Who is Jon Kabat-Zinn?
In 1979, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a microbiologist working at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester (UMass Medical School), MA, started a modest eight-week program called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction—inviting patients to take some time for self-care down in the hospital’s basement. More than forty years later, MBSR is taught the world over and has become the gold standard for applying mindfulness to the stresses of everyday life and for researching whether mindfulness practice can improve mental and physical health.
Kabat-Zinn is also the founder of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at UMass Medical School. He is author of Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness; Wherever You Go, There You Are; Coming to Our Senses; and Mindfulness for Beginners. He trains, teaches, and lectures throughout the world on applications of mindfulness and is Professor of Medicine Emeritus at UMass Medical School.
Kabat-Zinn has emphasized that mindfulness is not a mental trick. Rather it is a basic human inheritance that is essential to life. We need to be optimally aware of who we are, where we are, and how we are in order to survive individually and as communities, and even as a species, in Kabat-Zinn’s view.
Jon Kabat-Zinn MasterClass
Jon Kabat-Zinn speaks with Mindful’s founding editor Barry Boyce about his new MasterClass, and how it’s really about non-mastery.
Barry: Let’s start off with a very basic question: is mindfulness a state of mind, a fundamental capability, a practice, et cetera? In a time when the word gets used an awful lot—a lot more than back in 1979. What do you think’s most important to emphasize about mindfulness, what it is and why it’s important?
Jon: Well, it’s both a formal meditative practice that has a lot of different dimensions and aspects to it, it requires some kind of commitment of time and energy to actually stop and drop into the only moment that we ever have to be alive in. We’re usually blasting through to get to some better moment at some future time when we get stuff off our desk or, whatever it is, off our to do list. So one, is that mindfulness is a whole repertoire of formal meditative practices aimed at cultivating moment-to-moment nonjudgmental awareness. And nonjudgmental, by the way, does not mean that you won’t have any likes or dislikes or that you’ll be completely neutral about everything. Nonjudgmental really means that you’ll become aware of how judgmental you are and then not judge that and see if you [can let go], for a few moments at least, the restraining order that filters everything through our likes and dislikes or wants or aversion. So that’s already quite an exercise, quite an undertaking to cultivate that kind of attention and that kind of awareness and learn how to reside inside it.
Then another aspect of mindfulness is pure awareness, is not just formal meditation practice, but in some sense living life in every moment that we have it to live.
So that means bringing one’s formal meditation practice out into the world and letting life become both the meditation teacher and the practice, moment by moment, no matter what arises. Which makes it very challenging because so many things can arise in life that create real hurdles and problems and stress and emotional pain and physical pain and everything else. So, this is a major undertaking.
What it is not is a particular state that, if you were really good at meditating, you’d be there and then you could get back to it whenever you wanted. And that’s your home base that never deviates. If you try to approach it that way, you’ll always be striving to get to some special state that you’re imagining is what mindfulness is all about and actually missing how special the condition of this present moment is, no matter what. One example being—if you’re listening to this with your ears, the miracle of hearing—that’s non-trivial. And how we actually decode vibrations that come into the ears and set that tympanic membrane—the ear drum—going and then ultimately getting resolved in the auditory cortex. What we’re talking about is a miracle here and that’s just hearing. So, then there’s seeing, feeling, tasting, touching and all of the different domains in which human intelligence arises, including thoughts and emotions. And what we’re doing is we’re embracing it all in awareness so that we can actually navigate moments with as much clarity, equanimity and balance as possible, and not merely to be balanced for ourselves, but for the sake of being in deep connection with what’s actually happening. And since we’re social beings, that includes all of the different ways that we’re folded into our families, into our history, into our society, into every aspect, including the planetary aspect of how we are in relationship to nature, Mother Nature and the future that we’re bequeathing to our future generations.
Barry: I want to get to that aspect of things a bit later on in our discussion. Just to go back to some of the things you were saying—you’ve been talking about mindfulness as an undertaking, and not a state but, is there a natural capability there that we’re cultivating, that’s already available to everybody?
