Jon Kabat-Zinn is the father of modern mindfulness practice. As a professor of medicine, he founded the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts – which both popularized and added an important experiential and scientific element to the practice of mindfulness.

In this episode Jon and Marc explore what Jon calls awareness as a super power. This is the practice of going beyond our thinking minds and view of self and accessing the depth of who we actually are and the power of love. Jon describes practices for turning suffering into wisdom. Jon is an amazing person and presence and this conversation is practical, aspirational, and transformative.

 

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. is Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he founded its world-renowned Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Clinic in 1979, and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society (CFM), in 1995. Both the MBSR Clinic and the CFM are now part of UMassMemorial Health.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:03] Marc: Welcome to Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Times, this is Marc Lesser. Why Zen Bones? Our world is in crisis and ever shifting, and now more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership. My guest today is Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is considered the father of modern mindfulness practice. As a professor of medicine, he founded the mindfulness-based stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts. This both popularized and added an important experiential and scientific elements to the practice of mindfulness.

His aim has always been about greater health and wellbeing on every level from the individual medical patient or person trying to optimize their health to society more broadly as well as to the health of the planet as a whole. In today’s episode, we explore what he calls the superpower of awareness, going beyond thinking minds and view of self, and accessing the depth of who we actually are and of the power of love. He describes practices for turning suffering into wisdom. Jon is an amazing person in presence, and our conversation is practical, aspirational, and I hope transformative. I hope you enjoy today’s episode. Welcome, Jon. It’s really great to see you.

[00:01:44] Jon: Nice to be here.

[00:01:46] Marc: One of the stories I tell about how we met is that– I think this is a true story, I was teaching a mindfulness and meditation class at Google to a room full of Google engineers. You walked in as though you were one of the students and sat down in the class, and it was just so delightful. As I recall, you even raised your hand and asked me a question. I thought, “Oh, man, how am I going to answer this?” It was just super sweet.

[00:02:14] Jon: I remember that day. I remember the room. I was just so pleased by the entire effort in those early years to really bring the Dharma into the heart of this new enterprise that I won’t call the beast, which was in a certain sense supposed to be liberating us from all sorts of other beasts and how important it was to be offering this to people who are in the future, so that they create a future that it’s possible to live in present moments.

[00:03:00] Marc: Just to unpack that a little bit, this was at Google’s headquarters several years ago when I was there doing these trainings mostly for Google engineers. It’s interesting that you use that word Dharma, that was always what we were doing, but we were translating Dharma or translating wisdom and Prajñā and with this aspirational idea of can we bring this into the modern workplace? It was so great to have your support there, especially in those early days as we were very much experimenting and finding our way about how do we teach, how do we bring these mindfulness practices, meditation practices into the corporate world?

[00:03:58] Jon: What year was that? Do you remember?

[00:03:59] Marc: I do. That was probably 2007 or 2008 that you were there.

[00:04:08] Jon: I remember because it’s on my website, both of those Google talks, because at that point, it was very unusual to actually film a talk. Who did that? Now of course, everything is filmed and everything is uploaded to YouTube. Nobody ever dies anymore, they just migrate to YouTube. I think I have a lot of confidence that in some sense, that Dharma does itself, that wisdom is a intrinsic quality or opacity of life, and as part of life, we have the potential and also in some sense, the responsibility to offer whatever it is that we feel is potentially illuminating, liberating, calming, nurturing, and just whoever’s receptive to it will benefit potentially and then pay it forward.

[00:05:21] Marc: Whenever I’m teaching it, and in these conversations, I always hold that what I heard you just describing as the highest aspiration, may people be transformed, may people be changed and healed. Then there’s the second area or at least maybe you’ll have a few practices, a few tools and practices if your life– one or the other, transformation is the highest aim, but at least some practical ways that you can take something that you heard or learned during this time that you can integrate into your daily life.

