Jon Kabat-Zinn - "The Healing Power of Mindfulness"

My name is Helen Damon Moore and I am the director of service and education for the Tucker Foundation here at Dartmouth College. It is my honor to welcome you all and introduce you to John Kabat Zin on behalf of the Palea of ​​Care Service the Tucker at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Foundation, Dartmouth College Ruben Committee, Pek Day Hospital, Dartmouth Medical School, Norris Cotton Cancer Center, and Valley Insight Meditation Society. Special thanks to Ira bayak and Ivon Corbet and the Paleo of care service for collaborating on this project and to those at Tucker who have worked so hard and this week we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Tucker Foundation Dartus Center for Spirituality of Service and social justice.

We are pleased to welcome Dr. John Kitson to Dartmouth College today for the second time. Cabit Zin visited Dartmouth for the first time in the summer. 1984, when the university and the Connecticut River served as the training ground for the Olympic men's rowing team. He was the team's meditation coach, helping them optimize their mental performance. Currently, he is here to help optimize our performance. John Kiten has a PhD in molecular biology from MIT, is a Meritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and is the founder of the Center for Mindfulness in Medical Medicine, Health Care, and Society and its Stress Reduction Clinic. based on

mindfulness

.

He is the author of numerous best-selling books. including life in full catastrophe, wherever you go, you will return to our senses and the conscious path through depression co-authored with Williams Teasdale and Seagull. Dr. Kitson's research focuses on mind-body interactions for

healing

and the clinical applications and cost-effectiveness of

mindfulness

training for people with chronic pain and stress-related disorders, including the effects of pain reduction. of stress based on mindfulness in the brain. His current projects include editing The Mind's Own Medical with Richard Davidson and guest co-editing with Mark Williams AAL the special issue of Dr Kitson's journal Contemporary Buddhism.

His work has contributed greatly to a growing mindfulness movement in mainstream institutions such as medicine, psychology, healthcare, schools and universities, corporations, prisons, and professional sports, courtesy of Carrie Joe Grant here in our Health Promotion Department student. Dr. Cabitt in and his work have even made their way. inside our bathroom doors, as they appear in the current issue of the Dartmouth College Stall Street Journal, please join me in welcoming John kitson back to Dartmouth College, thank you, thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. Do I have to have the Turn this on to brighten my eyes because maybe you could dim it a little bit so people can still see me, but I'd like to be able to see you too.

It is a pleasure to be here. It's nice to walk into a theater where mindfulness is on the marquee, you know you've really made it when it's on the marquee along with Frankenstein, so you know it's like you're part of the mainstream, so to speak, though. , that goes from moment to moment and day to day, but um. It's really a pleasure to be here and I'm here basically because of Helen Damon Moore in her work that I got to see in Iowa College when she was in Iowa before coming here and also because of Dr. Ira Bak who I met in Ireland about two years ago, almost exactly two years ago, and I was incredibly impressed with what he's doing with integrative medicine and palliative care, so you know, it's like I don't live that far from this place and I got in the car this tomorrow and I drove up and I was so happy to be here for the next three days and, you know, have so many people leaving at 4:30 on a sunny afternoon after the kind of winter we have. having had a talk about mindfulness is really kind of an indicator that something has changed in society. um you all have better things to do I'm sure this afternoon than coming here unless you have some kind of real intuition about what the

healing

power

of mindfulness might be and then it might be incredibly valuable to get through the end of a nice sunny Thursday afternoon here together, so this talk really isn't about me or what I have to say, it's about us, it's about each of us and in a sense what the potential is as you say the slide to live your moments like they really matter and I put a little asterisk there as kind of an aside and they actually do um and uh the reason they do is because we're only alive when we're alive, this seems like a no-brainer, but you could say that for much of Our Lives we walk around with a no-brainer or basically brainless or the brain is on autopilot or something like that and what mindfulness is really about is bringing it back online, so to speak, in the present moment because it happens to be the only moment any of us have, but we are very good at thinking.

We are so incredibly good at thinking that we can spend enormous amounts of our time and energy absorbed in the past, have you noticed that it is just incredible worries about who is to blame for why it is that way or how wonderful it was in the old days and why ? Can't it be like that now? So there is a tremendous attraction to the past or a tremendous aversion, but whether it is attraction or aversion, we spend a lot of time there. Would you agree if you've noticed it most of the time? your mind depends on memory depends on thinking about things that are largely over the mind's other favorite worry is in the opposite direction um the future uh and if you again check from time to time just so you know, sometimes I like say uh, you know, you can call yourself, you might have to, since we're on 247, we're infinitely connected, probably every person has one of these in their pocket, I hope there are some. exceptions, but uh uh and they're called smartphones, you know, I mean, but they're not, but they can actually make us dumb because we can be infinitely connected, Ed, everywhere except here, so we might need call ourselves. from time to time hello John, are you really here and the answer is no?

I'm going into the future thinking and what's our favorite worry and by the way, you're going to get a bill from AT&T from Verizon um but seriously, what are our favorite worries going forward? Well, one is worry, I don't know in the North Country, maybe you've gone beyond worrying, but in the rest of the world there's a lot of worry about things that uh, that hasn't happened yet and may never happen, so In fact, Mark Twain is famous for having said, you've probably heard this in many different types of languages, but he's famous for having said, uh, there's been a lot of tragedy in my life and some of it actually happened, but there's a saying that says you know we died, you know he died a thousand deaths.

I mean, we go crazy over things that aren't going to happen because we're not smart enough to actually predict the future, but that doesn't stop us from going crazy and harping on and on about what will happen and then something else happens. because we're not that smart, then something else happens, but and we say we're Surprised, how many of you would like the future to be different from the way we think it will be? Does anyone ever find themselves wishing that the future was very different and that we would make some kind of change? world raise your hand I just want to feel like I'm in the audience so okay I heard social justice mentioned before and you know after all this is a university or I guess you call yourself a university but you know a campus type situation, so that's it.

I'm not surprised, but this kind of commitment really requires thinking about what it means to make the future different. How can we apply some influence? Could we find an Archimedean foothold, you know, to influence in the future? future there is only one point of support that I know of for that and that is the present because guess what we are living in the future of each moment in all our lives that came before this one, remember? I mean, I see that a kind of age range, although most of you don't look like college students, I have to say and I'm a little disappointed, I mean, you know, not that I'm disappointed that you came, but I .

I would like to see a lot more college students uh look they go to Frankenstein probably later it's an awkward time of day for young people how many of you are under 25 25 are under it's oh so I'm I'm wrong, it's very good to be wrong, so I was really going to tell the older people and maybe, but maybe you did it when you were even younger. Do you remember before you came to college here and you probably started planning what the courses were that you were going to take when you got the catalog or you went online and you started planning, oh, in the first year I'll take this and the second year and the third year and then maybe you even planned who you would be. you're going to meet and who you might marry and what your kids will be like and all that sounds familiar, you know, sometimes we do that when we're young um and uh and then we think everything's going to turn out well in the future, so it doesn't matter what it is your age, I have news for you, this is, it already turned out, and how it turned out, it turned out like this at this moment, your life is like this, I'm not happy with it. a little sad or depressed or wishing it were different that's not a problem that's not a problem because we can always feel good, how are we going to be in relationship to this?

