Jon Kabat-Zinn
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
that we're facing now in terms of planetary endangerment on a lot of different levels. Thoreau, it's said that one day he just stood in Walden Pond up to about his nose and just observed everything that was going on the surface of the pond. I used to swim in Walden Pond all the time when I lived in Lexington, Massachusetts. My wife and I would go there all the time. And his presence and his legacy
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
along with Emerson, who also lived in Concord. is just really profound. And I think in my book, Wherever You Go, There You Are, I featured a lot of quotes from Henry David Thoreau for just that reason, that it's evidence that this is not Asian or Oriental or Buddhist. It's a universal realization of the power of the present moment when you get out of your own way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And he said things like, I sat in my doorway from morning to night and just watched the the sort of sun move across the sky, and this was better than any work I could ever have done. So he really understood meditative contemplation and what he called the foregoing of works.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
In other words, not just busying yourself with doing, and even criticized the farmers of Concord, Massachusetts for living kind of lives of quiet desperation. And he was just an incredible visionary.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And I think that's a very, very, that whole transcendentalist movement in America was like really, both are looking backwards to ancient, very often Oriental wisdom, and are looking forward to a time where there's no East and West anymore. There's just one world. And we're waking up to the fact that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
we better take care of it because we've been despoiling it in ways that we have been ignorant of because we're so industrious in the industrial revolution about pumping carbon and methane into the atmosphere and not caring the way we're seeing now emerge in the Trump administration, just not caring, drill, baby, drill.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Yeah, you can go that route, but the costs ultimately for the next generation and future generations are going to be even higher. So maybe we have to literally and metaphorically burn ourselves out because we invited that to happen in the United States, that mindset, but that's not going to be forever.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
It can't be because the body politic basically won't allow it and the body of the planet will create conditions where we either wake up or we die. And I'm talking as a species. Now, the Earth and the universe won't care one tiny little bit if life itself was completely eradicated on planet Earth. But of course, life will be eradicated on planet Earth.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
The cockroaches will have no problem, even if we have a gigantic nuclear war. Cockroaches will do just fine. They may mutate into giant cockroaches or something else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
But if we care about our lives and our children's lives and our grandchildren's lives and their grandchildren's lives, then there's a certain kind of responsibility that all of a sudden maybe we haven't realized until now to wake up literally and metaphorically and do the right thing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And it's not Democrat or Republican or conservative or liberal or woke or not woke, but woke is just like a pejorative. What we really need is wake. We need wake the fuck up. And how long it takes, it's like the earth doesn't care, the sun doesn't care, but we should. Everything is interconnected.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
That's one of the things when you meditate you realize there's nothing that's not connected to everything else Everything in this universe is interconnected. In fact, if people remember back to the periodic table of the elements That's us those 92 naturally occurring elements are all either came out of the Big Bang, which was like the beginning of the universe with hydrogen and helium.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And this is like the greatest scientists and cosmologists speaking. It's not just make-believe, although it's hard to believe. So that's where the hydrogen and the helium came from. And all of our carbon atoms have hydrogen atoms associated with it. But the carbon and the oxygen and the nitrogen, the phosphorus, they all came out of stars. So it's almost the cliche that we're stardust.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
But no, if you wake up to this, it's like it's a total miracle that there is a sun. You look up in the sky and there it is. No sun, no us. And there's a deep relationship to it. And if we're ignorant of it, then we create conditions for our own self-annihilation now because we're clever and so industrious and we pollute so fabulously with...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
all sorts of waste products like sludge, for instance, that's putting all these microplastics into our food that you can't get out of the food. And so we're discovering thousands of different chemicals in our bodies that none of which are good for us. So everything, again, is connected to everything else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And what the meditation practice does is it allows us to hold it in such a way that we don't fall into despair. But that we realize that, hey, things are constantly changing. We don't know how the future is going to unfold. We can be really frightened by our own thoughts about how the future is going to unfold. But that's where the liberation comes in.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
If you are in the present moment, in the face of everything I've just said, then you can also find equanimity and compassion and kindness right in this moment. And the kind of clarity that allows you to, say, tilt things in the direction of at least in your family, not being a pain in the butt, but maybe being kind when your impulse is to be angry or just impatient.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And to recognize when you do that and to not blame yourself because it's not you doing it. That's just habits. That's not who you are. So in the meditative practices of mindfulness-based stress reduction and all mindfulness-based programs that are out there now in huge numbers, the real emphasis is that the meditation practice is a way of being in relationship to reality.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And when it comes right down to it, it's a radical act. It's a radical act to stop and drop into the present moment and just be open the way Thoreau was saying. And find yourself rather than lose yourself in your reactive emotions and thoughts and fears. And that's a kind of, I'm using the terminology, love affair.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
But actually, even a lot of the science comes out of the moments before the thinking sets in, where you have a nonverbal realization, an aha moment, where you see things that no one else has seen up to that point. Then you win the Nobel Prize, or everybody thinks, wow, what a great insight. And sometimes mindfulness is even called insight meditation, but it's not something you do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
