally resolve it in the auditory cortex. What we are talking about is the miracle here, this is just listening. Therefore, there are all different areas of vision, sensation, tasting, touch, and human intelligence, including thought and emotion. What we are doing is embracing all of this with consciousness so that we can control every moment with the greatest clarity, calm and balance, not just for our own balance, but to get deep into our hearts. The connection with what actually happened. Because we are social people, this includes all the different ways we integrate into family, history, society, and all aspects, including the planetary aspect of our relationship with nature and mother. Nature and the future that we are passing on to future generations.

Barry: I want to get to that aspect of things a little later in our discussion. Just to return to some of the things you were saying: You have been talking about full attention as a company, and not a state, but is there a natural capacity there that we are cultivating, that is already available to all?

Jon: Well, you have goals, because of course you have been practicing for decades. By the way, there is no correct way to practice. So in this mindfulness room there are many different doors and many different traditions based on mindfulness. The door may look different, but the first approximation of the room is the same. So part of this is that you are willing to immerse yourself in the present, as I said, and understand the present. To do so requires a certain basis of existence, and we are so interested in doing this and reaching other places that we don’t have much contact with the present moment, unless things are exactly what we want them to be. So the point is really to make friends with yourself and see if you can really establish yourself in the realm of existence, rest in the consciousness you don't have to acquire, you are born with conscious ability. What we gain through mindfulness as a formal exercise is access to this core aspect of our humanity, you know, I sometimes say that this may be the ultimate common pathway that makes us humans as a species of Homo sapiens. And this conscience didn't last long in school, at least not until recently. Now it is changing. But it is necessary to truly realize that in addition to thinking is a wonderful form of intelligence, and then emotional intelligence and social intelligence, the core intelligence may be consciousness itself. This scientific understanding is very poor. But the truth is that everyone already has it, so that means you don't need to buy anything.

Make friends with yourself and see if you can really establish yourself in the realm of existence, rest in the consciousness that you don't have to acquire, you are born with the ability to be conscious.

-Jon Kabat-Zinn

What we do in formal meditation practice, in a sense, is to move things away so that we can access, we are cleaning the brush, so to speak, it’s like hindering our ability to truly rest in consciousness, Live in the realm of consciousness. The best starting point is the body. The body is the first foundation of mindfulness. 

So can we bring consciousness into our body in a certain open and receptive way, without letting us fall into what we like and dislike? ? Continue to get along with the body, but in a sense, learn how to live in the consciousness of the body? Then it's like a platform for everything else in the human experience, because it's not just the body.

Present-Moment Awareness and the Body

Barry: Let's talk about the body. Is it possible to overidentify with the body? We have a lot of physical neuroses. So how do you refute in practice?

Jon: It's very simple, Barry, who do you say my body is. It turns out that this is a very interesting study because we will say things like "I'm breathing", but we know we are not trustworthy. In addition, the fact that we sleep most of the time means that if we breathed, we would have died long ago. So even if we say, "I'm breathing" as usual, it is much more complicated than this. We don’t know who is actually saying this, "I have a body" or "I like my body", or "I hate my body" or "I liked my body 35 years ago" are all the same Yes, but I don’t like it now because..." Then all these are actually called thoughts very, very simply. None of this is the truth. Now we are in this field, in this world, the truth itself is what you think it is, because with what is happening in the world, people live in their own bubble of truth. Therefore, one of the real deep and liberating aspects of mindfulness practice is to acknowledge ideas and then realize that they may be real to some extent, but none of them are absolutely real, and many of them are based on preference. Regarding self-fertilization, a kind of "I like this, I don't like that. I want this. I don't want that." When you give it awareness, suddenly you see them like weather patterns in the sky of your mind. They are not the truth about anything. Then, at that moment, you are free from your prejudices. You are liberated from your own thinking patterns, which recognize you in one way and other people in another, and you often ignore our common humanity, and 99.7% of our genes are the same in DNA In fact, it is the same everywhere. Planet. Of course, this will cause all kinds of huge problems. Therefore, in order to complete this article, it is very important for people to understand this. This is one of the main points I emphasized in the MasterClass project. It is not an attempt to go anywhere else. It is to make us where we really are. So from this perspective, I emphasized a lot. Although it sounds crazy, there is nowhere to go. There is no better time than now. There is nothing to do. There is nothing particularly worthy of your realization. When you treat yourself to that kind of moment, suddenly, not long after, you realize that you are at home, you are at home, and you have a great experience. Thoughts, emotions, physical feelings, feelings about this, that and everything. But that's not you. So you can control that field with a certain degree of wisdom, a certain degree of benevolence and compassion, because you don’t have to be in a hostile relationship with the world, even if there is a lot of suffering in this world, so we can help alleviate this suffering , Not only ours, but also global.