And of course, life is not easy and many times we face enormous challenges, sometimes with enormous pain, sometimes with enormous threat, and that is part of the human condition, but the really interesting question when it comes of the future and living as if life really matters is: can we really be in the present moment? when things aren't how we thought they would be uh or you know, sometimes the shorthand is well, I didn't sign up for this, I mean, or another way of saying it, sometimes maybe not meant to be offensive, but how was I born? in this family or who are all these crazy people why am I the only sane person and you know when you are in a family no one else can know the type of genetic disease of that particular family that you know everyone suffers from except you so if we wait that the future is different, the only place we have to be is now because, first of all, it is the future of all the moments that have passed before, so, if you want to be in the future, here actually, this It's not trivial, it's not just, oh yeah, which tells us something interesting, uh, because what it invites is a kind of change in perception and a change in consciousness, a change in consciousness that allows us to really live our lives like it really mattered in the only moment we had and part of that means being embodied because a lot of times you know we're lost in our thoughts.

That's another thing that everyone will notice if they start paying attention to their mind. everywhere it's everywhere you don't even have to meditate for that to happen it's just its default mode it's the default mode you don't even have to have a smartphone you don't even have to have an email You don't even have to have a computer, it's The mind's default mode is to be everywhere, it thinks this and it thinks that, it likes this and it hates that and it's like it wants to approach this but it really wants to stay away. from that and it's connected to our biology, that's called approach avoidance and it's like you know the hemispheres are actually kind of divided in terms of the left hemisphere in the frontal cortical region which is more related to approach and arousal. right more and that is one of the fundamental principles. biological, you know, the characteristics of living systems move towards food, away from danger.

Perfectly natural, but how do we actually modulate those impulses and those reflexes and those, you know, unconscious types of impulses that drive us and that make us react a lot of the time. time is really an art form, it's the art, if you will, of living our lives as if they really matter and when we start to let ourselves fall on ourselves and I brought, I brought some, some accessories, you know, sometimes I said when we start to dive into ourselves, you know, we can actually claim this moment in this body with this heart with this mind and change, start to change the default settings of how we live.

Our lives really begin to move in a direction of greater balance of Mind greater grounding in the body greater Clarity of sight greater uh uh if you recognize what is really unfolding Moment to moment that is not so conditioned by whether we like it or not because The world you may not have noticed yet, but it's not really organized around you being the center of the universe. I know that's really disappointing because I guess you won't be offended again, but I guess you're completelyorganized around the fact that you are the center of the universe. each of us is almost inevitable and that actually has representations in the brain.

It's turning out that there are medial, uh medial, networks in the frontal cortex and that's actually called default mode and that's what you think of in the brain. Neuroscientists think about what happens when you're not doing anything. Well, it turns out that when you're not doing anything you're very busy. very, very, very busy and one of the ways it's described is that your mind is wandering and now there's an entire field in neuroscience focused on mind wandering. How many of you have noticed that your mind sometimes just has a life of its own, goes here? goes there, it's like he loves to be entertained, you know, he's very entertaining, um, so yeah, that's what's called the default mode now and another name for it is Narrative Network, so it's like we're continually building narratives around ourselves.

I mean, after all, it's the Favorite Topic, right, what could be more interesting than me? My story starring me and if you start paying attention because what we're talking about is mindfulness, it's actually awareness. It's fine and it's grown by paying attention, so just to clarify. about this that doesn't sound very Buddhist so far or very Asian or very mystical or very you know, anything, I mean, it's just paying attention, that's what it means how many teachers are in the audience, whatever the level in the that you are teaching. Raise your hand so you can get a good feel for it, don't you want your students to pay attention?

Isn't it trivial to get them to pay attention? first it may have to be interesting, which in itself is a challenge, secondly, it may have to make the topic interesting, that is also a challenge, but thirdly, it is as I remember it as a product of the New York Public Schools, you know, having teachers yell at us to pay attention, but that's not a very effective way to get people to pay attention because it turns out that attending is something that you need to learn, it's a skill that can be learned, but instead of being taught to pay attention, they just tell you to pay attention, follow the program, pay attention and a lot of people pay attention very differently, some pay attention auditorily, really predominantly auditory, other people can't do the auditory thing. so well that they can see it visually, other people are more intuitive, they feel it and they know it with their bodies in a certain way, so this is incredibly important in education at all levels because, you know, They say about the orchestras that you know even to the biggest orchestras with the best musicians with the best instruments playing the best music before they play, they get together and tune their instruments first with each other and then with each other until there is a kind of drop if not I don't care, put it that way way in a kind of resonance, call it A or call it whatever you want, but that kind of interconnected feeling that we are together in some space, you could call it relationality, so mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention. paying attention on purpose in the present moment paying attention on purpose in the present moment and without judging, now without judging, that's the trick because, like I said, the default network is constantly operating and the default networks have ideas and opinions about everything that They judge constantly.

So non-judgment doesn't mean that you won't judge when you start paying attention to what's on your mind or what's going on in your life, but that you'll notice how much you're judging and how much you want. get closer to this and further away from that and you're just going to allow all of that to be there like you just laid out the welcome mat, okay, I'm not going to have an opinion on my opinions. Just let it all rain for a moment. Can you feel how radical the change would be in your life if you just took a moment and allowed everything to be as it is instead of wishing it were one way or another?

Liberation is a type of Freedom that no one else can give you, but that allows us, in a sense, to rotate in Consciousness so that for a moment we are outside of time because if you live in the now, maybe you can have this experience. Just check your watch and see right now and what time it is. I'll tell you what time it is now and every time you check your watch or your phone, it's now again. Because, why? Am I even talking about this? Uh, why did I come here? It has a lot to do with medical school and what Ira is doing there and what Helen is doing in undergrad school.

It has to do with the fact that society has reached a point. where we are beginning to understand that the exponentially increasing levels of stress in medicine in our professional lives and in our personal lives at every age really require some type of change other than taking a numbing pill. or get together, but that in reality we need to cultivate what is often called the mastery of being so as not to feel so overwhelmed by all the doing and Acting and while it is true that with the Olympic team we were using mindfulness to really improve His performance was a kind of Zen operation in the sense that you can't improve performance by trying to prove that you improve performance, especially with the mind, because the kind of mind that clings to a result is exactly the kind of mind that gets in the way. form of some desirable result, did you obtain it?

Did you catch it as it flew by? Okay, so this means we're in New Territory. A common example. You can't sleep if you force yourself to sleep and tell yourself. how important the meeting you have tomorrow is, in fact, it's probably a very bad idea because that thought will actually secrete one more thought, secrete one more thought about the meeting or what's at stake or and then that will lead to something else in This default network of mind wanders and pretty soon you're wide awake, desperately wanting to be asleep and not knowing how to get there, so it's not trivial to befriend our own minds and our own lives so that we can work through these paradoxical situations. . ways in which effort is of no use effort is of no use, that does not mean that I am advocating that we all like to abandon ambition or not worry about anything, meditation is not about becoming stupid, or even about being non-Judging not it's about getting stupid, it may sound like well, don't judge anything, maybe I'll just get off the stage and break my leg, you know, no, I'm aware that the edge of the stage is here and if I fall I'll get off the stage and breaking my leg, it will be a moment of unconsciousness or lack of contact, so to speak, but crossing the street without looking because you know we have a feeling that you know we're not going to judge that truck.

Coming to me, you know it's like there's a big difference between non-judging, between judging and discerning, so mindfulness is about clearly discerning what's really happening now most of the time. How many of you would say you are involved in something? in a way that doesn't feel so good most of the time multitasking, anyone finds themselves multitasking, confess, uh, you know when you're on the phone, you're actually sending an email to someone else, did anyone ever do that increase. your hands I want to see the moment of confession, okay, you know, and we actually do it a lot, why part of this is that we are really because we are so stressed that we don't have enough moments in our day to have Everything is done, so we started getting a little disorganized and juggling and taking shortcuts, and now there are wonderful studies that show that that actually impedes or reduces or U um uh any kind of objective performance measure that does two things.