Jon: Well, you’re right on target because, of course, you’ve been practicing for decades yourself. And there’s no one right way to practice, by the way. So there are lots of different doors into this room of mindfulness and lots of different traditions that are grounded in mindfulness. The doorways may look different, but the room to a first approximation is the same. So, part of it is that you’re willing to actually drop into the present moment, as I said, and apprehend the actuality of it. To do that requires a certain kind of grounding in being—and we’re so into doing and getting someplace else that we’re not actually that in touch with being in the present moment unless things are exactly the way we want them to be. So, the approach is to really befriend yourself and see if you can actually take up residence in the domain of being, by resting in awareness which you don’t have to acquire, you’re born with the capacity for awareness. What we are acquiring with mindfulness as a formal practice is access into this core aspect of our humanity, which, you know, I sometimes say could be the final common pathway actually of what makes us humans as the species Homo sapiens sapiens. And this awareness doesn’t get that much air time in school, at least until recently. Now it’s changing. But actually recognize that aside from thinking, which is a fantastic form of intelligence, and then there’s emotional intelligence and social intelligence, the core intelligence may be awareness itself, which is very poorly understood scientifically. But the fact is that everybody already has it, so that means there’s nothing you have to acquire.
Befriend yourself and see if you can actually take up residence in the domain of being, by resting in awareness which you don’t have to acquire, you’re born with the capacity for awareness.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
What we’re doing in the formal meditation practice is in some sense sweeping things out of the way so that we have access, we’re clearing the brush, so to speak, that’s kind of occluding our capacity to really rest in awareness, to inhabit the field of awareness. And the best place to start is with the body, the body is the first foundation of mindfulness.
So, can we bring awareness to our body with a certain kind of openness and acceptance that doesn’t have us falling into liking and disliking what’s going on with the body, but learning how to in some sense take up residency in awareness of the body? And then that’s kind of like a platform for everything else in human experience, because there’s a lot more going on than merely the body.
Present-Moment Awareness and the Body
Barry: Let’s talk about the body a little bit. Is it possible to over identify with the body? We have a lot of body neuroses. So how do you counteract that in the practice?
Jon: Very simply, Barry, you ask questions about who’s claiming that it’s my body. And that turns out to be a very interesting inquiry because we say things like, “I’m breathing,” but we know that we’re so unreliable. Plus, the fact that we’re asleep for a lot of the time means that if it were up to us to be breathing, we would have died a long time ago. So although we say, conventionally speaking, “I’m breathing,” it is much more complicated than that. We don’t know who’s actually making that claim and it’s the same for, “I have a body” or “I like my body,” or “I detest my body” or “I liked my body 35 years ago, but I don’t like it now because…” and then all of that is actually just very, very simply called thinking. That all those things are not the truth. And now that we’re in this domain, in the world where the truth itself is whatever you think it is, because with what’s going on in the world, people live in their own truth bubbles. So, one of the really profound, liberating aspects of the practice of mindfulness is actually recognizing thoughts, and then realizing that they may be true to a degree, but then none of them are actually absolutely true and a lot of them are based on preferences and on selfing, a kind of “I like this, I don’t like that. I want this. I don’t want that.” And when you bring awareness to it, then all of a sudden you see that those are like weather patterns in the sky of the mind. They’re not the truth about anything. And then in that very moment, you’re freed up from your own biases. You’re freed up from your own thought patterns that identify you in one way and identify other people in another way and very often disregard our common humanity and the fact that we are 99.7% genetically speaking in terms of our DNA, the same all over the planet. And of course, this creates enormous problems of one kind or another. So, just to finish off this piece, it’s very important that people understand and this is one of the main things that I emphasize in the MasterClass program is that it’s not about trying to get anywhere else. It’s allowing ourselves to be where we actually are. And so from that point of view, and I emphasize this a lot—crazy as it may sound, there’s no place to go, there’s no better moment than now. There’s nothing to do. There’s no special something that you need to attain and when you gift yourself that kind of moment, all of a sudden, it doesn’t take very long, you actually realize that you’re at home and being at home, you have a vast repertoire of thoughts, emotions, sensations in the body, feelings about this, that and everything. But none of that’s you. So, then you can actually navigate that domain in a way that has some degree of wisdom in it, some degree of kindness and compassion in it, because you don’t have to be in an adversarial relationship with the world, even though there’s a huge amount of suffering in the world, so therefore we can actually contribute to relieving that suffering, not just our own, but globally.
