MIndfulness Interview I - Jon Kabat Zinn

 

Well, I'm glad to hear it's very it's a very very crazy and dangerous time and of course people are dying at an unbelievable rate well above you know in a non-pandemic era and in our country in my country it's it's really a catastrophe that that is not receiving the kind of leadership so far that it's really needed and so you know a lot of unnecessary death and suffering which is really causing enormous amounts of stress that.

Nobody would have even believed possible in in my country in days and I hope we'll have a chance to talk about some of the sort of wider systemic challenges we face in our own responses to them but I guess we really wanted to with this event get back to the basics Iran stress as you've just said there are so many of us in this community and of course people we love and care about our all around the world in our global family struggling right now and experiencing stress so if you are the man who brought you know, the mindful practice in many ways into modern Western culture with your mindfulness based stress reduction.

I wonder before we dive into some of the mindful practices maybe you could talk. A bit about stress and and this sort of the universality of that experience and and how we can respond to it, yeah well stresses really as you're saying a universal experience and it's the forces that work in our lives that require some kind of adaptation or response and whether we we respond effectively to it or not can make all the difference in well-being in happiness since this is an action for happiness event we should at least start out there, but also just in terms of, Well-being survival a profound sense of interconnectedness meaning in life all of this really comes from how we are in relationship to the forces that are at play in our lives both hourly in the world and inwardly and so the bottom line is that it's not the stress within very large limits is not the stress that's the problem it's how we respond to it or don't respond to it, so we make a distinction in mindfulness-based stress reduction.

Between reacting to stress which is a kind of automatic reactivity, very often mindless that it happens before we're even aware of it and responding mindfully to stressful circumstances and that can make all the difference between getting caught in a stress reaction cycle that's unending and then actually has profound effects on a negative effects on our health and well-being and on our biology and many very well-known ways and when we respond then in a certain sense we're dealing with the stress that we have we're not trying to deny it or run.

Away from it, but to just really encounter it and then find a way to be and wise relationship with it and adapt as best we can to the circumstances and then that ends it because it doesn't recycle in the next moment and dig us deeper and deeper into a kind of pit that we're collaborating in in digging for ourselves, well that's a life skill it takes a certain kind of exercising a certain muscle to work with and then the stress becomes like weights, you know, nobody.

Really likes to lift weights and when you're lifting them you're not working against the force of the weight you're working with the force of the weight and then the weight becomes your ally in growing stronger as opposed to your enemy in generating fatigue and feelings of you know incompetency, so to speak well.

I hope we'll get a chance to practice that mindfulness together in a moment, but just to sort of check I've heard you right there, you're sort of saying that there's the stress that we have from the situations we're in but there's also potential elements of additional stress we create for ourselves, by the way that we either push away some of Those feelings or perhaps sort of fail to accept and then respond to them in a constructive way is that is an often it's not added if it's multiplicative so that we can really make things much worse for ourselves than the actually are by how we hold the circumstances and choose to navigate the ups and downs of of our life and and you know, I mean England has been through this before you've had multiple pandemics.

I know that you know, the 17th century saw its own, you know, fair share of them a it's just something that humanity has gone. Through periodically and it is colossal. I mean, it's really challenging but it's also a an opportunity if we can survive it to learn something about not mere survival but actually thriving even under very difficult circumstances and part of that is not just caring for yourself, but in some sense recognizing how interconnected we are and how an important it might be to put our shoulder to the wheel to be able to sort of help.

Others who are in much more dire circumstances than we are and of course in this eight day and age the people on the front line of working on the covet pandemic whether they're now giving vaccinations which today I guess is the first day in the UK that that's happened but those front line workers, they're not tuning into this program, they don't have time to do this kind of thing.

But but so we're already privileged in the sense simply by being able to tune into this program but the fact is that mindfulness is something that you can implement moment by moment whether you're on the front lines or not, whether you are you know, a sort of service worker that is more at risk for getting coveted all of those things and the more mindful we are the more we can take care of both ourselves and other people in a way that.

At least tilts things in that direction of. Being able to get through this in one piece but John hey I'd love us to sort of die straight into the practice really and I maybe I'll ask my colleague to sort of mute the chat while we spend a bit of a moment together but yeah, although as you said perhaps some of us on this caller and not experiencing some of the really extreme stress that many are I do know that within this community as in with many others as a lot of suffering anxiety isolation worries, we're holding this stress, so of course you talked about working with the stress and sort of responding to it could you maybe give us an example of how we can just sort of be withstra?

Ce in a way that's more productive. Well the first is to recognize simply recognize that let's say you know I mean they don't know what school situation is in the UK, but you know, a lot of people are working at home people, you know can't go into their workplaces and their juggling not with child care so nothing could be more stressful everybody in the household is somebody you love and yet very often we wind up at our wits ends and being short with each other and so forth and feeling badly about the whole thing so that's again a compounding spiral so to speak and so just taking a moment and dropping in.

To how things are and holding it an awareness in a way that's not merely a story but a feeling of how things are in this moment in my body in my own mind and in my family or my household or whatever my you know circumstances are at the moment and just holding it all in awareness without trying to change fix or redo anything at all.

And wherever you are in the world, I realize this is not just happening in the UK or in the US that we're a global community here on zoom so in any time zone in any location. Dropping in for a moment into your own body. Because something brought you to tune into this zoom conversation.

So there was some kind of instinct doing intuition already that's saying I need something along these lines. And part of my messages that what you need you already have. That you are in possession of an incredibly powerful tool for healing. And responding rather than reacting in these kinds of very challenging human situations.

And so a good place to start is with your own body and noticing whether this tension in various places in the body, as you assume some kind of posture that perhaps in bodies wakefulness and dignity and that original intention for tuning in.