At the same time, it detracts from the quality of either that you do five things at once or that you are so spread out in your mind that you don't even have to be doing anything, but when you are at the mercy of this type of mind that wanders around everywhere time and and and you're trying to do things, it's very, very challenging, very challenging, so the question is is there a way of living that allows us to deal with what the Greek in cousin Sak's cinematic novel called the total catastrophe of The Human Condition The good, the bad, the ugly, the unwanted, the feared, the traumatic, the terrible and being able to hold each moment in its fullness and allow our faculty of attention and our faculty of consciousness to hold it in such a way that later we can inhabit it. the next moment with authenticity and maybe even responding appropriately to this wide range of demands that we face all the time now, when I started the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts in 1979 and brought some slides that I don't know if I'll show you, but I'll take them moment by moment maybe I'll show them to you maybe I won't because I'm trying to really create a bigger impression, I don't want to leave you with just things in your head, just facts, that's okay, because you'll lose them right away, that's it. well, because other facts will come in and you'll know what if I've spent time and energy to get here and I've spent time and energy to get here, then what would make me feel more satisfied is if one had some kind of idea why he came today.

I'm sure everyone knows this, although it's a mystery. I'm sure I'm hoping to be entertained or maybe connect on some deeper level or maybe practice mindfulness or maybe you've been to an nbsr show, but if you peel back all those layers there's a really really really really interesting reason why. You're here and I bet you don't know what it is. I'm not kidding because there are intelligences at work that are simply deeper than the thought function and the thought function is so intelligent that sometimes it fools us completely. I realized that and then it's like we're stupid, we're so smart, we're stupid, it's very hard to see that in yourself, but you can see it in other people very easily, maybe you've noticed it, so I'm going to trying to weave together a bunch of things that probably none of them will make sense, but what I'm doing here is, in a sense, I'm trying to plant seeds.

I'm trying to plant seeds in fertile soil. or garden of whatever brought you here so that when you leave here you have touched something that will keep those seeds that I'm not really planting, they're already in you, keep them watered, nourished, protected, privileged in a certain way, so that nourishes in some deep sense some aspect of you that wants to be as alive as possible while you have the chance, we tell people who come to our Stress Reduction Clinic, uh, and they come with every conceivable type of human ailment referred by every conceivable subsp specialty and Specialty and generalist in medicine and we tell them and it is an eight-week course designed to teach you how to bet on taking better care of yourself as a complement to whatever the Health system is.

I should call it illness. By the way, the care system can do what it can do for you and we tell you from our perspective, as long as you're breathing, there's more good than bad about you, no matter what happens to you, it's okay, no matter what happens to you. . You and we see people who you wouldn't want to be in their body, or their mind, or their life, and they probably wouldn't want to be in yours either, but you probably wouldn't want to hear that because, after all, I'm talking about you. You're the star of this movie, aren't you?

There's more good than bad about you, no matter what happens to you, that's a radical perspective and very, very important because you know, hey, I started the stress reduction clinic in 1979 in In 1979 a report came out from the surgeon general called healthy people and what I was saying is forecasting the future that is here now, we are in this future where no matter how much money the United States spends on health and healthcare, it will never be. enough to be healthy because one ingredient is missing and it is humans who are supposed to take care of health care and there is not enough money on the planet to do all the things that would have to be done to us if we don't take care of ourselves when we don't know how to manage stress when we don't know how to be in a wise relationship with our lives and our lifestyle and our diet and exercise and our bodies and aging and everything else that if we leave all that so you know, mechanics model of medicine automotive, you drive your car until it breaks down and then you replace the carburetor or the engine or whatever or the tires, eh, but this is not a machine, okay.

I know a lot of people, even in biology, love to use machine analogies and even nanomachine analogies about the body and to some extent they are correct, but there is another part like no one understands the construction of the machine that is you and I give you An example. How many of you see that slide? there and what is the color of the blue background everyone agreed that it is blue no one knows knows how you do it no one knows how you go from the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation in the blue region well into the visible spectrum no one knows how to go from This wavelength that is colorless is just energy, a subjective sensation of blue and we don't really know who we are either, we have a consensual realitywhich agrees that the blue that you are seeing and the blue that I see in the same blue but it is not always true and it is not true for color blind people in the color blue green, okay, there is a lot of kind of consensus agreement here, but the brain weighs about three pounds, okay, and it's all cells and wires that are part, you know, made up of cells, neurons, and then all these gal cells that support the neurons and incredibly specialized.

I mean, it's really the most complex set of matter in the universe known to us, right inside your little old man. body and no one knows how sensitivity how Consciousness how to know how even thought arises in these three pounds of what some neuroscientists call meat, it's a little unpleasant, but you know you have to make it more or less graphic, so if you forget every now and then walking around on the Dartmouth campus or in Hanover or wherever you live, that you're a miraculous being, well, okay, it's just another wandering mind, you know, one more kind of defect, the not being really aware of how wonderful it is that you can see for example, you can hear that you can taste how many of us eat food and we don't bother trying it, we just like to devour it or savor the idea of ​​the food, yeah, that was very good Yes, but you didn't actually try it.

How have you ever received a meaningless hug from someone who was really trying to be friendly? A kind of impulse to be friendly but not in the body. Okay, so all of these things we take for granted, but we can actually start a process of remembering and I. put a little script in there to remind ourselves to restructure when now because this is the only moment we have and return to a certain type of vector or alignment with the entire trajectory of our life and it doesn't matter how old we are. It's when you start this process, the Native Americans actually measured your age from when you became, they started measuring your age from when you became a grandparent, before that it was like you were too busy to be really human and in the Asian Indians. uh it measures your age from when you start practicing yoga, so if you are 75 years old and you have practiced yoga for three months, you have 3 months.

I like it, that's not so nice. How about a new beginning in every moment? New beginning that's what mindfulness is about like every moment fresh now this is not a philosophy it's not a good idea it's not a concept it's a way of being it's not a technique teque it's not a technique and it's not a special state oh I think yes I will jog to the mbsr clinic to meditate maybe you are waiting for something else to happen but nothing else happens nothing else happens this is what you know it is like goodbye maybe you are waiting for something special to happen some special state meditation some kind of vision some kind of alignment of the spheres you know some special ray out of nowhere to wake you up this is a mistake a mean script take meditation on mindfulness in reality let's just pretend it's okay why don't we sit down? for a moment you are already sitting you don't even need to change your posture although I see some people getting ready okay now let's get into it it's going to be something experiential thank God he could talk forever but you see You know, you don't even have to change your posture to to be awake or conscious.

You can do it like this and be really aware. By the way, I can't see my hands, but I know where they are. How can I do it? I know a sense called self-acceptance, maybe you've heard of it, maybe not, but there are many more than five senses. I just want to make that clear, when we talk about miraculous beings or geniuses, there are many different meanings. It has many dimensions if I ask you, how are you in the elevator? and you say: well, how do you know? Aside from the fact that you're probably not fine, but you just don't want to get in the elevator.

Someone you don't want to tell anyway, but when you know you're some kind of someone, a friend asks you how you are and you're like, well, how do you know? That's another sense and you know it very quickly and you know when. You are not too much, what is that knowledge called? It's not good, let me think H I don't know how I am No, you know instantly that sense is called interoception. There are ways that the body has, you know, using the brain and the nervous system, which has many. of maps because of the way the brain is loaded with maps of the body loaded with mops and body and not just the somatic sensory cortices but also the insula and the sarabello and, you know, the hippocampus, I mean, so many, and again I emphasize "We're starting to understand something about what lights up when you meditate and you know when you do this and that when you go into depression.

