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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Jon Kabat-Zinn. Jon Kabat-Zinn is Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School where he founded its world-renowned MBSR, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979 and also the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare and Society in 1995. Jon’s also the author of a series of research papers on MBSR that date back all the way to 1982. To put it plainly, Jon Kabat-Zinn has been hugely influential in introducing the practice of mindfulness to medicine and also broadly to millions of people worldwide. He’s the author of 15 books currently in print in over 45 languages, including a new book with Sounds True, it’s called Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief. Jon, welcome.
Jon Kabat-Zinn: Thanks, Tami. It’s just wonderful to be here with you and with everybody else.
TS: Okay, Jon, to start, chronic pain is a huge problem for so many people worldwide, for so many of us. In America alone, I read this statistic in preparing for our conversation, 20% of the population, 50 million people, report suffering from chronic pain and I wanted to start to learn more how you view chronic pain.
JKZ: Well, my exposure to chronic pain came when I started the Stress Reduction Clinic, the MBSR Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, as you said, back in 1979. And the idea was to catch people falling through the cracks of the healthcare system back in 1979, now the cracks are chasms, it’s like the Grand Canyon of falling through. So to offer them something that they might be able to do for themselves as a complement to whatever medicine could do for them to attenuate or regulate whatever medical condition they had. And then right when I was getting started, the pain clinic at UMass heard about it and said, “Well, we got lots of people we can send you.” So they started sending me all of the people who did not respond to the traditional pain regulation treatments that they were using like lidocaine injections, spinal injections, all sorts of different kinds of therapies.
And so, we were getting the people who, as they put it in the medical language, were failures to that, who were like, “There’s nothing left for them, we’ll send them to the stress reduction clinic.” And I thought, “Oh my God, before we even get started, we’re going to be dead on arrival. Because how are we going to be able to handle people who have had no success with pain regulation with the medical treatments?” What I found out was that they became my teachers and demonstrated that these meditative practices that are thousands of years old and they really have to do with suffering in all its different forms, emotional as well as physical, social as well as physical and emotional, but that in particular people who are suffering with chronic pain conditions, which are defined as a pain condition of more than six months duration, anywhere in the body, but that could include emotional pain as well.
And what they would say after the eight weeks of training and fairly rigorous for the time mindfulness meditation practices including mindful hatha yoga by the way, so some degrees of movement and flexibility and balance and strength building, they were saying things like, “You’ve done more for me in eight weeks than my medical team has done for me in eight years.” And I was just staggered to even hear that and said, “Well, I’m so happy for you, but there’s one correction I need to add, and that is that I didn’t do it for you, you did it yourself.” So these practices based on these ancient meditative ways of learning how to be in the body and to be in one’s own heart and mind in ways that minimize suffering have been demonstrated over the years to be totally appropriate for people living in the time that we’re living in now.
And so yes, there was a lot of research that we did in the early days and now there’s even more. But I was staggered to see, if I could go on just a little bit with this line of thought, last week I think it was, a paper came out in the premier scientific journal of them all, Nature, the title of which is Chronic Pain: The Long Road to Discovery, written by a woman named Lucy Odling-Smee, who it turns out set a meditation retreat that my son, Will, and I led a number of years ago at Omega. And in reading this article, what I discovered is that almost nothing’s changed since 1979 in terms of treatments for the people who have chronic pain.
Yes, they’ve done a lot of neuroscience on pain and stuff like that, but basically people are still left to their own devices or the usual kind of chemical attempts to regulate things or surgeries for back pain or other kinds of pain that very often I would see people who had three or four failed back surgeries and then, “Now what am I supposed to be doing?” And people actually found ways to live with the actuality of what they were experiencing and to live relatively well. So that was a real eye-opener for me and really affirm that we were on the right track in terms of bringing these ancient meditative practices into the mainstream of academic and sort of high-level modern medicine.
TS: Can you help our listeners understand, Jon, how I could use mindfulness meditation to help me with chronic pain? Let’s just take back pain because it’s so common.
JKZ: Yes. And let me just say that knowing this was coming up, I actually sat down and read large sections of this new book that we just came out with. And I have to say it’s exactly what I most hoped it would be. It is meant to be so user-friendly that it’s almost not a book, it’s more like a friend. And of course there are audios, meditation practices, but this is the first time in my life ever in a book that I’ve put the text of the guided meditations into the book itself. So you could actually listen through your ears, but actually also read along, or separately the text of them. And it’s designed in such a way with the imagery in the book and so forth to actually be an… Offer an experience of momentary solace all by itself, when you’re really confronting the rendering dimensions of pain where you just don’t know what to do anymore and these are… the drugs don’t work or you’ve tried everything.