It's a love affair with how beautiful it is and how precious and how fleeting it is to have a human life at all. I want to say in terms of your work with the Navy SEALs, very often it's these elite military units. They're wrecking and also elite sports, whether it's baseball or football or basketball.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
All of those great athletes know that the mind is going to defeat you far faster than your opponent. Your own mind is going to defeat you moment by moment.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
So it's really worth exercising that muscle to train the mind to develop a certain kind of robust equanimity that's flexible, that is and doesn't take the story of me and what your mind is producing to say how good you are, how bad you are, both of which are like brakes on what's possible. And instead, see the story of me as a kind of like cloud moving through the sky.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
It's got its own structure and stuff like that, but it's really empty of any kind of essential nature. And it comes and it goes. And you aren't the cloud. You are the sky. And so the story, whatever story you have about how good you are, how bad you are, it's nothing compared to how miraculous you are when you drop the stories altogether and rest in awareness. And that's it in a nutshell.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
We can talk about this forever, but that really is it in a nutshell. This is a universal human capacity that even lies in the name that Linnaeus gave us as a species. We're called Homo sapiens sapiens. So there are two sapiens there, one for the genus and one for the species. And so we have a double dose of sapiens, which from the Latin means to taste or to know.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
So we're the species that knows and knows that it knows. And that's not, as is very often misapplied, it's not cognition and metacognition, because that's only one very limited way of knowing. It's awareness and meta-awareness, awareness and awareness of awareness. And this is, as I said, a skill set that you don't need to acquire. You already have it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
We're born with it, but we do need to exercise the muscle to access it. Access is what's most important. And there's only one moment when you can access it. And guess when that is? Obviously, it's now. And most of the time, we're never in the now because we're often lost in thought or the future or the past or striving to get someplace else. And then you die, just the way Thoreau said.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
The full quote is, if I can remember correctly, I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the, meaning confront, only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what they had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I hadn't lived.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
This is powerful stuff because I think a lot of people on their deathbed actually wake up and realize, holy shit, I was an SOB through a lot of my life. The people I loved the most, I was the hardest on them. And then you wake up and you realize that was all a kind of
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
evanescent play in the mind that you enacted out, but it was, you didn't have to do it, but you felt like you had no choice because you didn't realize that there was a whole other orthogonal space in which you could actually live moment by moment and learn how to not react to your most terrifying thoughts and emotions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Right. And he set an example that is really worth following, not to deify Thoreau or any other hero, but to realize what he was saying is this is universal this is every single human being starts where they are and we can be fully present with this in-breath and this out-breath this step this sitting here
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Rumi and Jalal al-Din Rumi said, this being human, in his famous poem, The Guest House, this being human is a guest house. Every moment a new arrival, a joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
and then he goes on and says welcome this is the kind of meditative instruction and no one wants to follow it because we don't like a lot of the visitors welcome and entertain them all even if they are a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture still treat each guest honorably. They may be cleaning you out for some new delight.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, greet them at the door laughing. Laughing is like advanced practice, but greet them at the door any way you can and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from Beyond.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
If we treated our thoughts and emotions that way and didn't take them personally and build the story of me starring me, how horrible I am or how great I am and why doesn't everybody love me or recognize it? And even if you are, even if you're a Hollywood movie star, there's no respite from that. You'll still have those kinds of thoughts that why didn't I do this or why didn't I do that?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
that why didn't they recognize me for this and so there's no end to the human mind torturing itself and yet there's a release and a what the buddhists call liberation only in this moment when you see what's happening and then you touch the soap bubble with awareness and it just self-liberates it goes poof and then next moment you'll torture yourself again so you gotta go poof poof poof poof
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And then over time, because I started on an awful lot of things in my 20s, but this is the only practice that has carried me through 60 years into my 80s. And it's I feel like a rank beginner and it's just getting like more and more of a commonsensical approach.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
love affair or adventure with this totally crazy terrifying beautiful world and that everybody in it is beautiful too and when we can see that and not fall into us-ing and them-ing and making those that don't look like us the enemy or those who even call us their enemy. They're not the enemy either. It's a sickness.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
It's a delusion because when you investigate who am I, which is like one of the core Zen meditative practices, heavy duty, you just sit and you ask yourself, who am I or what am I? And then you just listen to what the mind comes up with, all of which is wrong. And then it can lead to you realizing that you're not who you think, you're not the story of you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Then all of a sudden, who am I becomes a really interesting question. And the important thing is you're pointing out from the beginning is don't wait until you die to get into it. Die now, get it over with. That's why I don't know if you ever had yoga teachers on your podcast, but all yoga teachers know that of all the 84,000 mainstream yoga poses and there are 10 variants of each one.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
So that's 840,000 yoga poses. The hardest one is what's called the corpse pose, which is just lying on your back. And it's called the corpse pose for a reason. And it's a very radical reason because the invitation really, and we use this in our body scan.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
It's the first meditation that our patients in the hospital, when they're taking the MBSR, when they're entered the MBSR clinic, clinical program for eight weeks,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