[00:05:54] Jon: Agreed. I agree that you don’t want to set the bar so high that it may be super pure and totally right, but nobody gets it and it just doesn’t make any sense within the framework of one’s life. I feel like you start with transformation and work backwards, healing is a very important element of this work, whether you’re at work or at home or whatever you do, family and so forth, that there’s all sorts of suffering that’s actually intrinsic to being human. It’s not our fault or anything like that. The healing of that suffering, which means learning how to be in wise relationship to it or coming to terms with it, contributes directly to that transformation that you were talking about.

That healing comes from never stopping learning and growing. There’s a an arc, which I think is part of human evolution, actually, is like an evolutionary arc that we’re creatures who are capable of actually learning and just wagging our tongues like this, and you’re being able to understand me across thousands of miles and with computers and everything, but even if we’re in the same room, the miracle of language. We use it all the time and of course it’s completely related to thought. These miracles are completely taken for granted. When you stop taking them for granted and recognize their power, then learning actually catalyzes growing, like real growing into ourselves, into adulthood, you might say, or into planetary adulthood or into compassionate embodiment or whatever you want to call it.

Then that itself contributes to the furtherance of healing in the way we were talking about, and then that transformation. I don’t see them as actually even linear. I think it’s all rolled up into one, and everybody traverses this territory in uniquely different ways. I just love that.

[00:08:07] Marc: Of course, as I’m listening to you right now, I am thinking and acknowledging that all of the people who are listening to you at some point will be having their own conversation with you, will be hearing your words, will have wide, vast difference depth of what it is you’re saying. That, to me, whether it’s in all of our healing, this is a lot of how I spend my day job is trying to help people align around what people are saying and listening, and how vastly different it can be in all relationships.

[00:08:50] Jon: There’s a certain [unintelligible 00:08:52] of beauty in the present moment, which is very fleeting, but it has elements of real transformative power because it’s uniquely synthesized by a mind in ways we don’t understand. That’s where creativity and imagination come into the embodied living in a certain way. If you went back and heard something that impressed you 10 years ago, some talk or maybe that Google talk that I gave for whatever reason you’re going listen, or I went and listen, I might be completely appalled at what I said and how unskillful it was or how wrong in some ways or whatever.

That’s a beautiful part of the adventure is that there’s a certain lack of precision about it, a certain built-in imprecision that we need to be compassionate about, both in ourselves and in each other, and then understand that in some way, the big picture is a reflection of the [inaudible 00:10:03] of all of that uncertainty in the present moment and how amazingly beautiful that is. I’m thinking because I know that you’re a parent, there’s the mystery of having children and grandchildren, and the universe of communication and non-communication in ways that actually are profoundly humbling and also, I guess I would say, enchanting.

[00:10:29] Marc: One of the things that was really striking to me, again, I’m going back to where we first met at Google, was the paradox or the precision, and the non-precision. Maybe precision, and you use the word enchantment or flexibility, that there is a precision to the technology that we’re using. Here we are amazing precision that is allowing these computers to work, that the coding that took place to make this technology work.

I think one of the things that Google engineers were enthralled by letting go of that and being more spontaneous, listening in a different way the importance of creating more open and safe spaces.

It doesn’t mean that you’re not precise when you need to be precise. I felt like I was getting lessons there. I needed to be more precise in how I was describing meditation and mindfulness. Sometimes we would bring in the science often and there was a certain important sense of precision in the science of meditation, very different, I think often than one’s experience. That was interesting to me, that distinction between science. You’re a scientist, and you’re a mindfulness teacher, you have both of those parts in you.

[00:12:09] Jon: Yes. There’s an unseen beauty in a certain way. Scientists, I think and appreciate this in a particular way but engineers in a different way, perhaps, and everybody in their own way are beautiful matrix, interactive, continually changing matrix between the known and the unknown, or what one thinks one knows because often we think we know a lot, and we actually don’t know half as much as we think we do. The beauty of the unknown which is not necessarily a problem. It’s its own seduction. What’s next? What is possible? That’s where, of course, imagination and creativity really do come into the picture.

