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Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. is internationally known for his work as a scientist, writer, and meditation teacher engaged in bringing mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine and society. He is Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he was founding executive director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, and founder and former director of its world-renowned Stress Reduction Clinic.

Guy Spiro: Jon, how did you get started in your work?

Jon Kabat-Zinn: My training in school was in science. I got a PhD from MIT in molecular biology with the Nobel Laureate Salvador Luria. But I have always been interested in the biology of consciousness and awareness and of our capacity for knowing things. Rather than follow the path into neuroscientific research ... I was exposed as a student to training in Buddhist meditative practices and Asian martial arts and yoga. I began to think that there had to be a way to unify scientific understanding of human beings and awareness, and also the inner experience of it, through meditation practices. That’s what I’ve devoted my life to doing.

GS: The two things are commonly seen as antithetical.

JKZ: That was even more so in the 1960s and early 1970s. I’ve been practicing since I was 22 years old and I’m sixty now, so you know it’s not some kind of fad for me.

It’s a way of being. I’ve found in my own personal life that the cultivation of mindfulness and balance of mind and heart have been of such value. I thought, my God, where in our society are we exposed to systematic training in these kinds of things, so that we can balance out all the doing in our lives, which has become of course, of epidemic proportions. Where is the training in the domain of what you might call being, as in human being? That led to a lot of meditating on what my own unique karmic trajectory should be in terms of work in the world.

One thing led to another and I wound up creating the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979, which has now spawned a movement called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Now MBSR has spread to medical centers and clinics around the country and around the world and is being researched in the domains of mind-body medicine and neuroscience in ways that were virtually inconceivable 25 years ago when we set up the clinic.

GS: We started this magazine in 1979.

JKZ: So we have that in common. It was a different era. I look back now and I think, 1979 ... what stress?

[Laughter]

Compared to what we’re living with now ... and the stress is only getting more intense. Not only on an individual level, but also on the level of society. In my latest book, Coming to Our Senses, I argue that what we’ve learned in mind-body medicine over the past 25 years might have profound applicability to healing not only the individual, but also the world, which is more and more in sorry need of a certain kind of waking up, coming to its senses and healing.

GS: Of course, that’s close to the core of all spiritual teachings.

JKZ: It is, but I think that very often it’s not quite articulated in a way that regular people who aren’t interested in spiritual teachings readily understand. It becomes an “us versus them” kind of dualism, where you only speak to the converted and no one else is at all interested in what you have to say. Then there is a tendency to relegate you to the lunatic fringe.

GS: It was wise to put it in terms of stress reduction, because otherwise, why should mainstream people be interested?

JKZ: Exactly. But the first noble truth of the Buddha is the actuality of human anguish and suffering. The human condition itself is to a very large extent modulated by our perceptions and the human mind. The term for that in Pali, which was the original language of the Buddha, is dukkha. When it’s translated by Buddhist scholars nowadays, the term that they prefer for translating dukkha is stress. I like to emphasize, and I do in the book, that this is not about becoming a Buddhist or about Buddhism as a religion. In a way, you could think of the Buddha as a genius scientist of his time who had no machinery, no instrumentation available, but wanted to investigate the nature of mind and the nature of human suffering. He had to use his mind to do it and therefore had to learn to stabilize and, if you will, calibrate his mind before he was able to penetrate beneath the surface appearance of things.

GS: One of the biggest problems that humanity has painted itself into a corner with is that few people have ever thought about thinking.

JKZ: Right. Not only that, but we attribute an actuality to our thoughts, as if they were the truth. That is really extraordinary.

GS: Would you say that people have confused their minds with who they are?

JKZ: I think they confuse their thoughts with who they are, confuse their bodies with who they are. For the most part, we are not on very intimate terms with our minds, so the whole question of who we are is a very, very interesting and important one. I would say, from the meditative perspective, it’s the most fundamental question: who am I? But then, rather than fill it in with all sorts of sentences that are just one thought or another, we need to actually open up to contemplating the question without having to pick a particular answer. We need to investigate who is even asking the question, because that’s actually quite mysterious. Where do questions even come from in the mind?

GS: If we think that what goes on in the mind is who we are ...

JKZ: Then we’re in deep doo-doo.

[Laughter]

GS: ... we have a problem.