All kinds of wonderful things happening in brain research and neuroscience today, but still no one knows how." everything happens together in you right now in a way that you don't really have to think about and even if something is happening, even if you have lower back pain and you've had it for a long time or even if you have it. cancer right now or you are a cancer survivor or whatever or you have the heart, you know issues of one kind or another, whatever the sum total of this universe is between 10 and 100 billion The cells of the entire body of the that we are talking about now are good enough to have brought you here today.

It's good enough for now and the more energy you put into it, the more robustness, which is sometimes called homeostasis, but it's a very dynamic process. what we call Health as opposed to illness or disease when we begin to pour energy of attention in the form of attention into what is already good with us it turns out that the body has its ear to derail the brain has its ear to the railing the brain is part of the riel uh, um, the heart, every aspect of our being is an integrated whole, they are not different systems, the immune system talks to the nervous system, the nervous system responds and everyone else listens to the conversation and they are all cells. and if you took your liver, if we all took our livers and put them on the stage here, it would be an interesting exercise and then we would shuffle them and then everyone would be encouraged to pick up theirs on the way out.

I don't know what yours was, you can look at the hundreds of billions of these cells in your body and your name is not on any of them, it's like, oh, here's my liver, here's my gallbladder, this is the score of cell phones, it's actually really If it were a cell phone, it's really interesting, but do you hear what I'm saying? I even refer to the question of who we are. When you start asking it with tremendous authenticity, it may not be so easy to just say your name or even describe what you do or even send your CV if you have ever hired people, you know that the CV is not the person and you hire the CV many times , big mistake because you can't work with the person a lot of times what you want is congruence, you want integration, so when we take our seats, so to speak, what we're really doing is a recognition of how integrated we already are, it's not necessary, oh , I'm a mess.

I have to integrate, no, from this perspective, you are already as integrated as you will be at this moment, is that enough? is it good enough? So let's take a moment. I even brought another accessory. I brought some. Bells, we don't need the bells, but I will ring them and when I ring them, why and why not just for fun you don't have to change your posture, but just for fun, why don't you change your posture and sit in a posture that for now it embodies dignity, whatever that means to you look, the whole room is moving, it's not so dignified, I guess it's okay, but it doesn't really matter, the posture is secondary, the most important thing is the inner orientation , the willingness to open up.

Until the present moment to roll out the welcome mat and drop the idea that, oh, now we're going to do something special, because as soon as you plant that seed, now we're going to do something special. You are going to experience something special, so you will be looking for something special, but you don't see anything special. There's a wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker that I actually mentioned a long time ago. Wherever you go, you are with two. Zen monks, you know, you obviously know one, old man, the other young, and the young man looks curiously at the elder and, uh, and the legend under the elder.

He speaks saying that nothing happens afterwards, this is all. I just told you that before, but is this really important? Otherwise you could spend 20 or 30 years or more and people do this meditating trying to get somewhere else trying to have some special EXP experiences. Say that's what it's about now. I am enlightened. The problem is that you already are. enlightened but the personal pronoun that wants to grab it and say I am enlightened are the personal pronouns the problem is not the enlightenment your eyes are already enlightened your ears are already enlightened your belly is already enlightened your feet actually do what they are supposed to do in their greatest part your brain is actually doing what it's supposed to do your liver is doing what it's supposed to do a very famous scientist and doctor named Lewis Thomas once said he'd rather be at the controls of a 747 trying to land uh without any pilot training than with the controls of your own liver for 30 seconds, so you don't need to find something special, this is good enough, so let's sit for a moment if you're sitting or stand up if you are. you are standing in a posture that for you at this moment embodies wakefulness and dignity, you don't even have to close your eyes, but you can do so if you want or let them fall out of focus, on the chair in front of you or whatever, and while I call the bell, seeing if you can simply follow the sound of the Bells into the air space there and allowing the air space to be coextensive with the space that you might call consciousness, so that there is simply consciousness listening to what is here to You hear the ringing of the bells and now there is only sound, whatever is arising and you could use hearing as a way to anchor our attention.

You can concentrate on some object or field of objects such as hearing and simply rest being aware of sounds. and Stillness, the silence between within and beneath each and every sound, including of course my voice, alternately, because there is more than one thing happening, not only is hearing, there is also sight and smell , and you know all the sensors are actually working, uh, seeing. If you can really, instead of listening, for now, to a sensation, a sensation of the breath entering and leaving your body wherever it is most vivid in the body, simply allowing the awareness to inhabit the whole body and be most vivid. in the region. where the sensations of the breath arise and disappear as you exhale and see if you can ride the waves of the breath with full awareness Moment by Moment by moment and notice each time the Mind switches off and engages in anything else, including judging what so stupid This is that we came for a talk and suddenly we are doing this stupid exercise or whatever is going on in the mind right now, making it so spacious that you can see what is developing, listen to my guide while I talk and at the same time At the same time, follow the wave of the breath coming in and going out with full awareness and a kind of interest, a kind of loving attention in a sense, even if you find the breath not so interesting or so boring. or your mind says: okay, I understand that concept, what else to just stay with the breath and then play with the possibility of expanding the field of consciousness around the breath in whatever part of the body you experience it most until it includes a sensation of the body . in general, sitting here or standing here, breathing and noticing that you can do that very easily, it is not really a doing, but when I say it, you can easily, awareness can sustain the whole body to one degree or another and to any degree that you can hold.

Okay, it's not like if you practice, you'll get better at this, that's just the thought, it doesn't matter, just let the thoughts come and go and stay with the awareness of the body as a whole, sitting and breathing and if possible, remembering that this is not just a small exercise that we are doing in the middle of a talk, it is your life unfolding at this very moment and this breath is important to you, you would not want to do without it, so with that kind of quality. to see that it's not, it's not, it's really like tuning a guitar string, you know, notes too loose, true tone, too tight, no true tone, but if you can, just, um, bring the most lightest of touches, the lightest of touches of consciousness to the sense of the body. like one full breath as if it matters and of course it does because it's your body right now it's your life and the breath is vital and then one more before finishing, noticing any thoughts that may be moving through your mind and noticing how easily is.

It is to distract itself that the Mind moves away and away from the breath. If we did this for a period of time, sooner or later your mind would be somewhere else, probably not even in the room, maybe not even in thepresent moment. You would be having dinner in Paris or Bangkok or arguing, three years ago, in the shower with yourself, so when you notice that the mind is wandering, it's okay, don't judge, just or if you judge, don't judge by judging and just see if You can return to this moment in Consciousness by presenting any object of attention that interests you, it could be anything that is in the field of consciousness, but the last little piece is simply to underline that none of this has to do with the sound of the Bells. , none of this has to do with the sensation of the breath in the body, none of this has to do with the thoughts that move through the Mind, they are all important and secondary, but what it is really about is the consciousness that knows the sound when it comes to the ears that knows and I mean that non-conception knows not only conceptually knows the sensation of the breath moving in the body does not conceptually inhabit the body as a whole in Consciousness sitting and breathing does not- c knows conceptually when the mind wanders or when we enter an emotional whirlpool or turbulence of some kind or another and awareness can simply allow it to be here, present it center stage, let it come. let it go and in the meantime we continue to rest to rest in Consciousness outside of time because the present moment is time Less in some profound way and awareness, silence and Stillness are different ways of saying the same thing of pointing out something.