It’s not just about science and technology, but it’s about home life [unintelligible 00:13:02] thing or relationships, living one’s life, and not missing all one’s moments. It’s possible, as Thoreau famously said in Walden, to live in such a way that right before you die, you wake up and realize, as he put it, that I hadn’t lived because you were so caught up in all of the thinking mind-stuff and wanting things to be different that you actually got it all wrong. Didn’t see your children, didn’t appreciate and weren’t there for whatever it was, or were there in body but weren’t there and they knew it. You realize that, and then you die.

Part of this work, whether you’re doing it in a corporate setting, or in a hospital, or in a school, or anywhere else, is to actually encourage people to wake up now because there’s no time to lose. The future is a figment of our imagination. There’s only this moment. Yet we’re always living in the past in the future and the present moment gets completely eradicated and that’s the only place where we can actually see, hear, smell, taste, touch, love, understand, and know that we’re not understanding and then live that. It’s not like, “I’ll be okay in the future when I’ve meditated for 30 years.” You’ll just be 30 years older, but you won’t be any better off.

The point is not to improve on yourself, it’s to recognize your beauty now because there’s no improving on it, you just get older and things disintegrate. It’s like just the second law of thermodynamics, that everything is going more towards disorder and entropy. Recognize the miracle as [unintelligible 00:15:02] put it, the miracle of the present moment, the miracle of mindfulness, the ability to be awake and aware in this timeless, non-dimensional moment. It’s insanely illuminating and life-supporting in a certain way that just opens up enormous possibilities. For anybody and everybody, it’s not like you’re, you have to be special, or you have to go sit in a Zen monastery as you’re pointing out. No, that’s, of course, great to do if that’s your [inaudible 00:15:38] point of your life.

The reason I started the MBSR clinic in the hospital was because I felt like, well, hospitals are dukkha magnets, there is a lot of suffering. If you’re suffering beyond a certain point, you wind up in a hospital and you usually don’t walk in by yourself, you’re carried on the stretcher. The ambulances come, they take you. Where are they going to take you? Unfortunately, with the earthquake, and 22,000 people’s lives just wiped out in a fraction, second or day. Hospitals are the place where people go when they’re suffering. What better place to actually offer some elements of wisdom around how to be in wiser relationship to suffering, and actually, potentially transform that suffering into wisdom?

[00:16:37] Marc: Yes. The messages I’m hearing one is, don’t wait. You don’t have to wait. In fact, I was just meeting with a friend of mine who was just given a prognosis of having three to six months to live. Actually, it was a great gift being with her. She was so buoyant in a way, somehow, for some people actually knowing that our time is limited but our time is limited no matter how old we are. I hear you leaning into that. Also, you don’t need to wait till we’re in the hospital either, that the sense of waking up to our whatever our suffering is-[00:17:22] Jon: Yes, better not to wait because it’s true, we only have moments to live, all of us. Of course, that’s a play on words but it’s an incredible opportunity, or a wake-up call to say, “Hey, don’t take this one for granted thinking you’ll get more,” because every time we breathe out, if somehow the organism– and it isn’t up to us, but if somehow the organism didn’t take another breath in, it’s over. Every moment, there’s a certain way in which we’re dying and being reborn literally metabolically, biochemically. It’s not that one wants to get [unintelligible 00:18:09] preoccupied with this but to recognize the beauty and the power and the gift of the present moment.

Learn, train oneself actually, to be more in the present moment, to recognize what keeps us from it which of course is where it intersects with what you do enormously because the digital world is basically an enormous force that often is one of perpetual distraction and seduction because a lot of it’s really fun and interesting, or, I don’t know, appealing in one way or another to one part of oneself. You can get so seduced and wind up betraying yourself because you only have 24 hours, and you’ve devoted six or seven of them to stuff on YouTube. It may be the greatest stuff on YouTube but there’s other aspects to life. If you don’t nurture those, then there’s a certain way in which that’s its own form of a disease.