One of the truly deep and liberating aspects of mindfulness practice is acknowledging thoughts and then realizing that they may be real to some extent, but none of them are absolutely real.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Barry: So this paradox, actually, is not trying to go anywhere, I mean, we first appear to practice meditation because we have a feeling that we want to do something for one thing or another. At the same time, as you pointed out, if you try to get to a certain place, the attention will become to get to other places...

Jon: This is a big mistake, because if you start from the wrong perspective, 30 years later, even if you are practicing meditation, you will still go in the wrong direction in some way and deceive yourself on certain cores. All aspects of things that are being invited to capture at the moment.

A Non-Master MasterClass

Barry: So this is called a master class. Master how to adapt to the background of meditation?

 Jon: I don’t want to disclose too much, but MasterClass has its own culture. Everyone who provides MasterClass, if they have seen any of them, they will say, “Hi, my name is so-and-so and this is my master class. ." Then I found out I couldn't do it. I don't want to do that, because my particular orientation is that this is not to dominate, but to be good enough. so that? Because no matter what you need to live your own life, you must live with a certain degree of happiness, kindness, sense of belonging, meaning and purpose. So I said, when I introduce the master class, I will say, you know, hi, my name is Jon Kabat-Zinn, this is my non-master class. Therefore, I invite all those who want to join me in this series of 20 meetings, so that they are completely immersed in what we are talking about, rather than trying to reach a better place where you will become stressful, painful or Master of imbalance. Or something similar, but just believing that you are more or less good, you will put more energy into the right things for you, instead of just focusing on the wrong things and trying hard. In order to make yourself better, you will be able to know more and reflect your current beauty and integrity. This is all the meditation practice for thousands of years.

Barry: Although I understand that you did not claim to be a teacher, you have one or two legacy, one of which is of course mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). Although you are very careful when creating agreements and guidelines, you also avoid becoming strict canons, because there is definitely a way to teach this, and there is definitely a way to talk about it. 

Jon: Thank you for admitting that. 

Barry: Why is this important to you, Jon?

Jon: So sad. I mean, this is very important to me because mindfulness is indeed based on some kind of liberating wisdom, which has never been more important in the world than it is now. The more we fall into one or another dualism, as I suggest, one of them is that I am not good enough, I will try to be the best meditator or the most mindful person. I can be. Therefore, if you are teaching MBSR and passing this kind of stuff to people with chronic pain, chronic stress, cancer, and heart disease, then you are not teaching mindfulness, you are teaching some kind of capitalist greedy attempt Solve a problem in a certain way. The liberating dimension of meditation practice is to start from where you are, fully presenting and mastering the available inner and outer landscapes. For example, at any time, as long as you fall into your mind without trying to suppress it or let it disappear or follow it, we are completely conditional to do so, then in a very real way, you are free at that moment. .You are still breathing, you are still alive. This or that may happen in your life, but now you have a way to build a smarter relationship with it. And the part where you rest in your consciousness or live in the consciousness space has no problems, and never has.

Mindfulness is actually based on some kind of liberating wisdom, which has never been more important in the world than it is now.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

This is a way to take over your life. This is now the core of MBSR. How to get those who have not grown up in the tradition of meditation to participate in MBSR through the love of these ancient meditation practices, but there is a way to reconfigure them so that they have common sense of almost anyone and don’t have the feeling to try It is a very difficult task to transform someone into a religious viewpoint or philosophy or something similar. And I have always believed that, to some extent, beyond a certain point, no matter how much we train MBSR teachers, this is not a skill that can be trained.

Yes, you need a whole set of trainable skills to enter a classroom with 30 or 40 people suffering from unimaginable things you never want to have. When you know that you are not always so complete, how will you maintain the integrity of the space? So my belief is, and has been proven countless times in the past 40 years or more, as you mentioned, MBSR, when we provide people with basic core MBSR courses and they learn from them through their own meditation They practice when they understand it internally, they stick to the course, it's like that eight weeks of development space, they bring their own meditation practice; they will know how to teach it. They will know how to wisely respond to spontaneous events in class that you cannot prepare for. If you prepare in a procedural way, when someone comes up with something very painful and you respond with a procedural response that is not in the moment, everyone in the room will know that you are basically pretending What. You are not real yourself, but you are inviting others to be real. So I think it is practically impossible to be an MBSR teacher...that's why I like it so much. Because it basically requires people to practice meditation in a certain way, what they teach is their own understanding of existence and allow others to find their own way, good enough is enough. We are not talking about mastery. We are not talking about achieving a conscious state or a state of total global sympathy. In this state, we are saints walking in the human body, but we are human beings who truly realize life from one moment to the next. What a wonderful opportunity.