Well, the one thing you probably haven’t tried is to turn towards and befriend what you most want to be liberated from and get away from. And that’s what the entire book is about. So to come back to what you were suggesting, what mindfulness is really about when all is said and done, is learning how to inhabit a superpower. I’ve come to think of it in these terms, riffing on or following on the example of Greta Thunberg who speaks about her autism as a superpower. I think what the Buddha was teaching was that human awareness is really an incredibly powerful gift that everybody already has. So it’s not something you have to get or the misunderstanding of meditation is you have to become a good meditator. You have to strive to keep your mind still and balanced and penetrative in terms of insight and focus and try to be a good meditator.
But that’s not what it’s about at all. It’s about learning how to inhabit this functionality that we already have, which is called human awareness, and to sustain that inhabiting of it, and then it transforms your relationship to everything, including pain and suffering. So you can experiment with this a lot, but to bring it down to the sort of nitty-gritty in terms of your question, the first place to start usually in any meditative tradition is just start with the body.
In the Buddhist tradition, it’s called the… As you know, I mean, the first foundation of mindfulness, the body and everybody has a body. We’ve never found anybody who doesn’t have a body and the people that we get come to the hospital or to MBSR because of pain. So the body is not the way I want it to be. And, of course, all we want is for someone to come in and cut it out or fix it or just make it go away. And when you find out that that’s not going to be too likely, then you’re thrown back on your own devices.
And what mindfulness will say is, “Okay, well, let’s just start from scratch. How is it in the body right in this moment? And how do you even know?” Well, the only way you know is by attending to the body, by actually paying attention to “my elbow’s killing me” or “my shoulder’s killing me” or “my jaw’s killing me.” But actually, when you start attending, you realize those actually aren’t sensations, those are thoughts, and a lot of them are emotionally freighted thoughts like, “I can’t stand this, it’s going to ruin my entire life.” And that amplifies the experience of pain and suffering.
So if you develop a kind of constancy in your meditation practice over just even a few days, never mind a few weeks, which is all we’re talking about, come to realize that, “Holy cow, I may be contributing to actually amplifying and exacerbating what I call my pain,” and that it’s possible to actually turn towards it and befriend it, actually, put the welcome mat out for the sensations and learn to inhabit that space of awareness like that becomes your apartment or your house or your home, and you dwell in awareness as opposed to in thinking and emotions and stress reactivity.
And then you can explore what it feels like in the only moment you can never experience anything, which is now. And when people do this or when I do this, and I’m sure it’s true for you as well, or anybody who meditates, you find out there’s a whole other dimension of experience that is inhabitable and that is awareness. And we all have it. So it’s not something you have to get or meditate for 50 years in the Himalayas and then you’ll get it. No, you have it. The barrier is accessing it because we’re so self-distracting. And then now the world, of course, much more than in 1979, is Digital Armageddon in terms of distractibility, the attention economy or the dis-attention economy. So we’re up against a lot, but the message is, “It is doable. You can thread this needle and everybody will do it their own way.”
So it’s not like you have to fall lockstep into some kind of weirdo universe, but you’re actually befriending yourself and investigating who the hell that is, because it certainly is a lot bigger than the story you tell yourself. No matter, even if you don’t have chronic pain, you’re probably telling yourself some story that’s going to feature many elements of inadequacy or unhappiness or “Why, if this wasn’t this way, then I’d be so much better off.” All of which again, pointing out just thoughts and most of our thoughts are just completely wrong. I mean, they’re just wrong. And then the emotional stuff that goes along with them, also a kind of turbulence of the mind that’s unnecessary to get caught up in. Because even if you think of the mind as often spoken about in classical meditation terms, again, as you well know, he’s often likened to the ocean.
And depending on the atmospheric conditions, the mind can wave like crazy or be absolutely calm. And so, we’re not forcing it to be calm and we’re not arguing when it’s waving. You just learn how to drop underneath far enough, and it’s already here. It’s not like you have to go anywhere. The ocean has depth to it, your mind has depth to it, your heart has depth to it, and so you can learn to inhabit this space of embodied awareness. And that’s the practice.
So, the more moments you are inhabiting it, the more you’re transforming your relationship to the unwanted sensations and all of the cognitive and emotional turbulence that goes along with it. And then in the Buddhist tradition, they speak about taking refuge. And it dawned on me not too long ago that the meditation practice really is literally a refuge. It’s a way to step out of very intense winds and weather patterns. And it’s not like you’re getting rid of the wind or making the wind go away, but you’re sheltered enough from it so that you’re actually okay in this moment.