[00:19:20] Marc: Many years ago, I led a one-day meditation retreat for a group of Google engineers, and mostly we sat for the day. Most of them, the first time that they’ve had the experience of what it was like to enjoy the silence, enjoy the present moment and they said, “Wow, this was transformative. Do we need to quit our jobs at Google and go live in a monastery?” I said, “Well, you could there’s something to that, but I think you need to bring the monastery into your day-to-day life.”

[00:19:58] Jon: Because you did, as I understand it, spent years in a monastery and not just any monastery, a really hardcore Soto Zen monastery that’s like most people wouldn’t survive for 24 hours. Just the wake up time and the ways in which everything is regulated in a particular way.

[00:20:22] Marc: I think part of that training– there’s many, many parts to it, but one is turning difficulties and challenges into exciting possibilities. Wow. I get to get up at 3:40 this morning. Can you believe it? That’s going to be amazing. I get to walk in the dark and look at the stars on my way to the meditation hall. Like, wow.

[00:20:47] Jon: A lot of people don’t wake up with that thought. They wake up with, what the hell did I sign up for?

[00:20:54] Marc: I had many of those mornings as well. Recently, went back, did a three month practice period. The second morning, I was like, what was I doing. [chuckles]

[00:21:05] Jon: Well, that’s the beauty of it, is that you rapidly recognize that all of our thoughts are completely out of control. They have a life of their own and they’re like a prison. They form certain kinds of boundaries and barriers. Einstein had significant things to say about this. We live within this prison of our own creation which is not the actuality. Whether it’s a Zen monastery or some other form of Dharma practice or mindfulness practice, the recognition that you only have moments to live really is an invitation to see the boundless spaciousness of this moment and to learn how to live inside what I call the domain of being, as opposed to having a constant agenda for just getting the next thing done.

The recognition as you’re sitting with your mind day in, day out for hours at a time, sitting and walking, that the mind has a life of its own and it’s just going to do whatever the hell is going to do. When you recognize that those are just like weather patterns, that they’re not the truth of anything, that you don’t have to quit or run away or do something else just because you’re thinking mind is telling you you have to do that, then you begin to reclaim the full dimensionality of your being. That being dimension, that human being, not human doing. That’s deeply related to mental health, deeply related to physical health, all the way down to the level of gene expression apparently.

Of course, affects one’s level of joy and engagement in the world in a way that is meaningful and that is not self preoccupied and self-centering so that you can actually be of use in the world and recognize that you’re part of an infinitely larger web of connectedness and wholeness with other beings, not just human and with the planet itself. Which is really an important realization given what we now know about global climate change, warming, all of that stuff, which is really, you could say science teaching us to be mindful of the body of the planet and its wellbeing. You take photographs of the glaciers from space over 50 or 60 years and you realize like they haven’t changed in 600,000 years and now all of a sudden the glaciers are virtually gone.

The ice sheets in the North Pole, there’s open water there for many more months than there used to be within my lifetime. Then Antarctica, the ice sheet, the edges are falling into the ocean. This is a wake up call. This is not different from in the monastery. It’s a wake up call for humanity. That’s mindfulness practice coming out of our technological capacity to sense and be aware of what the planet’s doing. The Amazon and the Congo Rainforest, these are spoken of as the lungs of the planet. It’s not just some nice poetic metaphor. They are the lungs of the planet, including the oceans and algae and so forth. We need to take care of those lungs because if you eradicate your lungs, it’s a lot worse than what smoking will do to you.

From that point of view, it’s all mindfulness. We are looking in the mirror and understanding what we’re doing to ourselves in a way that actually requires us to show up with a different open spaciousness of heart and mind and then intelligence.

[00:25:18] Marc: It’s a subtle and profound shift in a way of being, as though we can’t shift our economy though, it’s as though it’s going to be bad for the stock market or bad for the economy if we shift towards taking care of the planet. It’s like this idea of ignoring, as you were saying, use your metaphor, ignoring our lungs, ignoring our bodies for some sense of material concern. That material concern, it’s important in a way, but it’s completely insignificant in comparison.