One of the really profound, liberating aspects of the practice of mindfulness is actually recognizing thoughts, and then realizing that they may be true to a degree, but then none of them are actually absolutely true.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Barry: So this paradox, really, of not trying to get anywhere, I mean, we show up in the first place to practice meditation because we have some sense that we’d like to do something about something or other. At the same time, as you’re pointing out, if you’re trying to get some place, the preoccupation becomes about getting to be some place else…
Jon: Which is a big mistake, because if you get off on the wrong foot, 30 years down the road, even if you’re practicing meditation, you’ll still be on the wrong foot in a certain way and deluded about some core aspects of what’s being invited to be embodied in the present moment.
A Non-Master MasterClass
Barry: So this is called MasterClass. How does mastery fit in in the context of meditation?
Jon: I don’t want to give too much away, but MasterClass has its own kind of culture and everybody who offers a MasterClass, if you’ve watched any of these, says, “hi, my name is so-and-so and this is my MasterClass.” And I found that I was not able to do that. I did not want to do that because my own particular orientation towards this is that it’s not about mastery, it’s about being good enough. For what? For whatever it takes for you to live the life that’s yours, to live with a degree of happiness, kindness, a sense of belonging, a sense of meaning and purpose. So I say, when I’m introducing the MasterClass, I say, you know, hi, my name is Jon Kabat-Zinn and this is my non-master class. So, I’m inviting anybody who wants to engage with me in this series of 20 sessions to actually drop into exactly what we’re talking about, not trying to get to some better place where you’ll be a master of stress or of pain or of emotional imbalance or anything like that, but to simply trust that you’re more or less OK as you are and the more you pour energy into what’s right with you, as opposed to simply focusing on what’s wrong with you and trying hopelessly to improve yourself, the more you can actually recognize and then embody your beauty and your wholeness right in this moment, which is what meditation practice has been about for thousands of years.
Barry: While you are not claiming the title of master, which I understand, but you do have a legacy or two, of course, one of them being Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). While you’ve been very careful about creating a protocol and guidelines and guardrails there, you’ve also avoided being strictly canonical that there’s absolutely one way to teach this, there’s absolutely one way to talk about this.
Jon: Thank you for recognizing that.
Barry: Why is that important to you, Jon?
Jon: Holy cow. I mean, that’s phenomenally important to me because mindfulness is really based on a certain kind of liberated wisdom that has never been more important in the world than it is now. And the more we get caught up in dualisms of one kind or another, as I was suggesting—and one of them would be, I’m not good enough, I’m going to strive to be the greatest meditator or the most mindful person I can be. So if you’re teaching MBSR and you’re conveying that kind of thing to people with chronic pain, chronic stress, chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease you’re not teaching mindfulness, you’re teaching some kind of acquisitive capitalistic attempt to get on top of some problem solving in one way or another. Whereas the liberative dimension of meditation practice is to start where you are and be fully present and apprehend the interior and the outer landscape of what’s available. In any moment that you drop underneath your thinking, for instance, without trying to suppress it or make it go away or pursue it—which we’re totally conditioned to do—then in a very real way, you’re free in that moment. You’re still breathing, still alive. You may have this going on or that going on in your life, but now you have a way to be in a wiser relationship to it. And the part of you that’s resting in awareness or that’s inhabiting the space of awareness, there’s nothing wrong with you and there never has been.