That is already yours and you don't have to get it, but it has tremendous healing potential. Tremendous potential to learn to see things in new ways for that rotation in Consciousness that I was talking about. Everything is the same, only nothing is the same. Why because you appeared in your fullness, so learn and from that learning grow and from that grow healing that in my vocabulary, the way I define healing is coming to terms with things because they are very different from cure, there are very few. cures in medicine but the opportunity to heal while there is breath, in a sense is already here, all we need to do is see it, feel it, live it and it is not about denying pain and suffering, it is, in a sense, about make friends even with that, so rest for A few final moments in Stillness in Silence, full of wakefulness and full awareness outside of time, as if you have nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to do and nothing to achieve because you are already complete, the root meaning through the words. health and healing and even the word holy holy and for the same reason the word medicine and the word meditation grow from the same tree the same root The Indo-European root medicine and meditation are joined at the hip, so it is not so radical to bring them together In conventional clinical care, in fact, it is essential for care.

So the silent vigil pays attention to what is now. True meditation practice never ever stops just because some bells went wrong. Just because we're going to change gears a little. The true practice of meditation. It is how you live your life moment by moment, it is not how well you are sitting still or what good yoga poses you do because yoga is in itself a meditation, a beautiful form of meditation that we use enormously and for good purposes at mbsr mindfulness . stress reduction I would like to say a few things about stress and medicine and then open it up and explain a little more about how we work, but I want you to have at least this.

Try it and I want to share a couple of poems with you and it's not like I've suddenly gotten a little weird. I'm getting a little weird with you guys. How many of you heard the word poetry when you heard it? or poems, you say, yes, no, it's not a poem, it's like I don't understand those things, that's not strange, but, one of my colleagues, John Teasdale, with whom I wrote that book, The Conscious Path Through depression, which is like one of the The world's great cognitive scientists are publishing several articles in which they argue that the fundamental cause of suffering in human beings is not knowing how to deal with our emotions because we do not know how to inhabit and then change our relationship . what he calls implicational meaning, implicational meaning is what moves in poetry, okay, it's different from propositional meaning, which is just the kind of bare facts, okay, so if I, I, I'll recite a poem to you, This is a poem by Antonio Machado, who is a great Spanish poet of the early 19th and 20th centuries and uh he won the Nobel Prize it's very short but see if you can feel it the wind one bright day called to my soul with the smell of jasmine the wind one bright day called my soul with the smell of jasmine in exchange for the smell of my jasmine I would like the smell of your roses I have I do not have roses all the flowers in my garden are dead can you feel that I have how many times have we had that feeling or similar feeling no I have roses there is nothing beautiful in me all the flowers in my garden are dead well then I will take the withered petals and the yellowed leaves and the waters of the fountain and the wind left and I cried and I I said to myself: What do you want? have you done the Garden that was entrusted to you?

Can you feel that this is a poem about great sadness that could easily turn into depression? Actually, just because of Noel Laua doesn't mean that you know that I really like to change the Last line and I would suggest that for our purposes, instead of what you have done to the Garden that was entrusted to you, which is a kind of guilt, wouldn't you say which is like sticking the knife in and then, of course, as long as I feel depressed why not just go beyond the limit and many cultures actually perpetrate that kind of perspective, but why don't we say what we are doing with the gardens that are given to us? they have trusted.

Gardens in plural, it's okay because right now we have many gardens that have been entrusted to us. I would say that the closest thing they know to us is the garden of the body. They know it better than an American Express credit card and can't leave the house without it, but many of us are not even in the body and many times our feelings about the body are so negative that the less said, the better to just Don't bother me about the body, you know, I don't even want to know. exists if it doesn't it's not driving me crazy I feel lucky and uh H and uh William what am I saying James Joyce is famous for starting a short story in Dubliners with the following sentence this is an approximation but Mr.

Duffy lived a a short distance from your body and if you start paying attention the way I suggest in the present moment, you will discover that that is your direction too, many times we are in our heads lost somewhere. otherwise, not in the body, that has biological consequences. By the way, everything I said tonight when I started the stress reduction clinic in 1979 was as if there was almost no science about the effects of stress and the biology of stress on the body. and in the mind, the brain and the heart, now the data is overwhelming, even, as I'll show you in a minute, getting older, it's turning out that, you know, stress used to say that stress is not. it's a real risk factor for morbidity or mortality because you know it's not like, you know, a high-fat diet, it's not like smoking cigarettes, it's not like hypertension, high blood pressure, but now it turns out there's incontrovertible evidence.

That stress actually reduces increases the rate of degradation of the ends of all our chromosomes which are called tiir. You're going to hear a lot more about that word, the woman Liz Blackburn at UCSF, who discovered taras, which is the enzyme that rebuilds them, one of the noble prizes. in 2008 he is well and his lab is studying the effects of mindfulness on TIR and taras and the evidence is moving in the direction that meditation can actually improve toras and not only that, it is more than meditation or mindfulness , it is your attitude towards what is happening, it is not.

Like these people aren't under a huge amount of stress, but it's never the stress, it's how you choose to be in relationship with it and if you've really depleted your resources to handle stress, then of course, yeah, all bets are off. canceled, but you do know. how to draw resources into yourself, then even under very high levels of stress you can dance with the energy, sometimes it is incredibly painful but yet you are so much bigger than even the pain and suffering and free yourself from that and guess what the heck they get longer, so every aspect of our biology is what is now called plastic and that is a new terminology.

It's not like you know Dustin Hoffman on The Graduate. This is for the old people in Norm, but it means our biology is miraculous in another way. It's constantly reorganizing. It's not just that everything goes downhill from here. Yes, there is aging. Yes, we're all going to die unless someone makes a very important discovery very quickly. But you know, the question is not whether there is life afterward. of death or if there is any way to do it. escape death but really, can we live while we have the chance? Is there life before death? That's the most interesting question and until the moment of death and a long time I think that really when we talk about fear of death we are really more afraid of life than of death and, uh, there are two chapters that I was going to say, They actually tell you some stories, but I don't think it's about my first days at MIT, one of which was how I got into meditation.

I came into meditation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a graduate student in molecular biology with a Nobel GL (believe it or not), not in some monastery in Asia because this final teacher came and gave a talk at MIT and I was one of the five people across MIT who attended the talk and removed the top of my head at the age of 22. I thought, "My God, there is a completely different way of knowing why we weren't told this in kindergarten a completely different way of knowing and no less beautiful no less profound no less transformative than just different thinking and this should be part of the repertoire for so to speak and part of the science and the research the other thing was the story of my thesis defense because I wrote, you know, a thesis on some arcane topic in MO biology and I let you know that it's like all these types of molecular biologists in the MIT Nobel laua, real molecular biologists and some from Harvard who came because you always have to have someone from another institution and and and um my thesis you know it was an existential challenge for me I don't know if how many of you are graduate students there was anyone here. of graduates.

It's hard to be a graduate student because no one cares and most of the time you don't do it either, but it could be really humiliating and, as you know, then, of course, if you're a scientist, science is a 99% failure, which doesn't do much for your self-esteem, so to speak. so you're looking for that 1% and then I finally put together my thesis and wrote on the cover on a single page, you know, they let you have a little dedication, sayings or something like that, I wrote the one who dies first. he dies he doesn't die when he dies I don't even know where I got it from, you know, it's like it's very ancient Greek, um, so I put that line on the first page that you know by itself before we get into the thesis, etc.