And then I’ll say one more thing and then we… And that thing is that, okay, I’m okay in this moment, but what about the next moment? I mean, the pain’s going to come back or I’m going to lose my concentration or focus or whatever it is. And so I’m worried about the future, but let’s not forget, it’s all about the present moment. So if you learn how to really stay in the present moment, your whole life is just one moment. Everything else is a fiction. The past over future hasn’t happened yet, and this one moment is so easily missed that you could live your whole life and then right at the end, Esther Rowe famously said, “Just before you drop into your grave, you realize, ‘Oh my God, I got the whole thing wrong. I got carried away with all this energy and all this stuff about my, me and mine and my failures and my success and my pain and my suffering, and who’s the blame and what went wrong, and then how unnecessary that was.’ And then you die.”
So in a certain way, these meditative practices are very rigorously inviting us to die now, get it over with, die to that aspect of the mind that’s so self-centered that it actually creates too small a narrative for who you are, then identifies you as a chronic pain patient or as a heart patient or as a cancer patient when you are infinitely more than that. And so letting go of the stories becomes a very big part of letting go of the pain and the suffering.
TS: All right, now I want to talk to that person who has an experience of something or other in their lower back. Decide that maybe we’re not even going to call it P-A-I-N, we’re not even going to use that word. But it’s something. Maybe it feels sharp or bloated or burning or red or something. They’re trying to describe it at a sensation level. Now, how does becoming aware of this, however the person might describe the sensations, in the most raw presentational form, how does that help, actually?
JKZ: It’s a wonderful question. It’s turning towards what you most want to cut out or run away from. And when you do it, you can actually put the welcome mat out, as I said, for the sensations themselves. And maybe you only do it for five seconds, like putting your toe in the water. “Could I take a peek at this thing I’m calling my pain and just feel what it really feels like with no barriers and no thinking, just what it is?” Very often when you actually do that, first of all, you’re experiencing agency because you’re choosing to put your toe in the swimming pool. You’re choosing to do that, and you also have autonomy. You can pull it out, but then you could put it back in and you could see, “Well, maybe I could stay in for 10 seconds.” And you begin to actually befriend the sensory field of what we call pain, and then see that it’s not exactly the same as suffering, that there’s a whole other dimension that we add to it that creates the story of suffering.
Now, this is non-trivial, okay? This is asking a lot of people. And so this is something that, hey, if you can take drugs or get surgery to fix your situation with pain, fantastic, yes, by all means have that happen. But if the doctors, as they very often do wind up saying at a certain point even after multiple surgeries, “The fact is this is something you’re now going to have to learn to live with.” What I’m describing is the learning itself, and it’s a cultivation of a certain kind of intimacy. It’s like doing the exact opposite of what we most want to do, which is just run.
And this is actually a kind of, you can turn what you most don’t want into sort of an adventure of what is okay in my life? Who is doing the attending? For instance, is if you learn how to inhabit the space of awareness and you’re experiencing the sensations say in your lower back, and they’re sharp and cutting and rendering or whatever the words are that are used to describe it, which are very, very vivid, and then you play with it in an experimental way, the way I was suggesting, it’s like, “Well, right in this moment, how is it? Could I go one breath into it? Well, never mind one breath. What about one in-breath, just the in-breath. And then if I guess I have to, I turn away, run away, get up, stop meditating.” But then you see, “Well, I actually made it through that breath. How about the out-breath?” And if not one breath, even half an in-breath.
And in doing that kind of thing, and again, I’m talking in a very sort of abstract way, but we’re talking about tens of thousands of people who have been through this kind of program with chronic pain conditions and have discovered that this actually is an enormous help in living life in a way that reclaims some of what’s been lost from having that back surgery after a car accident or from a fall or from whatever it is. That the “learning to live with it” part, not to make it go away or eradicate the experience, but the learning part has a beautiful geography to it and topology to it.
And then of course, nobody wants it. But when you don’t have any alternative, then it turns out that it can actually become your ally. And it says that in the book at a certain place, and even your friend, because, and a lot of people say this, “You gave my life back to me,” as I said. And I say, “I didn’t give your life back to you. You gave your life back to you,” by being willing in some sense to try something that on the surface might sound like complete insanity.
TS: Now, Jon, you talk about putting the welcome mat out and also paradoxically, you describe how we don’t need to bring our mindfulness to these painful sensations with a desire, with an agenda, “I want to fix this, I want this to go away.” Instead, the welcome mat welcomes.
JKZ: Yes, you can bring that kind of agenda.
TS: I noticed in me, I was like, “Look, I have that agenda.”
JKZ: Everybody does.
TS: “I bought the book Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief. I’m looking for relief. I’m doing these practices—“
JKZ: The relief, where’s the—
TS: Yes, exactly.
JKZ: Where’s the money? Show me the money.