[00:25:51] Jon: Well, if we think of it as wealth or riches and concentrated riches, of course, everybody wants concentrated riches in wealth. Capitalism does have its way of lifting people out of poverty. China lifted more people out of poverty than any other country ever without. In some ways it’s more of a capitalist country than the United States in economic terms. In political terms, like [inaudible 00:26:22], the honoring of the individuals in the society. I think we’re really at an inflection point on the planet and all governments. If it’s all really about governing, the first question is how do you govern yourself?

To go back to [inaudible 00:26:39] or to go back to the Chinese Chan Masters, it’s like, how are you in relationship to the experience? Then that’s a very focused question in a way. It’s also the biggest question in the world because the interesting piece is who are you? Not just how are you, who are you? If you begin to actually question who am I or what am I? Of course, that’s the deepest meditative [inaudible 00:27:08] practice of all, Ramada Maharshi’s practice. Who are you? There’s the mystery of– As my Zen teacher used to say, open your mouth and you’re wrong, attached to any thought. That gives you a definitive answer. That answer will not be anywhere near complete enough.

To me, this is what we’re talking about is not just, “Oh, now everybody’s got to go and buy a meditation cushion and sit on it and have pain in their knees and just be a real tough guy for an extended period of time and you’ll get some benefit in the long term from it.” It’s so much not that. It’s about a love affair with who you actually are when you realize or recognize even for a brief moment that you’re not the story you tell yourself about who you are, the story of me and then fill in the blank, how pathetic I am, how fabulous I am. It’s the I am part that needs some degree of inquiry and investigation.

Everybody knows that in the middle of the night when things are not going well, you wake up and you know your story’s not true but you don’t have anything to fall back on. Yes, you do, actually. You have to fall back on what you might call this. If it comes down to, well, how about just this breath? Just never mind this breath, just this in-breath. Just the pause at the peak of the in-breath and okay, now what is it? This out breath. You actually give yourself over to attending in that way. I see that as a love affair with life and with the domain of being, which so far transcends the narrative, the story of me or even the story of humanity that then we get into this not knowing and that’s where all the creativity and beauty and love lies when we practice in that way.

It would be criminal, at least this is, in some sense, why I started doing what I do, it would be criminal to keep that only within sequestered monasteries on mountain tops. This is like something that– it’s not like everybody should be a Buddhist, no. Everybody should be a human being and then relate to the full dimensionality of that humanity using all of the various things that people have figured out over the millennia about what’s helpful. Meditation, the way we’re speaking about it is really helpful. Is it hard? Yes. It’s the hardest thing in the world, perhaps, except that it’s also just the mind saying that it’s hard because how hard is it to actually be who you really are?

A lot of it’s more just getting out of your own way and then learning how to be patient and cultivate equanimity so that when the proverbial stuff hits the proverbial fan, either in your mind or outside in the world, you don’t lose your mind when you most need it. That’s like exercising a muscle. You work with the resistance of the weight and nobody likes to– the weight keeps getting heavier the more you do the contractions. Over time, something’s starting to grow in that way. The mind wanders, you bring it back. Each time you’re seeing what’s on your mind, I can’t believe that’s in my mind too. I’m identifying with it and I attach to it and you bring it.

You just let it be. You don’t push it away. You just let it be. You bring your mind back and you hold it in awareness so that you’re not forgetting what’s unfolding. I don’t know any other way to describe it but as a love affair with the actuality of being and the miracle of being alive, especially at this particular moment, where the technology alone, like the photographs that we’re getting from the infrared web; James Webb Space Telescope, you want to see where humans and the earth and the solar system really come from. Just go on that website and take a look at the photographs.

[00:31:27] Marc: I’m mulling over your words of a love affair with the actuality of being. I think I want to bring in our– we each have a book about to come out and I so appreciated your words about my book. We were talking as we were preparing about one of the chapters in my book is called Drop the Story, or Dropping the Story, right? Dropping the story of me and opening up to this love affair. I want to ask you about your book, which I know is about pain and working with pain. I wonder is there the key practice that you describe about skillful Dharmic ways to work with pain in our lives?