The first meditation is really, well, it's the second meditation because the first one's eating a raisin, but the second meditation, the more extensive formal meditation is lying down on the floor of the hospital and doing a body scan, starting from the bottoms of your feet and slowly over 45 minutes going up through the top of your head and from your fingers and right up through the armpits and shoulders.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And the real reason it's called the corpse pose is because the invitation is to die. Die now, get it over with, and the rest of your life will be free because you won't torture yourself with those personal pronouns. Everybody's so into, what are your pronouns now? And now pronouns have been outlawed. There's only he and her with Trump.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
But that's completely a misunderstanding of the reality of things. But the important point is those pronouns, however many there are, they're not who you are. They're never who you are. They're a tiny little secretion of the full story.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
We already have this superpower called awareness. And yet, when we go to school, all we're taught is how to think. And thinking is a great superpower, and it's given rise to science and everything else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And so why not live the full story moment by moment and not worry about who you are, but just be, and coming back to the military, isn't it the Marines, be all you can be? Right? It's like,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
different doors same room and then ultimately the whole question of are we defensive or offensive are we you know trained to become killers or are we reducing the killing and the whole question of harm and intrinsic compassion and wisdom are like they're not something that a few sages or philosophers or academics should be debating every single one of us needs to recognize
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
how when we're mindless, we create enormous amounts of harm and sometimes violence, lots of violence. And then, as I understand it, the people who are supposed to guard the society both inwardly as police and outwardly as military and so forth, they're to reduce the harm as much as possible and to protect the safety of the body politic. And that's a hard job because
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
very often as peanuts used to say in the kind of comic strip from long ago we have met the enemy and it is us and on the planetary level that's absolutely true look what happened with germany in world war ii and just like unthinkable horrors that the germans inflicted on the world and killed eight million people aside in concentration camps aside from war and everything And now we're friends.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
We were allied with the Russians and now we're enemies with the Russians. This doesn't make any sense. There's some people who may be benefiting from this, but it's not the planet earth and it's not humanity. And I've spent a lot of time in China. China's an amazing place.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And they don't, we need to learn how to govern ourselves so that the governments aren't trying to figure out how to get an angle on each other so that We win and they lose because in this nuclear age, there's no winning and losing. Everybody loses.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Concentration of power in a small number of very wealthy people. And I think we let them do that until we don't. Or until the circumstances are such that it becomes apparent that, and this is where the homo sapiens sapiens comes in, it's time for humanity as a whole to wake up to its true nature. The species that is aware and is aware that it's aware, well, I don't think we've gotten there yet.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
We haven't evolved quite that far. And the stakes are very high and the time is running out in a certain way because we are so precocious in our weapon systems. whether they're nuclear or drones or whatever, are getting so sophisticated. And then automatic weapons, autonomous weapons that make their own decisions with AI about killing robot armies. This isn't science fiction anymore.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
This is so the arms manufacturers are making out like bandits because they always win and everybody else loses.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Eisenhower pointed that out in 1960, I think it was, with the military-industrial complex. And then somebody recently said military-industrial-tech complex. Because now technology and AI and robotics and everything else, again, if we continue on the same path... It's like episodic destruction and then rebuilding.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
But if the episodic episode of destruction gets to be too overwhelming, there's no rebuilding. There's no infrastructure left. And so waking up is not a kind of luxury. It's an absolute necessity. And it has to happen like...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
globally every human being on the planet is the cell the way i look at it and i've written about it in coming to our senses and other books we could look at every human being never mind every animal and plant as a cell of the body politic of planet earth and if you have each one of us has i don't know how many gazillions of cells
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
They're like 200 billion neurons in the brain and 200 billion glial cells that are taking care of those neurons. So we got trillions and trillions of cells. Now, every single one of those trillions of cells needs an adequate blood supply or it dies. right? With every heartbeat, it needs to get that oxygen. And if it doesn't, it undergoes what's called necrosis.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
In other words, before it dies, it just goes into senescence and necrosis, and then you create necrotic tissue, which is not a good prescription for living a long, happy life. So it becomes obvious at a certain point that if everybody on the planet
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
is a cell of the one body of wellbeing of the planet, then everybody has to have enough oxygen or money or wherewithal or hope to actually function in relationship to all the other trillions of people, or at this case, 10 billion people on the planet, to govern ourselves, and I'm using that word instrumentally, in ways that maximize wellbeing for everybody, every cell on the planet, and minimize harm.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
minimize harm, because the more we create those kind of violent episodes and so forth, the more we're actually just creating more of the same old, but as I said, with much more powerful weapons. So it's interesting that we're even having this conversation where meditation could be thought of, especially in terms of MBSR and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
people with chronic illness and chronic pain in the hospital is something that's been really valuable and shown to be through science to have lots of effects on the body and the brain over the past 40 years of research and so forth. That's just at the level of individuals. And yes, learning how to reduce your stress and work intelligently with the forces at play in your own individual life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