TS: If there’s a welcome mat, I also want to welcome. I don’t really want to welcome someone I don’t like, but okay, I’d much rather open the door on the welcome mat. But anyway, I want relief and I want to—
JKZ: You want it now, right?
TS: Yes.
JKZ: Yes. Well, welcome to the club, you know what that’s called? It’s called being human. Of course, we’re all that way. We’re all that way. But part of the beauty of being human is there wouldn’t be a Sounds True at all if you yourself did not discover at a certain point that the reality is much more interesting than the appearance, and has so many more dimensions to it that can actually be cultivated, that can actually be turned towards, that can be befriended in all sorts of different ways. And that asking the question, “Who am I really?” When I refer to myself or I, me and mine, there’s an enormous richness there. There’s a gigantic universe there, and it’s so much bigger, as I was suggesting, than the narratives we tell ourselves. And that’s where the convergence of the sensory dimension of pain, the emotional dimension of pain, and the cognitive dimension of pain come together.
And as I was saying, you can experience as part of your meditation practice that when the mind contracts, when your thoughts kind of focus on me and my pain, it actually amplifies the suffering because you’re taking it all personally and you’ve got to blame whoever is to blame for it. And the doctors who weren’t able to fix you but promised that they would or whatever, or you thought they promised that they would, or that it would at least get better. And when all is said and done, there’s just you and the way things are. And that’s not a life sentence or a tragedy. That’s actually the beginning of… To grab the last line of Humphrey Bogart’s… in the movie… that it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship — you with you, you with yourself. And people may not be drawn to meditation, actually, people are drawn to meditation for a million different reasons.
But when you have no place else to go and you still have this body and it is not what you want it to be, whatever age you find yourself at, then actually there aren’t that many alternatives except to live a life where you feel completely imprisoned or betrayed by whatever, or that that’s not the end of the story. And as long as you’re breathing, as we say all the time to our patients, “As long as you’re breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong with you, no matter what’s wrong with you.” And we see people in MBSR with every conceivable medical diagnosis. And of course, all of us have the ultimate medical diagnosis of a sexually-transmitted disease with a terminal prognosis. It’s called being alive.
TS: Yes. Now, I wanted to ask you this question, Jon, because you said, “As long as you’re breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong with you, no matter what is wrong.” And this is one of the seven principles for working with pain that you write about in Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief.
JKZ: Yes.
TS: And I thought to myself, I could imagine a lot of people hearing that and going, “Uh, I’m not so sure. I think there’s more wrong with me than right in this moment.”
JKZ: And you just demonstrated my argument because you used the word “thinking.” You think, of course, everybody thinks there’s more wrong at a certain point when we are in trouble, when we… Seriously, we’re all going to die, okay? There’s not that there’s something wrong with us because we’re going to die. That’s simply the way life is, at least for now. There are people working on the whole problem of death, and maybe we will be able to download ourselves to a disc at some point and then sort of be immortalized in one way or another. But in terms of the embodied analog world, first of all, I want to just give a nod to the analog world that if you think about your body or anybody, any of us thinking about our body, how the hell did it get here? We can talk about ancestors and we do need to honor our ancestors, but we don’t know our ancestors back more than 4, 5, 10, 15, 20 generations.
How far back do you want to go before it’s just millions of years of evolution? And we’re living on this little blue planet that we’ve been able to get far enough away from to look back and photograph it, and it’s just hanging in space, absolute blackness, and there’s no place else to go. And we’re of course besmirching the planet in certain ways that are really threatening life. And the reason I’m getting cosmic here is to just remind people that every single one of us, just the body for instance, there are more atoms in the human body than we have numbers to actually name, and there are more cells in the human body than there are galaxies in the universe. So this is an enormous result of 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution since The Big Bang. And we should honor that there. There’s nothing wrong with the analog world. And in fact, what we’re learning through the meditative practices in the scientific study of meditation is that this brain of ours, for instance, right underneath our skull, is the most complex arrangement of matter in the known bios universe.
Well, we haven’t finished the arc of self-discovery of who we are by any stretch in imagination. And now with ChatGPT and AI and all of that, it may be that we are going to favor the digital world, which can give us a lot, but is also really potentially tremendously toxic, without fulfilling those for the planet Earth, 3.5, let’s say, billion years of human evolution and life on this planet. And with the result of it now, maybe we should actually learn how to inhabit the miracle and the full dimensionality of this body, this heart, this mind, this brain. You are the product of this unbelievable mystery where the eyes work, the ears work, the nose works, the mouth works, the spine actually holds you up out of the pelvis. The legs actually keep us erected in the gravity. I mean, it’s like a miracle on a million different levels, and my back is killing me.