[00:32:15] Jon: Well, when I set up the Stress Reduction Clinic, the MBSR program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979, that’s 44 years ago. The idea was that people don’t go to the hospital for fun usually, they go when there’s no alternative, suffering. Western medicine and western science and biology has come a long way in terms of understanding disease and the causes of disease and potential treatments for disease, especially, infectious diseases. Just witnessed how quickly they came up with a vaccine for COVID. Globally, it’s a horrible thing, but they did it in less than a year. That’s because of all these sciences that have developed over the past 100 years.

There’s also this inner dimension of disease that the Buddhist talk about as dukkha. It’s the first of the four noble truths. It’s often missed as life is suffering, which is not what it’s about at all. It’s that there is the challenge of suffering. There is suffering. Now how are we going to be in [inaudible 00:33:36] relationship to it? Since hospitals function, like dukkha-magnets in society, when the pain gets too intense, that’s where you get taken. Why shouldn’t hospitals, aside from all of the scientific medicine that they’re using to help people with whatever conditions they arrive at, especially the chronic ones where we don’t actually know what to do to really be helpful, why not teach people how to contribute to their own liberation from suffering and from pain conditions?

We were seeing an awful lot of people sent from the pain clinic. They actually got rid of the pain clinic in the Department of Anesthesiology after a while. I never understood why, but it had to do with funding. Somehow or other, they would not fund pain therapy. It was insane. What’s a hospital for if not for that? Anyway, the idea of the MBSR program was to have a clinic where doctors could refer people that they no longer knew what to do with, but were still suffering. Then we would teach them these ancient practices and just see what would happen in terms of their level of suffering.

We can make a big distinction as often as done between pain and suffering. Pain as they like to say, is inevitable, but suffering, and I’m not sure I love this way of putting it, suffering they say is optional, but when it’s happening to you, it doesn’t feel optional at all. I want to be as compassionate about that as possible. There is some wiggle room there for how one is in relationship to the pain, whether it’s somatic pain, emotional pain, cognitive pain, social pain, or some giant [inaudible 00:35:37] containing all of that and how you are in relationship to that versus the suffering because the suffering can be worked with in a certain way and it is possible to have these elements of pain and not suffer.

That was what it was about MBSR was set up to be. The stress reduction clinic was set up to be a safety net to catch people falling through the cracks of the healthcare system and challenging them to do something for themselves that nobody on the planet could do for them. It has to do with just how to be in a [inaudible 00:36:13] relationship with what they’re experiencing, especially, when it really hurts. Whether you want to differentiate it, it’s physical pain or emotional pain or obsessive cognitive contraction or whatever. Mostly we’re talking about physical pain, people being sent from the pain clinic and from the department of anesthesia and the orthopedic clinic of people with pain and, of course, the general medicine.

We would train them in all these meditative practices, including mindful Hatha yoga, by the way, which is an incredibly important part of it, see what would happen. What would happen is that in eight weeks, people who had been suffering with their conditions for eight years, we’re seeing things like, ”I feel like I’ve got my life back. I feel like I have a way of being with it.” You say, ”Has the pain disappeared?” No, the pain’s the same. My headaches are still here. Of course, headaches are the easiest thing to have go away and so often they do, but “My back pain– or whatever, “It’s still there?” “Yes, it’s still there, but I have a different relationship to it.”

That’s where the suffering gets attenuated. This book, to come back to that mindfulness meditation for pain relief is basically meant to be a user-friendly door into that space, into that universe. It’s very large type and it’s in multiple colors with beautiful illustrations and then brief encapsulations of the various guided meditations that we’ve been using for 44 years to help people wake up to this potential dimension of healing that’s been here right under our noses, all puns intended from the very beginning, but that really, you need a certain degree of instruction and then a certain degree of, dare I say, discipline in one’s life to actually practice, whether you feel like it or not.