Mindfulness is really based on a certain kind of liberated wisdom that has never been more important in the world than it is now.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
And so that’s a way to take hold of your life. Now, that’s the core of MBSR. How you get people who have not grown up in a meditative tradition so that they come to MBSR through the love of these ancient meditative practices, but with a way of reconfiguring them so that they make common sense to virtually anybody and don’t have the sense that you’re trying to convert somebody to some kind of religious perspective or philosophy or anything like that, that’s a very tall order. And I’ve always trusted that in a certain way beyond a certain point, no matter how much we train MBSR teachers, this is not a trainable skill.
Yes, you need a whole repertoire of trainable capacities to walk into a classroom with 30 or 40 people who are suffering from unimaginable things that you would never want to have yourself. How are you going to hold the space for their wholeness, when you yourself know that you’re not always so whole? So, my faith is, and it’s been confirmed hundreds of thousands of times over the past 40 plus years, as you’re alluding to, of MBSR, that when we give people the basic core curriculum of MBSR and they understand it from the inside through their own meditation practice, and they stay with the curriculum, which is kind of like the space in which those eight weeks unfold and they bring their own meditation practice to it—they will know how to teach it. They will know how to be in wise relationship with what arises spontaneously in the classroom that you can’t prepare for. And if you do sort of prepare in a certain way that is scripted, then when someone comes up with something profoundly painful and you respond to it with a scripted response that’s not in the present moment, every single person in the room will know that you’re basically simulating, you’re faking something. You’re not being authentic yourself, but you’re inviting everybody else to be authentic. So, I think it’s actually impossible to be an MBSR teacher…and that’s why I love it so much. Because it basically asks people to devote themselves to the meditation practice in some way that what they’re teaching is their own understanding of being and allowing everybody else to find their own way in, and good enough is good enough. We’re not talking about mastery. We’re not talking about achieving some mindful state or some state of utter global compassion where we’re saints walking around in human bodies, but that we’re humans actually recognizing how beautiful the opportunity is to live life from moment to moment.
Barry: Yeah, that’s quite beautiful. I think if it were more oriented towards being a self-improvement program then the teacher or trainer would be understood as trying to manufacture an experience or an endpoint for somebody rather than embodying something together, exploring together with people, using the curriculum and the set up as a container for that activity, as opposed to, “OK, here’s where you need to be, here’s the outcome.” You know, there’s a certain amount of uncertainty.
Jon: You’ve got that exactly right. And if you’re not comfortable as a teacher with that uncertainty, basically you’re painting by the numbers and people will recognize that immediately, that you’re basically following some script, but you’re not living it. So therefore it’s not alive. And the interesting thing is that people love to teach this, and I don’t really observe too many people teaching MBSR, but I can tell how good the teaching is by what their students say and how their students are.
When people say this has completely transformed my life, they’re not kidding around because they’ve in some sense liberated themselves from old scripts or narrative about who they were or what they were capable of, where their life was supposed to go. And they are now working with the real life material of authenticity embodied…authenticity and a profound sense of interconnectedness. So this is a way to actually stop for a moment and remember and reconnect with what life is really about and not get caught in all the little seizures that we might have when things are not going our way or when we’re feeling stressed.
And this is applicable, by the way, not just to middle class or privileged people who have everything and now they need to put mindfulness on top of it. I mean, this is basically a core human faculty that virtually anybody can make use of, no matter what their circumstances, no matter what their situation, because it is an invitation to actually bring the entirety of your being into the present moment for the benefit of optimizing well-being and minimizing harm both to yourself and to others.
Barry: You know, when somebody says, that changed my life, it’s that script that folks may have held onto for a long time, that they’re beginning to feel liberated from. But ironically, it’s not necessarily that meditation gives them a shiny new script. It’s like you have the confidence that you might be able to get by without a script.
Jon: Yeah, the script of No Script, so to speak. The awareness can hold all sorts of narrative stories that we build up about ourselves. But this loops back to something you brought up earlier, and that is the question of not just who’s breathing, whose body, but who’s writing these scripts? And who says they’re true in any kind of profound way? And then when you recognize that your awareness isn’t limited or imprisoned by the scripts, the scripts, you could say, liberate themselves. They no longer have that kind of power to keep us locked up in a prison that we create for ourselves—this narrative that I’m too old or I’m too this or I’m not enough—and ask instead for us to question who’s talking. What are these personal pronouns about, this I, me, and mine.