So I walk into the room with all these scientists who are going to decide whether I get my PhD or not after what's called I don't know, I don't even know, I even forget what they call it, but thesis review or you know defense defense defense correct It's a war term yeah, they're going to attack and I'm going to defend and if I do well enough then I go in there and you know I knew them all because it's just it's a small community and everyone you know likes each other and, um, but of course I was terrified, I mean, you know, it's like a lot of things are at stake and then someone says, um, what is this?

He who dies before dying does not. die when he dies this is the first question in my thesis. I've worked five years on this investigation and they want to know who dies before they die, of course, they were pushing 50, you know, I was 27 or something like that. in their 50s and they like to think about the future, that obviously generated some interest, you die before you die, you don't die when you die, I want that, um, so, um, I said, do you really want to know? and and everyone said yes, I said it right. It might take some time, we have time, so I would actually say half of my thesis defense was actually figuring out what mindfulness is all about for these guys, this was in 1971, by the way, and I wrote it, It's a chapter called die before you.

Die, of course, because the first death before you died was um um, the other story I told about your first encounter with meditation at MIT, so that's just to say that I didn't want to pursue a career in mule biology, I wanted to combine my training as a scientist with my training in meditation because it seemed that well, everyone is doing science but no one pays attention to the balance between thinking and this other function of our brain and nervous system that no one pays attention to called consciousness, that is It is evidently bigger than thought because any thought you have or any emotion you have you could embrace in consciousness and not have todo anything with it, but it would change by virtue of simply keeping it in awareness if you were patient enough to do so especially. if he didn't feel well and that's what we teach now and it's entered the mainstream of medicine in ways that are really amazing.

The National Institutes of Health is funding hundreds of studies on mindfulness to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. and the idea that that would have been the case in 1979 I like to say is more unlikely than the idea that the Big Bang suddenly stopped and imploded on itself and yet it is happening and that is why mindfulness is now in mainstream medicine and the last one, so I'll just show you some pictures before we get to the questions, okay? Do you think it's OK? Are you still awake? Well, because you never have to stop, even when you go to sleep.

I mean, you know it's present. that is being completely present, is anyone good at this? No, it's okay, so don't say, "Oh, I'm not." Well at this, no one is good at it, but all you need to do is be a little better than autopilot and your life will spin. I mean, it's going to be very, very different and every time anger comes up, the default mode comes up, whether it's anger. or anything else, don't dial the lights to say you know the reason we have to practice mindfulness the reason we have to cultivate it intentionally is because we're busy cultivating the opposite all day long cultivating anger cultivating jealousy cultivating ya you know a kind of lower self - cultivate esteem, you know, uh um, all kinds of negativity in the emotional domain or in the thinking domain and the people who are doing latilia's research say that their research shows that true stress comes from thought, so this is biological and molecular biological consequence that accelerates aging and accelerates many heart diseases.

I mean, you know you can't interview people who die from sudden cardiac death, but if you could you'd find out that it was probably a bad thought at the time. At the wrong time, I'm dead, no, I'm not really joking, I mean, it's so serious that we need to laugh and I want to say that about meditation too, it may have seemed like I'm not taking these things seriously. This is so serious that it's too serious to take too seriously and I mean it, so this is, if any of you were alive back then, this is the cover of Time magazine in 1983, four years after I started the stress reduction clinic and it's like you know.

I look back at that time and say stress, what stress compared to now. I mean, there was no Internet, there was no email, there was no instant messaging. I mean, you know, there were no computers except the mainframes I used to use. Let's say in the early '80s I could do more once I had my first PC, you know, which was gigantic, I could do more work in a month than I could do, I could do more work in a day than before. being able to do it in a month well, that was in the mid 80's, now it's like I can do more work in a day than I could do in a year, that's not so good, you know, we're always available, you know, we're always on, not so well, we're not computer servers, we're human beings, so here's the evidence from the lab of Liz Blackburn and Alyssa Eel, who is the mindfulness researcher in her lab procedures at the National Academy of Sciences, which shows its duration as a function of years of chronicity in childcare, these are parents with children with severe medical disabilities and eh, okay, so it's like an unavoidable stress, you can't just abandon your CH.

I don't stress, I'm sorry, bye, kids, no, you. I can't do that, but look at this in that study too. This is a perceived scale, a perceived stress scale. It is the perception of stress that makes the difference. If you're just dealing with it because that's what it is, then that's how you might be. more transparent to stress, your tiir for longer if you take everything personally, your tiir degrades, so if you want a take home message from this, this turns out to be harder to implement than saying, uh, don't take things personally when they are not personal, then you might ask, well, when are they not?

It's a good question to keep asking yourself. They may never be personal. It may be that the you you think you are is not the true you that you are. bigger and now neuroscience is showing that you want to be your narrative self, so you are using certain regions of the brain that you want to be your direct, moment-to-moment, experiential self, connected to the body, in which you are using lateral networks. the brain a completely different brain profile so you choose one it's more related to happiness the left activation in the prefrontal cortex if you put the monks in the scanners and I'll show you some pictures of that you know they have tremendous activation the left prefrontal cortex in particular regions that have to do with focus and that have to do with emotional balance and when we train people in mbsr, they switch from right activation to left activation in eight weeks.

Okay, their brains actually change structure in eight weeks. laboratory, a German postdoctoral fellow who is training with us at mbsr and who has been our student BR Hutzel for years from Germany, a young neuroscientist has shown that major brain regions change with eight weeks of mindfulness training at mbsr, including the hippocampus, including uh the cerebellum including um uh the posterior singular cortex all of these are involved in uh uh making meaning in uh in in self-regulation in um uh perception decoding uh memory and learning not bad for eight weeks of what seems like a lot yeah You look from the outside, our patients look a lot like nothing, they do nothing lying down, then they do nothing sitting, then they do nothing walking, eh, like that, like Night of the Living Dead, you know, a very slow meditative walk, no They do nothing and medical care. is paying for it it's amazing how they did it and it turns out that the brains are changing not only in terms of activity but also in terms of structure, significant thickening in those regions, I mentioned significant thinning in the amydala, which is the center of reactivity of emotional reaction.

The Threat Center triggering goes off all the time whenever we feel threatened or, you know, harassed in one way or another, so, God, I have a whole talk here that I'm not going to give, how many of Do you see a raised triangle? your hands if you see a triangle in this picture that's okay now keep your hands up there okay now look around so you know you're not alone if you see a triangle in that image and it's interesting because there's no triangle in that image a triangle is defined by three, a three sided figure and what your mind does is put the sides if we move that little pecman a little bit so the mind can see things that aren't there, the brain actually does that, that's so good.

Also, if I had time, I would show you this movie. How many of you have seen this image? Yeah, you can't use it anymore, but I'll play it anyway. Wow, you don't want to do that, let me see anyway. It's a movie and they're passing basketballs and you ask the group, you asked the room to count the number of times the people in white jerseys pass the basketballs and, uh, I could make it work, but it would take too long. so and in the middle I'll try it one more time in the middle because you know, oh no, okay, so you're counting the number of times the people in white jerseys pass the basketball, one basketball for each whites and blacks and then in the middle this gorilla comes out and then he goes to the other side, but when you ask people to count the number of times the people in white shirts pass the basketball, they don't really see to the gorilla If we did it and none of you had seen it, 95% of people would have counted the number of times people p.