JKZ: Yes, we do. Here’s how you can free yourself from that.

Meditative practice, in particular mindfulness, is spoken of as a liberating practice. In other words, it’s all about freedom. It’s about freedom from delusion, freedom from the afflictive emotions like greed and hatred and all of those kinds of things which actually imprison us continually in our lives.

So here’s a thought, or a thought point, to get beyond thought and that is, if you think that you are what’s going on in your mind, what about the awareness of what’s going on in your mind? That’s a whole different order. Maybe we’re more related to our innate capacity for awareness and for knowing non-conceptually than we are to the actual thoughts. That, yes, I’m a man and I do this work and I have these children and I have these parents and all of that, and I want this and I don’t want that. But instead, what about investigating the deep structure that the personal pronouns, I, me, and mine, are pointing to rather than being so attached to them? That’s really what the core challenge of mindfulness is.

GS: One of the ways that I put it is that I recommend that people find a gap between thoughts. You know, a moment of silence.

JKZ: Exactly. You can find a space between two thoughts.

GS: Then you find that awareness remains.

JKZ: Yes.

GS: That’s who we are.

JKZ: Well there you are. You don’t need to interview me. Just write it yourself.

[Laughter]

GS: The term mindfulness, couldn’t you substitute no-mind?

JKZ: Yes, and people do in various traditions. Mindfulness, like anything else, can be very easily misunderstood. Again, it’s just a word. It’s pointing to something worth talking about. For one thing, the word for mind and the word for heart in all Asian languages is the same. So when you hear mindfulness, you also have to hear heartfulness.

GS: That’s interesting.

JKZ: When you hear fullness, in a way, you also have to hear spaciousness, not just clutter. So spaciousness is a lot like emptiness. There’s the tie-in to no-mind in the Zen tradition. It speaks, if you will, of the method of no method. The true meditation isn’t meditating. I do these little exercises in my mind and then something great will happen, but that’s not real meditation. Real meditation is what the Tibetans call non-meditation. The Chinese call it “the method of no method” or, instead of mind, no mind, but they’re all just different arrows pointing at the Moon. The idea is not to look at the arrows so much as to look at the Moon. You don’t climb on the sign pointing to Chicago, 300 miles, and sit there thinking you’ve gotten to Chicago.

GS: I think many people get stuck when they’re confronted with a formal practice, you know, a half hour in the morning and a half hour in the evening. They can’t really see themselves doing that. So I find the informal practice to be so important. I think that Jesus was pointing at it when he said pray without ceasing. I think that was what he was getting at.

JKZ: Yes, absolutely. Pray without ceasing. But what does that mean?

That silence that you pointed to, that’s in between thoughts, is also underneath all thought. It’s like the image that is often used, and I like to use a lot, of the ocean. At the surface it’s waves all the time, but if you drop down twenty or thirty feet, even during a typhoon, it’s only gentle undulations. The same is true of the mind. At the surface the mind waves all the time with thoughts that have their own sort of seeming identity and separateness. But really they’re all part of this same ocean, and if you drop down in the ocean of mind twenty or thirty feet (and learn how to do that), then it’s just gentle undulations or what you might call pure awareness.

That pure awareness is inside and underneath thought and sound and sensation in the body and everything else. You can rest in that awareness basically 24/7 without doing anything, and that is what we call informal mindfulness practice. Your life becomes your meditation practice.

On the other hand, in order to do that and really have it be robust in your life, people need to have a formal meditation practice to, in some way or other, cultivate the foundation for it. It’s easy to say, but it’s hard to do. Mindfulness isn’t just a good idea. A person hears it and thinks, oh yeah, why didn’t I think of it? I should be more mindful, which, by the way, to define it from my perspective means moment to moment nonjudgmental awareness which is cultivated by paying attention.

GS: What’s kind of funny is how there seems to be a need to understand it intellectually, but the practice is not intellectual.

JKZ: Exactly. That’s why if people are only brought to it intellectually, very often the first thing they’ll find is that five seconds later they’re bored. I don’t want to watch my breathing, show me something more interesting, how about a Tantric sexual visualization meditation?

[Laughter]

GS: That might hold the attention a little longer. I’ve always been interested in the sports application. People talk about getting into the zone and it’s the same thing.