And again, let me just say that because people might be wondering, well, why the hell would I do a MasterClass? Since it feels like a certain kind of elitist, privileged kind of thing. And the reason I did it is because, first of all, I was really touched by the person who invented this and his commitment to actually making this available to people who would never have the wherewithal or the interest in subscribing to the sort of glitterati of the MasterClass. And so we’re making every attempt to actually reach a whole range of different kinds of people. We’re trying to figure out how to do that. And it’s really a collective effort. It’s not just me, but the whole orientation is around that. But that is what I tried to do in these 20 lessons in MasterClass is actually just visit every aspect of what you and I are talking about now in terms of the depth of the meditation practice, but how easy and understandable it is to actually enter into these waters and then just see what happens and let the practice do you rather than you doing the practice. Because that feels like, oh, just one more thing I have to add to my already too stressful, too busy, too preoccupied day. It’s not about mastery, but more about inhabiting the full dimensionality of your being when you let go of not just the narratives, but the generator of the narrative. So, who’s generating those narratives? I, me, and mine… the personal pronouns.
Healing the World
Barry: You know, one of the later segments in your MasterClass series I notice is called Healing the World, and your book Coming to Our Senses has been a favorite of mine. It laid out a kind of a social mission emerging from mindfulness, is that what you are treating in the Healing the World segment?
Jon: Very much. You know, again, none of these are comprehensive, but they’re all pointers to something, mindfulness is not simply about sitting on a cushion and experiencing oneness with the universe. But it’s actually recognizing the enormity of that greed, hatred, delusion and suffering the ocean of which we are swimming in. And the profound repercussions of it that we’re seeing played out in the world of politics around the world, but in particular in the United States at this moment, and how to heal from some of those wounds—but then how to not repeat them either, which means it’s not just a matter of these people being in power, those people not being in power or being more or less in favor of these social programs or those social programs.
Mindfulness is not simply about sitting on a cushion and experiencing oneness with the universe. But it’s actually recognizing the enormity of that greed, hatred, delusion and suffering the ocean of which we are swimming in.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
But a question of what is the nature of the human mind and the human species. How can we learn to live together? The kinds of weapons we have and the kinds of effects we’re having on global warming, we just can’t keep this up. Humanity itself is the autoimmune disease of planet Earth in a certain way. And if we don’t live our way into the name Linnaeus gave us as a species, Homo sapiens sapiens, which means basically the species that is aware and is aware that it’s aware from the Latin Sapere, which means to taste or to know—we may not make it as a species or we may create a world in very short order where the suffering on our children, never mind our grandchildren or future generations, will be so immense and we will not be able to blame it on anybody else, it would be self-generated. So, there’s never been a more important moment in the history of humanity as far as I’m concerned, for us to actually wake up to our true nature. And if there were anything more powerful in that regard or adequate for that enormity of undertaking than mindfulness, I would not be teaching mindfulness. I meant MBSR from the beginning to be a political act. It wasn’t just another therapy that we would introduce into medicine or psychology. That was a skillful means for actually demonstrating proof of its value or concept and developing a science of mindfulness to the point where it would move out into the world in ways where we might actually begin to, on a population-wide level, on a global level, challenge ourselves to not fall into a kind of lethal, us-ing and them-ing, no matter how much we disagreed with other people. But to actually inquire about our commonality in a way that would minimize harm on every level that harm could unfold and maximize well-being and happiness and safety, because that’s what health really is. Whether you’re talking about mental health, physical health or the health of a nation or now the very real health of a planet. So that’s what it was about from the very beginning. And Coming to Our Senses was really my attempt back in the early 2000s to frame this so that it’s understood that this is not merely a stress reduction approach for your own simple well-being, but that it had profound repercussions simply because of the interconnectedness of things and, if you will, the law of impermanence.