Barry: Yes, that's beautiful. I think that if it focuses more on self-improvement plans, it can be understood as a teacher or trainer trying to create an experience or an end point for someone, instead of embodying something, exploring with others, using courses and assemblies as The container of the activity, instead of "well, this is where it should be, this is the result". You know, there is a certain degree of uncertainty.

Jon: You are absolutely correct. If you, as a teacher, feel uncomfortable with this uncertainty, then you are basically drawing based on numbers, and people will immediately recognize it. You are basically following the script, but you are not living according to the script. So it is not alive. The interesting thing is that people like to teach this. I really haven't seen many people teaching MBSR, but I can judge how good the teaching is by what their students say and what their students look like.

When people say this completely changed my life, they are not kidding because they somehow get rid of the old script or narrative about who they are or their abilities, where their lives should go. Now they are dealing with real things in real life...authenticity and a deep sense of interconnection. Therefore, this is a way to pause for a moment and remember and re-understand the true face of life, without falling into all the small seizures that can happen when things go wrong or when you feel stressed.

By the way, this is not only for middle-class or privileged people who have everything and now need to put mindfulness first. I mean, this is basically a core human ability that can be used by almost anyone, no matter what their situation is, no matter what their situation is, because it invites you to bring your whole person into the moment for benefits. To optimize happiness and minimize harm to yourself and others.

Barry: You know, when someone says it changed my life, people may have stuck to the script for a long time, and they start to feel liberated. But the irony is that meditation does not necessarily give you a shiny new script. It's as if he is confident that he can live without a script.

Jon: Yes, it can be said to be a scriptless script. Consciousness can contain all kinds of narrative stories that we build on ourselves. But this goes back to the things you mentioned earlier. It's not only a question of who breathes and whose body, but also who wrote these scripts. Who says they are true in a profound sense? Then when you realize that your consciousness is not limited or imprisoned by the script, the script, you might say, was released. They no longer have the power to keep us in the prison that we have created for ourselves, this kind of narrative that I am too old or I am too this or I am not enough, but it makes us question who is talking. What are these personal pronouns, this me, me and mine?

Again, let me say this because people might think, why on earth do I have a master class? Because it feels like an elite and privilege. The reason I did this is because I was first moved by the people who invented it and their commitment to making it available to people who would never have the ability or interest to subscribe to the master class celebrity type. Therefore, we are doing our best to cover a wide range of different types of people. We are trying to figure out how to do this. This is indeed a collective effort. It's not just me, the whole direction revolves around this. But this is what I tried to do in these 20 lessons of MasterClass. In fact, it is just to visit all the aspects you and I are talking about now in the depth of meditation practice, but it is really easy and easy to understand. Go into these waters and observe what happens and let the exercises do it for you instead of doing the exercises yourself. Because it feels like, oh, I have to add one more thing to a day when I am already too stressed, too busy, and too focused. This is not about dominance, but about living in all dimensions of your existence when you abandon not only the narrative, but also the generator of the narrative. So who is creating these narratives? Me, me and my...personal pronouns.

Healing the World

Barry: You know, I noticed that one of the last episodes of your masterclass series is called Healing the World, and your book "Come to Our Senses" is one of my favorites. You have established a social mission that stems from mindfulness. Is this what you deal with in the "Healing the World" section?

Jon: A lot. You know, again, these are not complete, but they are indicators of something, mindfulness is not just sitting on a mat to experience unity with the universe. But it really recognizes the immense nature of greed, hatred, delusion, and pain in the ocean in which we swim. The profound influence we are seeing is playing a role in the political world all over the world, especially now in the United States, and how to heal some of these wounds, but how not to repeat the same mistakes, which means that it is not just a matter of these people being in power, these People do not hold power to more or less support these social plans or those social plans.