that's really important so that you can be kind to your children and kind to your partners and when function effectively and do meaningful work and all of that kind of stuff but you can't be healthy in a sick society and you can't be a healthy nation in a planet that's actually just if you think about permafrost and the fact that the melting is releasing the permafrost captures
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Unthinkable amounts, billions, trillions of tons of CO2 and even worse methane, which is 80 times more warming than even CO2. And we're like, you talk about Greenland or whatever, but the fact is we're melting the permafrost. And we have no idea when it will reach a critical point and it'll just kind of like burp. to a much, much higher level of carbon dioxide and methane in the air.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And we don't know how to capture it back. Maybe tech will figure that out, but they better figure it out very quickly if you're going to have a tech solution. Much better to actually slow down global warming. We're going in exactly the opposite direction now. So we go from the hospital to the whole planet being, in some sense, a hospital or a medical center or a school.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And the question is, what's the curriculum and when do we actually... learn what we need to learn of this curriculum so that we don't self-destruct.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Let's do that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Thank you for that wonderful question. It's not that hard actually, because as soon as you start paying attention, you wake up. If meditation is really about paying attention and doing it on purpose in the present moment, then non-judgmentally, which means not getting so caught up in your ideas and opinions and likes and dislikes, then maybe you'll see your child in a new way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
My wife and I wrote an entire book on mindful parenting called Everyday Blessings, because you can live like your whole life and raise a whole bunch of children and have no idea who they are. And they will come back and happily tell you or unhappily tell you 30 years later how much hurt or harm was created by that. So it's it really is with us everywhere.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
There's no place that you turn, I think, where you can't take this moment and drink in the beauty right in this moment. So we don't get all caught up in anxiety and fear of nuclear war or what's going to happen in Ukraine and Russia or the monstrosity of Gaza and the death and destruction. It's all happening and it's always happened, only worse and worse with nuclear weapons and stuff like that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
But at the same time, there's also the beauty. So we can't forget the beauty And we have to actually exercise that muscle so that we can actually see the beauty and what better place to do it than close to home. One reason to do yoga and to meditate is to actually start with your own beauty.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Now it sounds very narcissistic to say something like that, but every single human being is a miraculous being. So from that point of view, we can start here and recognize that we're already okay in this moment. underneath all our likes and dislikes and opinions and the things that we did wrong in our lives that we regret, still we're fundamentally okay. There's nothing wrong with us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And that our story is much too little. The story of me is much too small to capture who the miracle of who you really are. And between now and the time each one of us is going to take our last breath, why not turn it into an adventure?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
in seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, loving, and seeing how easily we get caught in those personal pronouns and then get angry because you're hurting my feelings or you're insulting me. Instead of inquiring about, well, aren't you going to take some responsibility for your own feelings instead of just projecting it onto everybody else?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
So from that point of view, again, just links back to what was said earlier that Life itself is the meditation practice, and there's nothing that comes up that's not the curriculum. The curriculum is whatever arises, including all your thoughts and emotions and anger and everything else. It's like even anger, you just hold it in awareness.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
All of a sudden, it's a different kind of energy because the awareness, I hate to use this verb, but trumps the anger. And the same with pain or suffering. You can actually... Put out the welcome mat for your own pain and transform the suffering.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And people with chronic pain conditions where there's no magic bullet that's going to make it all better for them, they find that the meditation practice is, first of all, it's a last resort, but second of all, it is liberating. It is liberating.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
It doesn't always make the quote unquote pain go away in terms of the sensory dimension of it, but it can attenuate the emotional arousal around it, which compounds the pain and the cognitive thinking around this is going to ruin my entire life forever and tell that kind of story.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And when you write yourself a kind of restraining order in that regard or see it when you're doing it, then all of a sudden it's again like touching soap bubbles and they just self-liberate. And right now there's nothing wrong with you. And I love that because if there's nothing wrong with us, then maybe we'll do the right thing on every level or not do anything.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
We can just be instead of just, we're called human beings, but we probably should be called human doings because it's so nonstop. It's a cliche, but so nonstop. But what about just the love affair of being and the sanity of just being? And that's where the formal practice of meditation comes in.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Just to say, I will sit for upwards of an hour every morning on my meditation cushion, but you can sit on the chair or whatever, but give myself over to
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
the meditation practice and i have an app with all my guided meditations on it so called jkz meditations in the app store people can download these kinds of things and but the real thing is like easy to download something not so easy to actually do it every morning and wake up and actually first thing after you brush your teeth is brush your mind and just purify so to speak or recognize the original purity of your own mind so you don't have to do anything but
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