Okay, so hey, how do we actually hold both of those without diminishing that my back is killing me? Because when my back is killing me, I don’t care about evolution or even the next moment or even eating dinner. But how do you hold all of that in a way that actually could enhance the quality of your life? Because when all is said and done, that’s what we’re talking about.
What’s pain relief mean? That I have a better quality of life. I’m happier more, and less in suffering. And as again, you well know and Sounds True well knows, these meditative practices, it’s almost like this is the moment on planet Earth that they’re most needed. Not just for individuals in chronic pain, but for governments, for leaders, for the people who are deciding how, as humanity, we govern ourselves so that we don’t self-destruct, for instance.
So it’s all the same superpower. And this book is really meant to be something that you reach for when you don’t know what else to do, that you really don’t know what else to do. And everything you’ve tried has failed, but you’re still breathing, you still have a body. Why not turn towards what you most want to just get cut out or run away from or get fixed? And just see what this 3.5 billion years of evolution on planet Earth in the form of you, today, might be capable of.
TS: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Suffering and discomfort are far more widespread and pervasive than many of us previously thought, in all of our lives and in the culture that we share. In response, we need to learn how to turn towards and embrace our difficult emotional experiences and make small self-honoring shifts that turn out to be quite meaningful over time. Shifts that enable us to be closer to our true selves and even find our way back to a sense of innocence, awe, and joy, today and every day. In Rachel Macy Stafford’s new book, Soul Shift, she shares small actionable steps that make a difference even when life gets hard. You can learn more about the book Soul Shift and also the audio series, the Soul Shift Sessions at SoundsTrue.com.
At one point towards the beginning you talk about tuning into something, inhabiting your body and finding something pleasurable in your body experience even when you’re suffering from a lot of pain. And I wonder, do you advise people to alternate between paying attention to what they’re naming pain and something that they find as pleasurable? And does that start to shift something if we go in between those two experiences?
JKZ: Yes, because when you… A lot of the time we don’t even tune into the pleasant, we are into the narrative of if it’s pleasant, I want more of it. How long is this going to last? So often you can be pessimistic even about the pleasant, whether it’s a relationship or whether it’s a… Whatever it is, so like, “This is not going to last.” Everybody’s into impermanence when it comes to my concern about the pleasant not lasting, but if you shift to the unpleasant, everybody’s into total permanence, “This is going to last forever. It’s killing me. It’s ruined my entire life. I’ll never be able to do what I really wanted to do.” And both of those are just a hundred percent wrong. They’re just, like, wrong. It’s just thoughts. They’re just secretions of the thinking mind. And when you learn how to, as we said at the beginning, rest in awareness, then you learn that you have another perspective.
There’s nothing wrong with thinking. I mean, thinking is phenomenal, but when it runs out of control and you can’t get to sleep or whatever it is, then it’s really helpful to know, hey, there’s another way to be in the moment, to be in your body, to be underneath the waves of your self-narrative about how bad things are one way or another. And that’s liberative, that is freedom right in the moment, not just freedom from pain and from suffering, but it’s freedom from all of the ways in which we don’t honor our own intrinsic beauty as human beings. And I’m not talking about ego or self-inflationary sort of self-congratulations. I’m talking about just being who you really, really, really, really, really are.
And that seems to me to be something that we’re all starving for, if not dying for, because we feel like circumstances or fate or whatever it is, has constrained us in certain ways.
And why meditation is called liberative. Why mindfulness is, you know, the Buddha himself said it was like the direct path to liberation. And why do they talk about it as liberation? Because we are liberating ourselves from the delusion of those not big enough self-narratives and not just about self, not just about me, but about we. It’s like we are not seeing each other. We’re not really, and that’s why we could use more kindness and compassion, not just towards others, but towards ourselves, but very much towards others, and not just have it be kind of circumstance, be conscious of it.
So of course, there’s a lot of love in all of our lives, but if we’re not conscious of it, if we’re not aware of it, then we take that stuff for granted and then we just feature on the marquee “My pain, my suffering, my lack of fulfillment in my life, and nobody can help me.” And, of course, go out and get as much help as you can from all the specialists in the world. But at a certain point, they’re going to say to you, “I mean, we may be specialists, but we’re not gods. We’re not miracle workers. You’re going to have to learn to live with this.” They say that every single day in medicine, but that’s the end of the story. They don’t say, “And this is how you go about that learning trajectory.”
And that’s what the book is. That’s what MBSR is. And it’s no big deal. I mean, it’s like completely obvious in a certain way that we sell ourselves short and then we blame everybody else for it. And what this is saying like, no, don’t inflate yourself. Don’t make yourself into the greatest thing to walk the planet Earth since sliced rye bread or whatever, but to mix metaphors, but don’t sell yourself short. And that means, well, then maybe you don’t know who you are. Maybe you need to investigate who you are. Maybe those stories you’ve been telling yourself about your childhood or your parents or your successes or your failures, maybe it’s not the whole story.