Mindfulness is more than just sitting on a mat and experiencing oneness with the universe. But it really recognizes the immense nature of greed, hatred, delusion, and pain in the ocean in which we swim.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

But the question is what is the nature of the human mind and the human species. How can we learn to live together? The types of weapons we have and the types of our impact on global warming, we can’t go on like this. To some extent, mankind itself is an autoimmune disease of the earth. If we don’t name our species after Linnaeus, Homo sapiens sapiens, it basically means knowing and realizing that it knows the species in the Latin Sapere, which means tasting or knowing. As a species, we may not be able to achieve it, or We will create a world in a very short period of time. In this world, our children will suffer such great suffering no matter what our descendants or future generations are. We will not be able to blame others. It will be self-defeating. Therefore, in my opinion, there has never been a more important moment in human history that allows us to truly awaken to our nature. If there is something stronger than mindfulness or more suitable for this huge cause in that sense, then it is not mindfulness teaching. What I mean is that MBSR has been a political act from the beginning. This is not another therapy we introduced in medicine or psychology. This is a smart way to truly demonstrate its value or proof of concept and develop mindfulness science, it can be at the entire population level, at the entire population level in a way that we can really start. world. Level, challenges us not to fall into a certain use and deadly theme, no matter how different we are from others. But really explore what we have in common to minimize all levels of injury that may develop and maximize happiness, happiness, and security, because this is true health. Whether you are talking about mental health, physical health, or the health of a country, or now, the true health of the planet. So this is what it was all about from the beginning. Wake up is really the framework I tried to build in the early 2000s, so that people will understand that this is not just a simple way to reduce their own happiness, but also because of the interconnection of things, it has a profound impact. If you are willing, there is still impermanence.

Barry: Well, generally speaking, this is a public health method.

 Jon: Completely. 

Barry: And, you know, in this sense, many people who participate in mindfulness practice feel very unhealthy or unhealthy, and feel that when I am in a mess, how can I think of healing the world? Do you need to heal yourself first? Is it in this order? Well, first I must heal myself, and then I can start thinking about healing others and the world, or how do you understand the continuity of your own healing and greater healing?

Jon: I think there may be many different ways, and different people will deal with it in different ways. I believe that as long as you are exposed to your own pain, you can use it to acknowledge the pain of others, even if you actually do nothing. If you start to feel the pain of others, it is not just empathy, but compassion, if something in your heart really touches you. So from this perspective, the more we cultivate this combination of formal meditation, we will practice ourselves to adjust the instrument, and then life itself is the practice of meditation, in a sense, it is a kind of reason and love Radical behavior. Then we can really begin to see that the way we are in the world has undergone changes, small, gradual, but profound changes, especially when they are integrated.

Then, if a large number of people accept this, and more and more people accept it globally, then suddenly we can make a difference. And this is already happening. In the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and Scandinavian countries, mindfulness is now developing in the direction of government and politics. The Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium, who is also a doctor, talked about her mindfulness practice and how it helped her cope with the political challenges she faced in Brussels, not only related to Belgium, but also related to the health of the entire European Union and Europe. , you can say so. Although this sounds like the farthest edge of the fringe of madness that brought meditation into the mainstream. Well, you know, I think the 40 years of MBSR and all other mindfulness-based programs developed in a similar way to treat other aspects of life have reached the point where there is a certain critical mass or critical momentum. This is no longer Like the fringe of a madman. In a sense, it feels like a lifeline being thrown at humans.

And it's like, "Hey ... Do you want to wake up now or do you want to fall in some kind of horror horror that is going to be very, very difficult to return, beyond a certain point?" So the full attention of the world or the healing of the political body, as I put it, is so absolutely important as cure the body. And like our body is made of trillion and trillion of cells, the political body is formed by billions and billions of cells. And the more we recognize that each one of us is a cell of the political body, the healthier we are and the more we take care of the other cells in our neighborhood and maybe in all the different types of ways in which different tissues are Connected We do not go to war between us and create an autoimmune disease of the planet Earth just when we have the potential for a deep healing.

Barry: Thank you Jon. I mean, we have changed from physical mindfulness to physical mindfulness in a very, very large way. It’s always nice to spend time with you and go out to play. I know our readers will like this, and this master class, not a master class, will affect a lot of people and do a lot of good things.

Jon: Thanks, Barry. It’s a pleasure to talk to you and reach out to a broad audience who care about mindfulness and belong to the Mindful family. Finally, I want to tell everyone who has been reading that each of us is very important in this regard. It's not like you are listening to the teacher to do things their way. In a sense, no matter how much you want to take on this karmic task, you are not only the master of your own life, but also the master of your relationship with others and reality. This is a very deep love story that tells the deepest and best thing among all of us. There is no correct way to do this. There is no hero or heroine riding a white horse to save mankind. In a sense, it depends on every cell of the political body to connect the most beautiful things in your body. If that is the practice of meditation, from my point of view, what exactly is it, then put your ass on the mat, so to speak, for the formal tuning of the instrument, the restoration of your possibility becomes Complete change. The act of reason and love, not another thing I have to adapt to my already over-stressed and busy day. Well, thank you. 

Barry: Thanks, Jon. Until next time, keep it in good condition. 

Jon:  You too.