The formal meditation practice and the formal yoga practice, which also follows that for me every day, it's like tuning the instrument before you take it out on the road to play. And even the greatest musicians in orchestras with the greatest instruments and playing the greatest music in the world, they all tune their instruments before they play.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And they tune to their own ear, and then they tune to each other's instruments. And that's what formal meditation practice is. And then when you get off your ass, off your cushion or chair or lying down doing body scan and your yoga, you take that into the world so that it's not like an hour or two of meditation. It's no life is the real meditation practice. Life is the real curriculum.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And then every body movement is yoga. Everything you do, sitting down, standing up, hugging your children, whatever it is, it's like, are you here for it or not? If you're here for it, it's yoga, it's meditation. And it's also in that moment, which is the only moment we're ever alive, it's liberating.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Well, the radical way is to just look at it deeply. Most people don't want to look at their suffering. Get me out of here. I'll go to the movies. Anything to distract me from the suffering. So mindfulness is a kind of, as I said, a radical act of sanity and love.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
But part of the radical nature of it, and you'll know this from your work with the Navy SEALs, is you turn towards and move into what you most want to just run from. Yes. Okay. But you do it in a way that's actually loving. It's not trying to get a result. It's realizing that we're too attached to our narratives around results. And so let's just do it to investigate.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
What is this stuff that's driving me crazy? And then you can ask very elementary questions. Is my awareness of my anger, for instance, if anger is the big thing in the moment, and you catch it right in the middle of some murderous impulse in your family, is my awareness of my anger angry? It's never angry. The awareness is never angry.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Well, why am I choosing to go with the anger rather than the awareness? Take another example is anxiety because, and even if you scratch the surface of anger, what you're really gonna find underneath is fear. It's always fear. So let's put the welcome medal for our fear or anxiety and just invite it into the present moment. How's it feel in your body? Where is it in your body? Is it in your jaw?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Is it in your chest? Is it in your shoulders? Is it in your fists or fingers? And then you ask yourself that same question, is my awareness of all this anxiety anxious? And the giveaway is you're going to find that it's never anxious. No, it is not. It's not anxious.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And so that's a kind of, it's like you're reclaiming the territory that is your birthright, who you really are underneath your age, your name, your gender identification, all of that stuff. Who are you really can't be put into words. Maybe poets can do it. Maybe if you were a haiku poet, you could do it in three lines. But what if you turned your whole life into poetry?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Then you wouldn't need the poetry. You'd be the poetry. And it's a love affair and it's infectious too. If you ever meet somebody, I've seen this a lot around the Dalai Lama who had privileges, spend, you know, a number of different occasions with pretty up close and personal. He can walk into a stadium with a hundred thousand people. People start crying.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
They can't even see him, but they know he's there and people will start crying. And why is that? I've always wondered, why is that? And it's not just because they have all such projections about how perfect or wise he is, and especially if you actually are in a room with him. You see, the thing is, when he looks at you, he really sees you, because he sees past the story.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Whatever the story is, there's the sense that he really feels me or sees me, and people can feel that even in a stadium. So it's a kind of really interesting example of how working on yourself in that way, in that kind of a meditative way for your entire life is infectious. It touches other people. Sometimes it happens and it's, I guess, why we do podcasts. Why are we doing a podcast?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Why do you do lots and lots of podcasts? Well, hopefully we're wagging our tongues and moving our lips and amazingly we're
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
using our lungs to get air to go over our vocal cords in such a way that in concert with the lips and the tongue i'm actually shaping the air into sounds that my laptop is picking up and going to your laptop it's going into their ears through their microphones or speakers and they're decoding this sentence and i don't even know how i'm doing it or where it's going to end
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And it's like just one example of how miraculous it is to be human. We developed language and no one knows how that came about 60 or 70,000 years ago, it's thought, that all of a sudden the human brain went through some major change. And then all of a sudden, through language and language is much more related to thought than it is to conversation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
It's like somehow once we thought arose at the same time as language in a certain way and thoughts that led to other thoughts so that this is an amazing superpower because I can say to you if we actually took that stick and we sharpened it. and we put some feathers on the other end of it and we threw it, maybe it could actually get us dinner for our starving family.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Or if we took some seeds and we put them in some soil that we dug up, that maybe we could have food for the next time we run out of meat. And that's how agriculture happened, but it couldn't happen without thought and thought and language are totally related. Just the way I'm wagging my line word for tongue is long. So I'm wagging my tongue and creating all these vibrations and we're all decoding.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And it's, are you kidding me? This is like a miracle of miracle. Why don't, why do we have to kill each other over this? Why does this have to be us against us, me against you or us against them when we're all us? And one of the things that has been a marvel to me in terms of looking at this from the point of view of what the earth is going to need right now, no matter what,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
whether people want to deny climate change or not. The climate doesn't care. The planet doesn't care whether you deny climate change. The ocean's going to keep rising. The glaciers are going to keep melting. And there's going to be an enormous amount of suffering. But if you think about it for a moment,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
All the aerial photographs of what's happening with the glaciers and the polar ice caps melting, that's an extension of our senses. These military and satellite photographs of planet Earth, it's like a body scan, but not of your own body, but of the planet Earth. And what's happening to the rainforest. The rainforest in the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, and now.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And you see what's happening to the rainforest. If that were happening to your lungs, You'd be running to the hospital and asking for a cure. There's no way to really repair lungs. You might get a lung transplant, but it'd be a very rare thing. So here we have the Amazon and the Congo, and we're losing the lungs of planet Earth. So this is all part of the mindfulness practice.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Once we know this, we can't turn away from it. And from that point of view, just the last thing I'll say on this, Because it blows my mind so much from an evolutionary point of view. So we're this like tiny little blue dot going around an insignificant sun in some completely like infinitesimally small area of the Milky Way galaxy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And that sun and the planets all they know just adhered from other sun's material that from supernova and things like that in the formative years of the universe.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