TS: You ask this great investigative question—
JKZ: Is this making sense to you by the way?
TS: It is, Jon, of course, it’s making a lot of sense, and—
JKZ: It’s true, because it’s very important to me to be able to communicate something that at a certain point, words just don’t do it. The words are like fingers, as they say in the Zen tradition, “Don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon.”
And all I’m doing is speaking words. And the only reason I’m speaking words, and of course I know that all this stuff and you practice this stuff, but the people who are listening to this, to one degree or another, it’s very important to understand that what we’re talking about is not some abstraction, and we’re not actually even selling anything. It’s not a product, even though it can take a form of a book or something like that. What we’re offering or extending is the possibility for you to connect with you in the most profound ways while you have the chance. And it will be different in a certain way for everybody. So we’re not saying what the outcomes will be or even the pathway. We’re sort of just giving you the roadmap and then it’s a big territory so you can take whatever paths we like.
TS: You are making a lot of sense, Jon, and the book and the audio series, Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief, both are invitations for people to engage and explore deeply, themselves. And I wanted to bring forward to have you comment on one of the questions that you put out for the reader to explore. And you write, “Is my awareness of the pain in pain? Is my awareness of the pain in pain?” And I thought this was a really, really essential question that the book puts forward, because even as I was describing to you, and I’ve suffered a lot from chronic pain, so it’s not like I don’t know this territory. I’ve come up with ways of working with myself.
JKZ: I hear you, and that’s true for me as well at certain points in my life.
TS: Would you tell us some about that? And then also go into this question, is my awareness of the pain in pain?
JKZ: Well, let’s start with that because it’s a very weird question in a way. And it’s meant to be weird because when something is sort of doesn’t go over all that smoothly, then it has the potential to actually stop you or a little jarring wake-up call, is my awareness so? Let’s say I’m experiencing a lot of pain in my lower back, okay? And I’m sure almost everybody who’s listening to this has had that kind of experience. I mean, we are talking like really, really, really, really… It’s killing me. We’ll say things like, “It’s killing me.” I mean, I remember once just hitting my thumb full-on with a hammer, and then I had the thought — after I let out the loudest howl I’ve probably ever let out — to actually zero in on the thumb and just feel the pyrotechnics of the aftermath of that whack. And it was wild.
There’s a whole universe of sensation in there. And then there’s the awareness, or sometimes I like to use the present participle, I invent words like “awarenessing.” There’s no verb for awareness, but why not? We are awarenessing that sensory explosion in the thumb or wherever. And then you can ask yourself, you can investigate, it’s not like, “Let me think about that.” You can just directly know in the moment is my awareness of what’s going on in my thumb in pain, or suffering? And I don’t want to give away the ending, but the fact is that for almost everybody, you come to realize that your awareness is a whole other dimension to inhabit and that it may not be in pain even though you are dealing with all this sensory stuff. And it’s not dissociative by the way. It’s not like, “Oh, we’re going to just dissociate from the body,” which would be pathological, but it’s almost like more associative.
It’s like befriending this new dimension that we never get pointed out to us in school. And I’m using the word pointed out because that’s actually a technical term in Tibetan meditation practice, pointing out certain features of the landscape, of meditative awareness. And so that you can explore an experiment in a laboratory for yourself— is my awareness of the pain in pain? You can do it with anxiety. Is my awareness of my anxiety anxious? If it’s not, well, you have a whole other degree of freedom to work with. And when you’re really anxious, how is it in the body when you’re anxious? How is it in the chest? How is it in the belly? How is it in the back? How is it in the jaw? The shoulders? And everybody who’s on this call knows exactly how it is because we’ve all had that experience. It’s like a complete contraction, but the awareness doesn’t contract.
The awareness just holds the actuality of it. And it’s like a refuge. It’s out of the wind. Yes, all that stuff’s still going on. Yes, I did hit my thumb with the hammer, but there’s just more to that moment and the following moment and the following moment that you can actually surf on, you can ride the wave of it. And everybody with chronic pain will tell you it comes and goes. It’s like it has waves. Sometimes… it may be never great, but sometimes it’s a lot worse than it is than other times. So moment by moment, you can actually surf on the waves of your own experience. And the surfboard — I’ve never said this before, and may be overextending the metaphor — but the surfboard with you on it is actually awareness. And you can inhabit that space in a way that’s, in that moment you are already free.