JKZ: It is. I trained the 1984 Olympic Men’s Rowing Team in mindfulness, and a number of collegiate rowing teams and various other athletes. My colleague, George Mumford, trained the Chicago Bulls in their championship seasons and then the Los Angeles Lakers. The sports applications of systematically cultivating greater awareness in the present moment are really legion, because your performance comes out of being. The more you understand that, the more you can recruit capacities that just aren’t quite as available to you if you’re too caught up in thinking, which happens a lot during competition.

GS: Talk a little about the now.

JKZ: Well, what’s there to say about now?

[Laughter]

It’s only everything. It’s the only moment that any of us are ever alive in.

GS: There is only now.

JKZ: But we don’t live that way. If you start to pay attention to where your mind is and what’s on your mind from moment to moment, most of the time it’s in the future, either worrying or planning. And when it’s not worrying or planning, it’s obsessing about what happened and is already over, namely the past. The present moment, which is actually the only time we have for learning, for growing, for healing, for expressing emotion, for getting work done, for anything, is just completely squeezed. So in some ways we are driving through our moments, and not at all in touch with the actuality of things as they are. We live mostly in our thoughts, being driven by them and by our endless liking and disliking and afflictive emotions.

GS: It’s interesting the way the mind, and when I say that I’m talking about the thoughts that go on in the mind, seems to fight for its life and doesn’t want to be brought into the now. It’s almost like it has a life of its own.

JKZ: Well, certainly the part of us that gets caught up in the personal pronouns, my life, my ambition, where I’m going, what’s getting in my way, all of those things, contributes to a kind of addictive perspective that’s very driven and doesn’t really admit to there being hidden dimensions of our being. You can go for twenty or thirty years living a kind of delusional dream of a life where you get married, have children, get new work, and all of that, and really not ever completely show up for it. Not knowing who your kids are and not knowing who this person is that you’re sleeping with.

All of that “not knowing who you are” keeps us coming back to the question: do you want to dream yourself through your life and then wake up at the end and realize you’ve missed the whole thing because you weren’t in touch with the present moment? Or do you want to open to the actuality of things as they are now, the good, the bad, the unpleasant and the ugly, and then come to some kind of experiential terms with it so that you can live the life that’s yours to live, and not some caricature of it?

GS: How easy it is for those with the intellectual capacity to understand this, and yet the practice is not so difficult. It’s so easy to forget and drift off.

JKZ: That’s why I write books about it and that’s why there are guided meditation tapes and CDs that help people to actually develop the kind of discipline that’s required. We need to do the work in order to learn the difference between critical thinking, which we’ve been trained in our whole lives, and resting and awareness, which is a much deeper capacity. But we never take any courses in it, so we don’t feed the incredibly beautiful aspects of our being that are the common pathway of our humanity, until something untoward happens, like a lot of our patients in the stress reduction clinic.

They have had something happen to them, like a health crisis, maybe some form of cancer or a heart attack, or some kind of chronic condition or losing their job; something that reminds you, ho, ho, wait a minute. I’m still awake. I’m alive. I’m alive, but I’ve been zoning along on autopilot for so long I’m only half alive and half awake, and maybe this cancer or this heart attack is, for all the horror of it, reminding me of something that I need to be reminded of: This doesn’t last forever.

GS: When we put it in terms of discipline, that to many minds implies a drudgery.

JKZ: Discipline as a word has gotten a very bad rap.

GS: It doesn’t tend to imply the joy and the freedom.

JKZ: The way we teach MBSR, people take to it like ducks to water. They want to do it because, in a sense, it’s like finally befriending yourself. Then you begin to realize, oh my God, I’ve been putting my attention everywhere else but where it really needs to be. If you take five or fifteen or twenty minutes to meditate early in the morning, even if you wake up early to do it (because who has any time to do non-doing, so to speak), you wind up realizing that it’s like putting an oxygen line straight into your own heart. It’s a radical act, a radical gift that you’re giving to yourself. Ultimately it’s the gift of self compassion and wisdom.

GS: Just the very event of identifying with your real self as opposed to the chatter in the mind is ...