Barry: Well, it’s kind of a public health approach writ large.
Jon: Totally.
Barry: And, you know, in that regard, many people who would come to a practice of mindfulness feel profoundly unhealed or unhealthy themselves and feel like perhaps how could I even think about healing the world when I’m such a mess myself? Is it necessary to heal oneself first? Is it sequential like that? OK, I have to get healed first, and then I can begin to think about healing others and the world or, how do you understand the continuity from one’s own healing to a larger kind of healing?
Jon: I think there are probably a lot of different ways and different people will all approach it differently. I do think that to the degree that one is in touch with one’s own suffering, one can use that to recognize suffering in others, and even if you don’t actually do anything. If you are beginning to feel the suffering of others, that’s kind of not just empathy, but it’s compassion, if something is moving in you that’s actually moving you. And so from that point of view, the more we cultivate this combination of formal meditation practice ourselves to fine tune the instrument and then life itself being the meditation practice, and in some sense a radical act of sanity and love. Then we can actually begin to see that how we be in the world already makes changes, small, incremental changes, but profound, especially when they’re embodied.
And then if large numbers of people take this on, which they are more and more, globally, all around the world, then all of a sudden we will be able to make a difference. And this is happening already. There are initiatives in the UK and in France and in Holland and in the Scandinavian countries where mindfulness is now moving into government, it’s into moving into politics. The vice premier of Belgium, who is also a physician, talking about her mindfulness practice and how it helps her relate to the political challenges that she’s dealing with in Brussels, related to not just Belgium, but to the entire EU, the health of Europe, so to speak. And while that might sound like the far side of the lunatic fringe to bring meditation into the mainstream. Well, you know, I think that the 40 plus years of MBSR, and all the other mindfulness based programs that are developed along similar lines to deal with other aspects of life, have reached the point where there is a certain critical mass or critical momentum, where this no longer seems like the lunatic fringe. It feels like in some sense, a lifeline that’s being thrown to humanity.
And it’s like, “hey… do you want to wake up now or do you want to fall into some kind of horror hell realm that’s going to be very, very hard to back away from, beyond a certain point?” So mindfulness of the world or healing the body politic, as I put it, is as absolutely important as healing the body. And just like our body is made of trillions and trillions of cells, the body politic is made up of trillions and trillions of cells. And the more that we recognize that each one of us is a cell of the body politic, the more healthy we are and the more we take care of the other cells in our neighborhood and maybe in all the various kinds of ways in which the different tissues are connected. We don’t go to war with each other and create an autoimmune disease of planet Earth just when we have the potential for profound healing.
Barry: Well, thank you, Jon. I mean, we’ve gone all the way from mindfulness of the body to mindfulness of the body in a very, very big way. It’s always a pleasure to spend time with you and hang out. I know that our readers will enjoy that and that this MasterClass, non-master class will reach a lot of folks and do a lot of good.
Jon: Well, thank you, Barry. It’s always my pleasure to talk with you and to be in touch with the broad audience of people who care about mindfulness and are part of the Mindful family. And so I just want to say in closing to everybody who’s been reading that every single one of us is important in this. It’s not like you’re listening to some master who’s putting out the way things are. You are in some sense, to whatever degree you care to take on this karmic assignment, the master of not only your own life, but your own relationships with others and with reality. And this is a really profound love affair with what’s deepest and best in all of us as humans. And there’s no one right way to do it. And there are no heroes or heroines on white horses that are going to rescue humanity. This is up to every cell of the body politic to, in some sense, connect with what’s most beautiful in yourself. And if that’s what meditation practice is, which is from my point of view, exactly what it is, then getting your ass on the cushion, so to speak, for the formal tuning of the instrument, and the reclaiming of your possibilities becomes a radical act of sanity and love rather than just one more thing I have to fit into my already too stressful and busy day. So, thanks.
Barry: Thank you, Jon. And till next time, be well.
Jon: You too.