It’s not like you have to meditate for 50 years and then maybe you’ll get enlightened. The freedom, if it’s worth anything, it’s only valuable now. And if you apprehend it, then that’s a realization. That’s a profound realization that you are not who you think you are. There’s so much more to this. And that while we think of ourselves often as our CV or our story, my narrative, the story of me, the awareness doesn’t have a story. And it’s not like it will get better in the future. It’s always just as reliable.
It’s like your ally, your best friend, your refuge. And this has nothing to do with being Buddhist or Buddhism, but it has everything to do with dharma, what the Buddha taught and embodied and invited the community of humans to see for yourself, not take anybody’s word for any of this stuff or even now, don’t read the scientific papers and believe everything that they say. No, you’ve got to try it for yourself.
And the book — to come back to the book — is really meant to be as user-friendly a way as you and me and some of your wonderful colleagues at Sounds True. I mean, we really tried to make the type and the size of the type and the feel of the pages and the imagery and the colors of the type and so forth that the entire thing is actually a kind of experience of intimacy, not with the book, intimacy with yourself, that the book is kind of catalyzing. And I hope that people relate to it that way because that’s what-
TS: It is. The book is a friend, it’s a friend.
JKZ: It’s an offering. Yeas.
TS: It is a friend really, it really is.
JKZ: It’s meant to be a friend.
TS: Okay, now I’m going to ask you a question here, as my friend, and I’m going to go out a little bit —
JKZ: We’ve known each other for a very long time. I love that.
TS: Go out a little bit on a limb based on what’s happening for me in my inner experience as I’m exploring this question of awareness and what’s arising, the contents, the searing red, difficult feelings, awareness, not in pain at all, just spacious, open, accepting. But what I’m noticing is it’s almost like there are two things going on: when I tune into that awareness and then the content of the experience. And at a certain moment, it collapsed into one thing happening. And that was very interesting to me.
JKZ: How would you describe the collapse?
TS: I don’t know. I was like, “Wait, there aren’t two things. There’s just one kind of an interesting arising. Oh my God, this is kind of blowing my mind and I think I have to ask Jon about it.”
JKZ: There you go. You see, but you don’t need to ask me because that’s what meditation is about. It’s actually discovering a kind of integrative unity within diversity on every level, from the subatomic to the molecular, to the cellular, to the organ, to the organ systems, to the all of that, and then into humanity, into society, into government, into nations, into the global environment. And yes, it’s an experience of unity and diversity that your uniqueness is an important part of it, but it’s equally important that you’re just like everybody else. And there’s something about that that’s so wonderful. That that’s where the compassion just springs out because you’re experiencing what I call interconnectedness. You can’t practice mindfulness without almost instantly realizing everything is connected to everything else. And we take so much for granted like just that we breathe in the air.
I mean, if I’m in a room with a thousand people — I haven’t been in a room with a thousand people in a very long time, but I used to ask people, “Just let me ask you one question, how many of you are breathing?” And a thousand hands will go up, and of course we conventionally say I’m breathing. But the fact is that if it were up to you to be breathing, you would’ve died ages ago. You got distracted, got a text, an email, some kind of problem arose, or you got into your pain condition and you lost track of breathing and you died. But no, the organism, the brain stem and the phrenic nerve and the diaphragm don’t let you have that level of control. You can hold your breath for a while, but you can’t commit suicide by holding your breath.
So there’s a certain kind of way in which we’re so much more beautiful and complex and interconnected than we tend to realize or even learn in school until recently. Now they’re teaching this kind of stuff in school. A lot of schools are teaching mindfulness, but then that’s where compassion arises. So we can have compassion for, “I’m not the only person with chronic pain on the planet.” Maybe we can learn from each other. I mean, we run an MBSR classroom. We go way beyond chronic pain because we take people with every conceivable medical diagnosis and we do something with them that in medicine would be considered insanity, the heart of insanity, maybe even malpractice. After all the scientific development of medicine to understand diseases and what differentiates one disease from another and the mechanisms underlying the disease and everything else.
And then developing drugs and surgery that are specific for the specific thing that you’re dealing with, we take everybody no matter what their diagnosis is, and put them in the same room and we focus on what’s right with them rather than what’s wrong with them. And it turns out to be really, I mean, in some ways revolutionary, but totally common-sensical way of working with people because then they’ll look around the room. Because everybody gets to say why they’re there, if they want to. And when you hear why other people are there, it puts your pain or your diagnosis, whatever it is, in a whole different perspective. Because invariably in a room with say 20, 30 people, when we would do it in person in the room, you’d never even give any thought that the body could actually do what Mrs. So-and-So just said she’s experiencing or her social situation for that matter or whatever it is.