and so the sun and the planets evolved together and we happen to be at this just right goldilocks distance it's called not too hot not too cold venus is way too hot more is way too cold and here we have this flourishing of life and the way it happened is first the thermal vents under the ocean where like heat is energy so somehow chemicals figured out how to reproduce themselves and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
and put membranes around themselves and become like organisms. And then they learned how that you don't get much energy from thermal vents and stuff like that. It's driving the metabolism on kind of chemistry. But if, but at a certain point somehow they managed to actually create receptors for sunlight.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And now those receptors, like, have turned the entire planet green and that green is chlorophyll the molecule chlorophyll, which is what's called a porphyrin ring structure. If anybody remembers their basic chemistry, it's for porphyrin rings and the porphyrin rings hold together. And.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Thank you. It's wonderful to be with you, Jon.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
the case of chlorophyll a magnesium atom at the center of it so magnesium atom comes out of stars exploding previously before our sun and southern so everywhere you look outside and green that's the universe allowing planet earth to capture energy from solar energy through this chlorophyll now if you cut yourself You bleed red, not green.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
But the hemoglobin structure is almost identical to the chlorophyll structure. It's for hemes. That's why it's called hemoglobin. There's a big protein that holds the heme. And at the center of that, not a magnesium atom, an iron atom.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
that's why we need iron and that iron atom binds oxygen which is how we get all the oxygen to every one of the trillions of cells in our body you can't make this stuff up this is like miraculous beyond miraculous and the periodic table of the elements whether it's carbon or oxygen or phosphorus or all of these nitrogen and all of the sort of copper.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
We need all these micro, and now they're talking about the kind of rare earth elements. Nobody had ever heard of rare earth elements, but it's a big stretch at a periodic table in the middle because they use them in cell phones and in drones and all sorts of electronic stuff. So now all of a sudden everybody's going to kill each other over rare earth elements.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Not realizing you are a rare earth element. You're a complete universe of rare earth elements. And they all come out of exploding stars. And this is so miraculous. Why would you commit auto suicide? Why would you commit planetary global destruction of the species that is aware of all of this? So sooner or later, we're going to have to wake up.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And the real question is, is it going to be sooner or is it going to be later? later and what does later mean almost like too late this is not separate from meditative awareness this is meditative awareness because awareness is more like space than anything else if you think about the universe this is what the physicists and cosmologists tell us there's no center to the universe
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
It's hard to understand this, but there's no center and it's continually expanding and it's actually expanding exponentially. It's accelerating and it's an expansion and there's no edge to it. There's no periphery to it. So what do we know that's most like that? Awareness. Try to find the center of your own awareness right now. Anybody who's listening, where's the center of it? Don't know.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Where's the edge of it? don't know it's more like space than anything else and it's already you i can't say yours because us claiming that it's mine we don't even know how to use it so why should we claim it but the fact is it's available to us it's part of our in some sense our deepest nature and so if we are a lot more like space and we're boundless that's a lot in a certain that's like
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
The cat's meow. It's like, it doesn't get any better than this. In the religious traditions, you might call that divine or a kind of illuminated. We're merging with the divinity or the cosmic mystery or whatever it is. It's right here, right now. And it's not mysterious. It's just insanely beautiful. And if we're part of it, then maybe that comes with a certain kind of Responsibility.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
It's something you learn to inhabit that's already yours. And that's awareness.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Yeah, no, that was an incredible gift. And NOVA programs actually, a lot of the stuff, I don't watch them, but every once in a while I'll see one. There are people out there putting this stuff out in ways like, I wrote in one of my books, why isn't every student in the world interested in science? Because it's so mind blowing when you look at the nature of reality or the reality of nature.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Wonderful. I love that. And I think you zeroed in on exactly what I think is most important to investigate and bring more into the world at this juncture in time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
It's like, you can't make stuff up. It's so amazing. And a good teacher should be able to ignite passion in students for not only how amazing it is, but how much we don't know. No matter how much we know, there's so much more we don't know.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
It gives me a lot of hope that even in the face of all of the crazy stuff that's going on, that I really still have confidence that human beings can do the right thing when they've exhausted every other possibility will do the right thing. And that may be the learning process to lead to wakefulness. I don't know.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Or to compassion or to understanding that there's no separation between compassion and wakefulness. Different sides of the same coin.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Well, in a sense, as probably people can guess, get from listening to this, we're talking about mindfulness is really talking about the timeless. So in that sense, the meditation practice as it's mapped out in that book is timeless and why put out a second, another edition.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
There have been many editions, but this was the one which I redid it to whatever degree I felt it needed redoing and put a new forward on and a new afterward. And that book has sold millions of copies in its first and iterative incarnations. And I really felt like it hadn't finished its work in the world.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And it was such a labor of love when I wrote it to begin with that I really felt like it was time to do it again, to take a look at it and then do whatever was needed to tweak it