At first, it feels very artificial practicing and it feels very mechanical. Sit down and watch my breath and be in awareness. The first thing you’re aware of is how hard that is, your mind is all over the place and you’re saying, “This is nonsense and it doesn’t hurt that much anyway.” On and on, it’s endless. The mind is just out of control and it’s got its own narratives, it’s got its own stories. What we are doing is we’re cultivating access to a different superpower. Thought is an amazing superpower, but there’s one that we have that’s never really developed in school. Now it is much more because they’re teaching kids mindfulness in elementary school.

When you recognize that awareness is its own superpower and you don’t have to get it because you were born with it. You say, “Well, awareness of– what do I care? I’m aware of what? My breath, my body, this table.” It’s like, no, don’t be so quick to think you understand what awareness really is. You live inside the mind coming and going, and then you just see if you can just be aware of the mind coming and going without building a big story about it. It’s the image that’s often used as you well know classically, is that the thinking mind and the emotional turmoil of the mind is a little bit like the waves on the ocean or on a lake. Depending on atmospheric conditions i.e. the weather, it can be tremendously turbulent and chaotic and energetic, or it could be flat, just totally calm and everything in between.

That’s the surface. If you drop down, even in the midst of typhoons and hurricanes in the ocean where the waves are 40, 50, 60 feet, if you drop down 100 feet or so, gentle undulations, even in the most turbulent conditions, well, the metaphor is, you can drop into your mind in that way, drop into your body in that way so that even though the surface is really turbulent, and a lot of the content of that is how horrible this moment is, how much of a failure I am, how I’m on the way out, or I’m too old, or I’m too young, or I’m too this or I’m too that, and then you just drop underneath it. You don’t try to shut off the waves of the ocean, put a nice big sheet of plexiglass over the Atlantic Ocean. I’m sorry, that’s not possible.

You can’t suppress the thoughts, but if you drop underneath them, then you’re tapping into this other form of intelligence, this superpower we call aware– You can just be aware of the waves and not take the story of each wave personally at all. You can see how much you take it personally. That’s part of the practice is like, “Oh, I’m not supposed to take it personally, but, oh my God, I’m taking it so personally,” but you can be aware of that.

You see, that’s the superpowers. No matter what comes up, you can hold it in awareness and then you can ask yourself, “Is my awareness of this pain, which, of course, we’re going to say is my pain– is my awareness of my pain actually suffering?”

This is something you can do. This is a laboratory experiment, and you got the lab. Is my awareness of my anxiety anxious? Is my awareness of my pain suffering? Just be honest with yourself. Take a look and see. I’m going to just say that from the experience of hundreds of thousands of people who are in there, that the answer is universally, no, it’s not. What’s going to happen in the next moment? It’s going to come back, and then I’m going, “Hey, but remember mindfulness is all about staying in the present moment,” so not fair to actually say, “That’s just more thinking about the future, and that’s just thinking so we can be aware of that too.” Whether it’s a thought, whether it’s an emotion, whether it’s a sensation, just hold it all with equanimity. Well, that’s a practice. That’s why you have to exercise the muscle. The more you practice, the more it integrates into your life.

[00:42:33] Marc: Well, I so appreciate your teaching this. Thank you.

[00:42:37] Jon: It almost feels so commonsensical that it doesn’t feel like [unintelligible 00:42:00] framing it as a teaching, but it’s just common sense. You start to play around with experience and you realize, “I’ve got this other capacity to just attend, to pay attention.” That’s the gateway into awareness. It’s not about coming more aware. Our awareness is infinite. It’s like the universe. I challenge anybody to find the center of your awareness or the periphery or circumference of it. I don’t think you’ll find it. It’s just like the universe. It is boundless, and it’s already yours. Our challenge what we have to work at is accessing it because it gets overgrown with brambles and thorns and all these twigs and vines and stuff like that, which is all generated by our thought habits.