You usually get a Plus on the distribution, so you can't even count correctly, but then you don't see the gorilla, why? because the mind has told itself the brain has told itself the white shirt so what is important disconnect from everything that is not white well, the brain turns out to be fantastic, I just showed you that it sees things that are not there and you do not see the things that are there are not very reliable now does that apply to you? I'll leave it up to you to decide just ask your spouse or your mother or your father because that's part of the default we, we, we're out of touch mode. seriously out of touch with a lot of different elements of this and this is just a quote from William James that basically says that if we could learn how to bring Mind back when it was wandering, that would be a good thing, turns out Buddhists have been doing that for thousands of years, so I'm going to stop at this point and ask some questions, we have some time for questions and then we'll stop at night, obviously, you can see that. um, I just started.

I hope you've started. I'm not kidding because this thing doesn't stop, it's called your life and everything is really beyond magnificent and if you can get into that, that implicative meaning of the poem. In poetry, then, there is the potential to live your life as if it really mattered. Moment by moment and it turns out that it is recruiting and transforming the brain. You see that when you're depressed and you're in depressive rumination it's not about shutting those things down. get out of that kind of toxic stream of thought, but actually learn to hold it differently and then you don't take it personally and then you don't really fall into depression, you don't relapse into depression and I'm talking about major depression. disorder and that affects your tiir and that actually affects the gene expression in your body.

U regulates and regulates hundreds of genes that have to do with cancer and that have to do with inflammatory responses, so if your entire body is really plastic and the more you tune into your mind and body the more you participate in your own health and well-being . I like to call the medicine of the future or the medicine of the present, actually participatory medicine, that's because there's not enough money to fund the fun. medicine if we only use the auto mechanics model then we need all of us to participate and isn't it interesting that to participate the increased evidence suggests that we need to go back to Ancient and Ancient practices of very, very old traditions that are mostly not from this side of the planet, but it turns out that we have very deep connections with our culture and with our nervous system and with our love, so I'll leave it at that.

I want to thank you for your attention and I'm open to having some questions thank you, yes, thank you, thank you for your attention and um and O, if you need to go, we understand that it's obviously 6:00, there's a book signing outside the auditorium after the question and answer period just to let people know and uh. So why aren't we okay? Then you have it. Why don't you line up with that microphone behind the guy who has it and we have another one here? So go ahead, won't you? You're not really asking. a question you're offering them, well, give it to them.

Thank you so much. I really appreciated that talk which was fascinating. One question I had was actually from your bio that was provided that just talked about you and your wife's interest in supporting. initiatives that promote mindfulness and k312 education, yes, and I was wondering if you could provide some examples of what exactly that might look like in public education and beyond, okay, thanks for that question, I alluded to it, but obviously you know the topic. The concept of mindfulness is very broad and to do it in a way that's not just throwing facts at you, it would actually take several times or you can remember what we touched on today and then discover more for yourself, which is really the best part, but uh , in the book that my wife and I, Mila and I, wrote together about conscious parenting, which is a completely different story, there's a chapter about a fifth, fourth, and fifth grade teacher in a public school in Utah, uh, who experienced mindfulness at mbsr for medicine. her for health reasons and then she brought him into her classroom against all my advice at Mormon Utah and converted the entire school so you could start there.

You can also Google mindfulness and education. You will find that there are teacher groups in many different places. places that are doing this and if you want to take a trip up uh 89 to South Burlington Vermont. I was there a couple of weeks ago and they are doing amazing things in that school system. The superintendent and one of the principals reached an agreement. Mindfulness day retreat I did for teachers and there are hundreds of teachers incorporating mindfulness into their curriculum at all ages so there's a lot to say about that. I think it's one of the best things that can happen in modern education and it's really inspiring. teachers because nowadays it is very challenging and there is a lot of stress in thatprofession and a lot of kids come in and they're not ready to learn, so they need to learn how to learn to tune the instrument before they play it, so to speak. uh and this is a way to really allow that to happen and I've sort of been in classrooms like this in Oakland and in Manhattan in New York City public schools.

It's amazing, I mean, and a teacher at South Berlington called it a pin drop. Right now you could hear a pin drop in these classes where a lot of kids are normally all over the place, but they've learned how to do it, it's valuable for attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and it's also valuable for teachers. sanity thank you so hello I was wondering what your general advice would be as we try to live it moment by moment but we are faced with moments where we have to make decisions and I know we have to make them. like dozens of decisions every day and sometimes there are big decisions regarding our future or personal relationships and my friends always tell me don't think about it too much, but I mean, don't think about it too much, yes, but I know it's very difficult.

It's a great question, now you want an answer, yes, I realized that's the reason I decided to come today, oh, wonderful, wonderful. You're probably going to think about it too much, but you can keep that in awareness, the overthinking and awareness will really take care of A lot of times let's say if it's relationships, you mentioned relationships, it's true and it's very complicated, and you know, attention plena is about relationships, we start with the body. What is my relationship with my body? It's quite strange to even say that I have a relationship with my body. Who speaks?

Oh, you're not your body, but you have a body, oh yeah, so there's something there that we don't know much about. more than what we let on, then you have a relationship with your mind and your heart in all Asian languages, as you can know that the word mind and the word heart are the same word, so when you hear the word mindfulness, if not listening sincerity you're not really listening you're not understanding it has a tenor of openness of heart it's okay and within that certain type of trust and confidence in what happens with your own beauty it's okay so when you start to know yourself that way no conceptually, not with thought, but through the embodied consciousness of sensation and what you know how to hear, smell, taste, etc., and your thoughts that are overthinking who to have a relationship with or who to break up with. a relationship with or whatever and you're not judging all of that, your deepest intuition and wisdom is trustworthy and when you get in trouble, that's trustworthy too because you see, oh I see, I made this kind of decision .

I thought about it too much. I got to this point and I ended up, you know, somewhere I don't want to be, that's important information that's useful data, so you learn from that and next time, if you're really, really, really aware, you don't. you will repeat. the same pattern, but mainly what we do is repeat the same old pattern over and over again because we are attracted to only those people who are not so healthy for us if you have read The Power of Now e Carle, which I recommend. You read for this kind of thing, it talks about a kind of construct called the pain body, so it's like falling in love, if you start looking at it, it's like my pain body, which is all knotted up and painful and hurt.

I recognize everything that is knotted and painful and hurt in you and those pain bodies falling in love in the meantime is not a good idea because it is what you call a dysfunctional relationship from the beginning, you know that, but consciousness can see that and can save you. I have a friend at MIT, one of the graduate students, with me in my lab and he said that he decided to get married at one point and I did. The only time I did this I gave someone advice about who they wanted to marry and I told them not to do it.

I was young and arrogant, so I told him not to do it. It took you 3 seconds to see what it took me three years to see and I said well that's because you know I wasn't there to see it when you're there, that requires a completely different rotation in Consciousness, but it's trustworthy. There is no answer to your question, it is life that unfolds and whether it is your relationship with another person or it is choosing courses or a professional career or something like that, trust your love and, what is it called, Joseph Campbell said and you know that this It's really good advice, follow your happiness, follow your happiness and it will teach you everything you need to know, including how sometimes you need to modulate follow your happiness a little.

I hope that helps because I have nothing else to say, thanks people. They're saying that life is more complicated and more stressful now and I would believe that, I have nothing to compare it to, but um and also the same with war, that people go to war and come back having experienced things that, um, I haven't lived through other wars and there are scientists working on PTSD and trying to help people recover from those things that they may not have experienced and so I sometimes think about what we would be like if the world turned upside down. more stressful or complicated and our answer is change yourself change your relationship with that stress it seems I'm not sure it seems I don't know how to say it but I understood it yes thank you that's the other half of my talk okay so thank you for mentioning that , so let me tell you very quickly, uh, this is not about changing yourself, it's about re, it's the exact opposite of changing yourself, it's recognizing the beauty in yourself, no change is necessary anymore, Now imagine if Congress really was aware, okay?