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And so I wrote some very personal stuff in the new forward and in the new afterward, almost like a completion of something, talking about a story from ancient China in the Zen tradition of the Tang Dynasty, which is started in the 600s, and then completed it at the back in the afterward to carry the reader through the whole thing and understanding
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
everything that we've been talking about on this podcast, but mapping it out in such a way that hopefully it will land with people. It's a very popular book among 20 somethings. And the 20 somethings nowadays really need something analog to balance the kind of digital intoxication that's going on and the emergence of AI and everything is digital now.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
We spend so much time on our screens and it really feels like it's an offering to help balance our analog beauty and genius with what's coming in the digital future and is here in the present. And so that was really the motivation behind it. And that's true for all my books, really. They're different doors, as I said earlier, into the same room.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And that room, it's not about me and it's not about mindfulness. It's about the reader. And some people read it, some people get it as an audio book and hear it. And whatever way, whatever the delivery system is for a book nowadays, my aspiration is that it goes into people's hearts. It's not a book. It's a vehicle of transformation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And if it comes to you at the right time, then you'll know exactly what I mean by what I just said.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Thanks for asking. It would be my website, johnkabet-zin, allstrungtogether.com. And as I mentioned earlier, one way that I was always dubious of, but went along with some of my students from Sweden wanting to create this, was an app.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
for phones a phone app i want people to stop using their phones not use them to meditate but since everybody's so attached to phones the thought was why not load up the app with all of my guided meditations from all of my books And even some of the books themselves and make that all available in one place for a very reasonable amount of money. And if people can't subscribe, they can't afford it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
The subscription will give them a free subscription that's renewable year by year. But the most amazing thing about this app that I had not anticipated at all is that at a certain point, the guys who started it said, would you be open to having live sessions on the app? And I said, let's try it. So we have six to eight live sessions a year on the app. We've been doing that now for three years.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
It's been unbelievable. It's like being back in the hospital at UMass in a class of like, 20 or 30 medical patients or just people who have stress or pain or illness in their lives. Only now it's thousands of people all together. And then a lot of it is like we practice together and then we, people raise their hand and say things. And I respond to what they're saying.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Sometimes it's a question, but sometimes it's just talking about their own meditation practice and how it's liberated their lives in one way or another. It is mind blowing. I'm getting more benefit out of it. I feel just from hearing the reach of it. And of course, rather than being in one room in the hospital in one time zone, it's in 24 time zones and thousands of people around the world.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
So it's like we're living in that kind of era. And I feel it is doing a certain kind of work. So as long as it still feels that way, I'm going to keep doing it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Thank you. It's an honor really talking with you. I wish I knew more background about you. It sounds like you've lived a very interesting life so far and you've created a platform and a program that really has integrity and that is a kind of deep dive into some of the more important questions that we need to be asking ourselves. So I feel really privileged to be part of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Yeah. Well, thanks for starting there. Interesting place to start because it's like a long time ago. This is now, we're talking 1965, and the Vietnam War was just heating up. There was this naval incident off the coast of Vietnam where the American Navy accused the non-existent Vietnamese Navy of attacking it, and it was the pretext for the war.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
I'm with you on that. And so this, the deepest of thank yous and a deep bow to you for what it is that you're doing. And hello and goodbye to everybody who's tuning into this now or whenever your now is that you tune into it. And I hope that it speaks to you in a way that goes as deep as it's possible to go.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
I was like depressed about the political situation to a great extent. And I was a first year graduate student in molecular biology at MIT. And I'm walking down the corridors at MIT, which are longer than any other building in the world, except maybe the Pentagon. And at that time, they weren't painted colorful, imaginative ways, but they were all like a junior high school in New York City.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And then I see this poster saying the three pillars of Zen, talk by Zen master Philip Kaplow at the invitation of Houston Smith, who was a professor of philosophy and religion at MIT. I didn't know who Kaplow was. I didn't know who Houston Smith was. And I certainly didn't know what Zen was. But I was in this kind of funk.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And so I went to the talk at 5 o'clock in the afternoon at seminar hour at MIT. And they had a fairly big room for the talk. And there were only five people in the room, the speaker, the guy who invited the speaker, and then maybe three people who went to the talk. And I was one of those three people. And I did say that it took the top off my head because it did. It's the first time.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
that I had met anybody who seemed to really put together something that had been bothering me my whole life, which was how to bring different ways of knowing together. Because I grew up in a family where my father was a samurai scientist at Columbia University Medical Center. He was a razor sharp mind when it came to science, but really opaque when it came to art or anything else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And my mother was a painter, a very unknown painter. She never showed her work until she was like 101 and then she had an exhibit. But she was very prolific, and really, I felt quite talented. It was beautiful to look at a lot of her stuff, and she never stopped in a lot of different mediums.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And I could see, as even a young child, that the world of science and the world of art were having a hard time understanding the depth of the other's vision of life. and place in the world. And so I guess there was this kind of familial kind of koan of these can't be that separate. They had different ways of knowing there has to be something to unify them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And when I heard Kaplow talk, it was like an aha moment for me. And it was like, this is it. What unifies different ways of knowing is knowing itself, non-conceptual knowing, but pure awareness. And that's what Zen is all about and how to not