[00:43:35] Marc: Well, Jon, I wonder, maybe as a way of closing, you’d like to say or– let’s see. One of the questions that’s coming up for me is, given all the things that are happening in our lives and our world, if you want to say a few sentences about what gives you hope these days? Despite all of the challenges or right in the midst of the challenges, what is it that gives you hope?

[00:43:59] Jon: Looking out the window gives me hope. My grandchildren give me hope. My children give me hope. The air and the sun and the moon give me hope. The Ukrainians give me hope. My colleagues and friends in Ukraine who are teaching mindfulness give me hope. Response of the world to the earthquake in Turkey and Syria right now. We focus on the horror, which is, of course– but that’s already over. It happened and it’s over. It doesn’t give me the opposite of hope.

There’s enormous sadness and empathy and compassion for the survivors and those who have lost, but look at also immediate outpouring of people with their bare hand rescuing whoever it’s possible to rescue, which is almost unfathomably impossible under 10 stories of concrete collapsed floors in apartment. People rise to the occasion and do whatever it is that we can do. There are examples of that everywhere. That gives me hope.

It also gives me hope that there are people out there, like Paul Hawken and Kaz Tanahashi and all sorts of people who are very deeply grounded in– I’ll use this vocabulary because I’m talking to you– the Zen experience and the Soto Zen tradition.

They are out there in a very rigorous but beautiful way, both on the artistic side and on the environmental science side, demonstrating that there’s a lot we can do and that we absolutely have to do to [inaudible 00:45:54] how we are in relationship to the planet, which means how we are in relationship to the way we use energy, to the way we understand what it means to live through 24 hours and so forth. Now we have to change our own behaviors as individuals and as a species. That just gives me boundless hope.

[00:46:15] Marc: No, Paul Hawken’s work very hopeful about Drawdown and Regeneration is a new book coming out. Kaz Tanahashi, amazing being artist, teacher, Dogen translator.

[00:46:28] Jon: Yes, and also coming out with a book about this and the example of Costa Rica and mentioning that perhaps– I don’t remember exactly how he framed it, but the fact that Costa Rica got rid of its military. You could say, “Well, that’s just some idiosyncratic thing,” but maybe that’s a lesson that the amount of wealth that we spend defending ourselves against each other is insane. There must be some wiser, cheaper way to actually befriend our commonality as human beings, whether we live on one side of the earth or the other and to stop telling ourselves stories that actually elevate us, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

That big narrative depends on the color of your skin, though, as to how that unfolds as we’re beginning to see, and that’s not just idle woke-ism. This is actuality that when it doesn’t want to be faced, then you label it woke and you write it off. There are forces at work that are far bigger. I really love that we’re beginning to recognize the full spectrum of American history, for instance.

[00:47:50] Marc: Jon, I so appreciate you. I know you might be too humble to realize this, but I think you’ve brought these practices, mindfulness practice, awareness practice. I think many of us, me certainly, stand on your shoulders.

[00:48:09] Jon: I prefer the linked arms for, but I hear what you’re saying and I touched by it.

[00:48:15] Marc: That ultimately it just might save us. It just might save us–

[00:48:19] Jon: Yes, that’s a challenge. It just might.

[00:48:24] Marc: I think of it as that we are all sacred beings, and that, ultimately, this teaching is a way of just uncovering, accessing what is and allowing the sacredness of our beings to emerge and help and heal and connect each other. I just want to thank you for all of your wonderful work in this.

[00:48:46] Jon: That’s very beautiful, Marc. Very beautiful. I thank you for saying that. Absolute pleasure. Congratulations on your new book. May it be incredibly effective in transforming people’s hearts and minds and the world.

[00:49:01] Marc: Yes. Finding Clarity, a book about compassionate accountability, our next topic. Thank you so much. It’s really a joy to spend this time with you.

[00:49:10] Jon: Okay.

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[00:49:17] Marc: Listen in each week for interviews, teachings, and guided meditations. You’ll receive supportive tools for creating more meaningful work and mindfulness practices to develop yourself, to influence your organization, and to help change the world. Thank you for listening.

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