JKZ: A huge breakthrough. It’s a huge breakthrough and it’s usually one you don’t forget about because it is so vivid. It has so many other dimensions to it that you intuitively feel are true; it’s more like you realize that you don’t know who you are, and that not knowing is really authentic. So rather than put on some mask, that smiley face or whatever, that suggests I am so and so, and you fill in the blank with nouns, you realize that being is more like a verb than a noun. It’s in the living that you manifest and embody what the Buddhists like to call your true nature.

GS: There is no retirement when your career is being who you are.

[Laughter]

JKZ: In fact, the adventure just goes on and gets more and more interesting. Then death itself isn’t a problem, and even health issues are not necessarily a problem, because there’s a dimensionality to you that’s way beyond who you thought you were, that’s just so big and so boundless.

GS: In our time, just to keep up with popular culture, people are forced to process so much information that they are being dragged kicking and screaming into a state of almost semi-enlightenment.

JKZ: I think that there are ways in which that’s true.

GS: But it’s completely undisciplined.

JKZ: It’s not just undisciplined, it’s very materialistically grounded, so it’s still driven by greed, hatred and ignorance. But I think, with the tiniest little tweaking, it could actually be transformative. I call that transformation an orthogonal rotation in consciousness, meaning rotated ninety degrees. Like when you hold two polarized films against each other one way, they won’t let light in, but if you rotate one ninety degrees against the other, the light will come through. In the same way, sometimes something will happen and you’ll just see the world slightly differently. Everything will still be the same as it was before ... except that everything’s completely different, and how you will respond in the next moment is completely different.

It’s almost as if your consciousness can occupy the same space at the same time as a conventional view, but it’s healing and transformative. One very simple and non-abstract example is an apology. People can hate each other for seventy years, and if one approaches the other as an old man and says, I apologize for what happened, all of a sudden the other, instead of hating him, loves him, in a second. That’s an orthogonal rotation in consciousness.

GS: That’s excellent. Would you like to give us a brief overview of your books?

JKZ: In 1990 my first book was published and is titled, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness. It’s about the work of mindfulness based stress reduction. Random House, which now publishes it, just issued a 15th Anniversary edition with a new introduction by me, because it’s been just chugging along growing in sales over the past fifteen years, which doesn’t usually happen. It’s because of this growing worldwide movement in mindfulness based stress reduction and mindfulness based cognitive therapy and other approaches. Four years later another book came out, Wherever You Go, There You Are.

GS: I’ve always liked that saying.

JKZ: That’s a shorter and in some ways much easier book to enter into, especially if you’re not that interested in health and stress reduction and things like that. Wherever You Go, There You Are is very popular among twenty-somethings and it was just reissued in a 10th Anniversary edition by Hyperion, who is my present publisher. In 1997, my wife and I came out with a book together on mindful parenting which is called, Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting. That is basically oriented towards bringing mindfulness into the what I consider to be the hardest work in the world, which is raising children without losing yourself in the process or forgetting that they are miraculous beings, and allowing them to find their own way in the world, but with tremendous need for care and nurturance. In some sense, you can think of parenting as the hardest spiritual practice of all, even being in a monastery, freezing cold in the mountains of China would be much easier.

GS: Oh, I know, I have three.

JKZ: The last book is the one I mentioned before which has just come out, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness. This book has a very broad sweep to it and has to do with both the work of cultivating mindfulness in our own lives and at the same time, the possibility of functioning as cells in the body of the body politic of the society, and of the institutions we work in. We can bring about this orthogonal transformation that I’m talking about in tiny little ways that turn out to be tremendously important.

GS: What a fascinating time to be alive. You can walk into one of the large chain bookstores and find thousands of books that would have gotten you burned at the stake 300 years ago.

JKZ: It’s true. There’s been a huge transformation. One of the things I say in Coming to Our Senses is that there has been just unbelievable growth in the direction of greater self knowing in our society. Yet at the same time, there’s the opposite happening. I think that the real question of our time is how is this going to unfold? Is what’s deepest and best and most beautiful in humanity going to win out? Or is what’s darkest, most ugly and most unwilling to be looked at going to create some irreversible events that are going to make it infinitely painful for our children and our children’s children to find their ways in the world?

GS: Some very important things are being decided by the generations that are alive right now. On most days, I remain optimistic.

JKZ: That’s why you’re writing and I’m writing and we’re having this conversation. We’re all meant to be vehicles for transformation and healing based on the capacity we have as human beings for wisdom and compassion.

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