In fact, there is now a congressman in Congress, Tim Ryan of Ohio's 17th district, who is doing everything he can to bring mindfulness to the mainstream in political and economic circles. Well, you'll see his name from time to time. Fifth term congressman, uh, but something much more important and I wrote 100 pages on conscious politics and reaching our consensus. It is not about forgetting about social change or transformation, but about really achieving deep social change that is aligned with humanity and with kindness we have to look at our own minds because even agents of social change are driven by greed, Hatred and deceit, like the rest of us, is fine until we learn to at least recognize the toxic or inquisitive type of aggression. violent aspects in ourselves, then we can do everything we want to transform institutions and even laws, but, human beings being what they are, what we have to do is transform the species or I would not say transform the species, I would say have the species becomes important because we call ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens in Latin Sapar is the verb to taste or know know so homo sapiens sapiens is a species that knows and knows that it knows in other words consciousness yes and meta consciousness consciousness of consciousness Now, if we really were wise, then we would see what war does to societies, we would understand that, we know that with the kind of precocity in weapons and fire

power

and everything we need to find other ways to solve it. human conflict, but where is it going to come from?

It will come from the same human heart and the same human mind and the corporations which, after all, mean bodies, well, the Corpus or the body politic and which is made up of human beings, so we do it. The instrument needs to be fine-tuned at many different levels, including the law and jurist Prudence, to privilege awareness over a kind of dualistic adversarial condition in which there are actually winners and losers and a great deal of social harm and injustice occurs. and then we learn to tolerate it thinking that in 100 years it will be better, so this will not happen overnight.

I have a lot of time for Horizon, as I like to say a Zen master put it this way, never forget it. the thousand year vision I don't really have a thousand year vision, so if it happens in 100, much better even where we would locate nuclear power plants if we were building nuclear power plants, let's say in northern Japan, for example, Where would you place them knowing the geology of the Pacific Rim in northern Japan? Oh, maybe not too close to the water. I don't know, you need a lot of attention to think of something like that, so it has an infinite number. of implications and I apologize for not spending more time on this talk, going there, it's all Inc coming to our senses and there's a lot going on in the world today around that, so we'll take one more and then we'll stop one or two more if there are two people standing, I will take Are you standing for a question?

You're just the microphone, hold it, do you want to sing or something or just like you understand it? This is your moment. I mean American Idol, I can do it, okay, so this will be whatever you want to sing, so I hope to be a resident at the hospital. Here it is, okay, and I know you're getting involved in trying to bring this to yourself. I know more conventional medicine and I hope it's not like 100, you know, it's already in conventional medicine, although well, what I wanted to ask you is correct, so I mean, it is definitely not recommended that we take care of ourselves and the amount of stress and appointments and phone calls and now EDH and our new computer system and I found out about that and in 30 minutes you know I'm a psychiatrist in 30 minutes to adjust the medications and also the one person wants to talk to me and all that and, you know , it totally stresses me out, but I can only imagine and I have really good attendance and well, you know, great faculty, but if I told you, you know what I am.

I'm going to go to Shambala to meditate because I do Shambala meditation and I've read the Shambala Mountain Center in Colorado, well there's one in White River Junction, there's one, um, but you know, I've taken courses like level one and level two, and um. and but if I said you know what I'm going to go to for lunch and we're not really doing anything, I'm going to go meditate for an hour and then I'll be there a lot more. for my patients, um, probably even with these kinds of good mentors, you know, it's not going to work and I advise my patients on these things, but still medical professionals are supposed to be these human people that I'm not, you already know.

In a talk like this, in a sense I can only point out how deep the penetration has been, however, what you are saying is not deep enough by any stretch of the imagination and it takes a long time to change a culture that has its own self-interest during a lot of time, so it's like I'm sure it takes a long time for these people to get to your clinic because I know the P chronic pain patients that we're seeing and we're not counseling like everyone else. from the recommendation, you know what, yes, but you could establish an mbsr.

I mean, maybe there is an mbsr clinic that isn't even close. Well, that's not so radical. Are you in psychiatry? Yeah, well, it's not that radical. perhaps medicine should if psychiatry is averse to the mind-body connection. I even know trained gastroenterologists who work with veterans who have PTSD and pulmonologists, and you know, I mean, this transcends the specialty, so there are some and you would hope that Psychiatry would be the most open to it. You know it well. I don't know if I would hope, but you would hope. If you expect it, then make it happen.

You see Psychiatry in the future. where where is it? I'm being serious with you now, well, I think what you know is in neuroscience and no, I'm looking for something much simpler, it's yours oh, it's from that impulse of having come to this talk. It lies in that impulse to go to the Shambala Center and clear your mind and then be more present. If you want the medicine of the future to be different or the psychiatry of the future to be different, don't look for someone else to do it. Do it, do it, when will you be good enough? never because part of your mind will tell you you don't have enough power you don't have enough influence you don't have enough this you have enough as a resident doctor as a psychiatry resident you have a lot and if people don't want to do it it's a shame, but you can take the initiative and I'm not kidding, I mean, we're really talking about a rotation in Consciousness here and institutions change when people I'm willing to acknowledge how you take it and you've had enough medical training to be able to make a compelling case that much of the way it is configured the health care system.

I guess just from what you said it's toxic to the people you're trying to help the most, what kind of setup is it, even if you have a better medical records system, so okay, this will be the last one, oh no, is there anyone really in front of me. I just wanted people to know. that we have um Upper Valley mindfulness Associates uh P we are psychotherapists and we are in our sixth year of um offering wonderful mindfulness-based cognitive therapy so yeah, another thing that I couldn't really talk about too much mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, but yeah, I want to. say there are, I'm sure there are resources in this area, many of them, like the Shambala Center, are there any mbsr teachers here in the community, therecan you say oh, wait a minute, someone just said no, there's nothing at Dartmouth?

Hitchcock, but mbsr is in D Dartmouth Hitchcock, I'm not a doctor, well, you see, the doctor doesn't know, so I mean, between you two you have an insurrection, if there are how many more, how many more people are here with that. how many are there, so now you have a revolution, I mean, you know, listen, this is how institutions change and you can do it with tremendous intelligence, with tremendous ownership, with tremendous intentionality and kindness, so that it's not like were you going to go and just order. of being nasty and telling everyone else what they're doing wrong, but actually offering a new option that I'm not kidding, people die for, metaphorically and literally, and there's never been more scientific evidence for it.

To move in this direction, in a sense what I am saying is that the responsibility for the future of not only medicine but our society is a distribution of responsibility and, as I like to say, the world needs all its flowers and you are one of them. If your mind says it's like a depressive rumination, it means everyone else in the room, but not me, no, I mean you, so if you don't recognize the flower that you are, the genius that you are and the beauty that you are, and you take and somewhere where I can illuminate some little corner that may be insignificant but you don't think it is, but it's not and just apply what matters most to you there, that's how health, that's how attention returns to medical care.

They were not talking about health insurance reform, we are talking about health system reform and we have not seen the beginning of health system reform and when we do it will be a partial anticipatory medicine that will recruit the inner dimensionality and resources that each human being has. By virtue of being born, a human being has one degree or another and that degree is enormous and we need to learn how to recruit it because anything else will be just technology and everything will be based on doing and none of it will be based on being and uh we don't We call ourselves human actions, we call ourselves human beings, so that's what I'm going to stop at because once again, it's already late, but thank you very much for your attention.