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
acquire it or achieve it or attain it but to realize it because it's not ever not here so i know i've used a couple of negative assertions in that sentence but that's part of the difficulty of talking about awareness or mindfulness is that it and now this is like not 1965 anymore but i'm talking in my present and the present day that awareness
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Since I heard Greta Thunberg talk a lot about her illness, her being on the sort of autism spectrum was actually a superpower in a certain way. And you could see it when she gave a talk. It was selfless. There's nobody there. She's just speaking her truth in a way that there's no ego behind it. There's no selfing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And it had enormous effect on me and many other people, including the Dalai Lama, who was then later in conversation with her. And I felt this is Mindfulness is that unifying factor that transcends opposites and that we already are born with it. Mindfulness, by the way, for everybody who's tuning in, in my vocabulary, mindfulness equals awareness, pure awareness.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
So it's not like it's something you don't already know. And more than that, it's not something you have to acquire. Because the amazing thing that we never get any schooling in or pointed out is that we already have this superpower called awareness. And yet, when we go to school, all we're taught is how to think.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And thinking is a great superpower, and it's given rise to science and everything else. But actually, even a lot of the science comes out of the moments before the thinking sets in, where you have a nonverbal realization, an aha moment, where you see things that no one else has seen up to that point. Then you win the Nobel Prize, or everybody thinks, wow, what a great insight.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
and sometimes mindfulness is even called insight meditation but it's not something you do it's something you learn to inhabit that's already yours and that's awareness so that's what meditation is all about is learning how to actually take up residency so to speak in the only moment any of us ever have which is now Everything else is either gone or yet to come.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And to learn how to live inside of awareness so that we're not captured and tortured to a large extent by our thoughts and emotions and our likes and dislikes and our reactions and our othering and the enemy and the friends and all of that kind of stuff, which has its own place, but without this kind of awareness,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
There can't be any wisdom, there can't be any compassion, and there can't be any clarity around how to thread the needle of human beings not just killing each other forever, each generation of which does it with more and more horrifyingly sophisticated weapons, which now include like toy drones that you can put a grenade or a missile launcher on and then kill all sorts of people with these like digital devices that cost like $50 in the store.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
And I've said an awful lot up to this point, but that gives you, in some sense, the arc of the sweep of like from when I was 21 years old and a student at MIT and where this showed me, in a way, a new hidden dimension of what it means to be human. What I called when I was at MIT, because we like fancy words, an orthogonal dimension of reality. It's here all the time, only until you
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Learn how to recognize it. You just don't even know it's there. And it can help enormously with how much you drive yourself crazy, how much you suffer, how angry you get, how lonely you get, how depressed you get. And you already have the solution in a certain way. And that is, as the Buddhists speak about it, because...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
The Buddha gave historically the most articulate teachings around mindfulness and the most thorough and profound that you're already okay. And there's no place to go, nothing to do, nothing to attain. Meditation is not about attaining some special fantastic meditative state where all of a sudden you're you and everything is good forever. It's just not like that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
It's like discovering an old friend, which is awareness. And it's never not been here for you, but you have to learn to. Let that become your default address, so to speak. I live here in awareness rather than I live in stress reactivity and anger and fear my whole life. And that's a choice every single one of us can make. And it's not that hard.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Jon Kabat-Zinn on Why You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Feel | EP 619
Totally. He was living in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1830s. And the railroad was the biggest technological innovation, which of course brought on the entire industrial revolution. When the steam engine was invented, that's when we started global warming and burning fossil fuels. And it's been nonstop since then, and not just nonstop, but exponential, which is the problem with
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
We already have this superpower called awareness. And yet, when we go to school, all we're taught is how to think. And thinking is a great superpower, and it's given rise to science and everything else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
But actually, even a lot of the science comes out of the moments before the thinking sets in, where you have a nonverbal realization, an aha moment, where you see things that no one else has seen up to that point. Then you win the Nobel Prize, or everybody thinks, wow, what a great insight.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Andrew Brodsky on How to Be Seen Without Being Always Available | EP 617
and sometimes mindfulness is even called insight meditation but it's not something you do it's something you learn to inhabit that's already yours and that's awareness until then communicate clearly connect intentionally and as always live life passion struck
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Return on Energy: Rethinking ROI in the Age of Burnout w/ John R. Miles | EP 618
We already have this superpower called awareness. And yet, when we go to school, all we're taught is how to think. And thinking is a great superpower, and it's given rise to science and everything else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Return on Energy: Rethinking ROI in the Age of Burnout w/ John R. Miles | EP 618
But actually, even a lot of the science comes out of the moments before the thinking sets in, where you have a nonverbal realization, an aha moment, where you see things that no one else has seen up to that point. Then you win the Nobel Prize, or everybody thinks, wow, what a great insight. And sometimes mindfulness is even called insight meditation. But it's not something you do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Return on Energy: Rethinking ROI in the Age of Burnout w/ John R. Miles | EP 618
It's something you learn to inhabit that's already yours. And that's awareness.