It’s like pain and suffering come in an infinite number of different packages and then all of a sudden you realize maybe I’m okay with my own circumstance. I certainly don’t want to be the way that person is. And that’s also liberative because it says, “Okay, and here’s a place to stand. I can stand with the actuality of things as they are.” And then it’s like… And in this timeless moment we call now, which is the only moment we are ever alive, the only moment we can take a breath, and then the question comes up, “Well, now what?” Exactly, now what? And what is questioning, investigative. How does it feel in my thumb if I hit myself with the hammer or if I’ve been suffering from back pain for… On the average of people who come to the stress reduction relief when they’re… They have an eight-year history on average of chronicity of low back pain and multiple surgeries and stuff like that, headaches, jaw pain, just you name it.
And this was kind of like the last resort, and people would say when we told them what the program was about and we never force anybody to do, we invite them. They have to sign up, and we tell them, “It’s hard. It’s a discipline. You’ve got to practice.” And we don’t care if like the practice, you just have to do it at the end of the eight weeks, you can tell us whether it was full of it or not, but when your mind tells you, “This is full of it, I’m sick and tired of lying on my back and doing a body scan and Jon has no idea how much I’m in pain and everything else,” and say, yes, no matter what the mind comes up with, we don’t care. If you don’t sign up for the eight weeks, you can’t come for one week and then quit. We won’t let you sort of have a sampler. “Do I like mindfulness?” No, no, you don’t have to like it. You just have to do it.
And at the end of the eight weeks, come back and tell us if it was full of it or not. But in the meantime, just practice and take that energy of anger or resentment or frustration or doubt and take all those energies and put them into the present moment and practice and then report back. And, of course, you can call us anytime during the eight weeks. So we’re willing to be completely present for people. But then the flip side of that is, are you willing to be completely present for yourself with things exactly as they are. Not the way you would like them to be if we surgically, could just magically cut out your pain and restore you to the way you were before or… And, of course, there’s no end to it, people say, “I just wish I was 20 years younger, that would solve all my problems.” Well, lots of luck.
TS: One final question for you, Jon. When you were describing the evolutionary history that we’ve come from, you said, “And there’s a promise, there’s some kind of promise in us as humans, and are we going to realize that promise? Will we get diverted into distraction in the digital world or will we realize the promise of this?” What does that mean to you? What would it look like?
JKZ: It’s a good question, and I’m not sure I’ve ever used the word promise before. I mean it as potentiality, as a possibility that there’s something about human awareness and human compassion. And you can see it in all the people that we classically recognize as in some sense, transcended a small view of self, whether it’s the Dalai Lama or Ramana Maharshi or whoever it might be, where they’re just living in a domain of wisdom as so many of the Tibetan teachers, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and so forth. But they’re all also ordinary human beings. They’ve just befriended their minds, and in some sense, not just trained, but tamed their minds so that they’re not prisoners of the sort of selfing impulse that contracts around the story of me. And this is a human inheritance. We’re all capable of this, just the way we’re all capable of learning. And MBSR is like a course, it’s… in the book, is a course in a certain way.
It’s like, you go through it from one end to the other only there’s really no end, even though the course ends for eight weeks. But we like to say the eighth week is the rest of your life. The eighth week is the rest of your life. But why do we take courses? Why do we… We take courses to learn something, right? Now, maybe there’s something more I could learn before I die. Probably the people who love you the most are constantly telling you that, yes, there are a lot of things that you could probably learn that we wish you would already, if you know what I mean. Whether it’s parents or children or whatever, or friends, when they’re really honest, of course, we’re all on a growth curve. And that’s exactly what happens when you learn, go to school, you learn and out of the learning, you grow and out of the growing, you learn how to come to terms with things as they are, which is my working definition of healing.
It doesn’t mean eradicating the pain, although when you practice in this way, a lot of people report their pain goes away, independent of diagnosis, by the way, which blew my mind when I saw it back in the early 80s. It’s like it doesn’t matter what they come with, they’re all benefiting. That’s why it was okay to mix all those diagnoses together because we’re focusing on what’s right with people. And we did notice that everybody who comes into the program, even if they have to be wheeled in on a stretcher, they’re breathing, they have a body, great place to start, first foundation of mindfulness.
And then you also have likes and dislikes, second foundation of mindfulness, and it just goes on with thinking and emotions and the third foundation of mindfulness. And then there’s like awareness, the dharmas, and that’s a territory where we just haven’t in our culture had that kind of systematic education that carried us that far. But so, learning to growing, growing to healing, and what about healing? Coming to terms with things as they are, that’s transformative, that’s transfiguring because all of a sudden, you’re the same person you always were and you’re not. And you may not even recognize it. A lot of people will say to us, tell us, “People ask me, ‘Well, what’s going on with you? I mean, you seem really different to me.’”
Other people will notice you’re not so self-centered, you’re not so strung out. You’re not so hair-trigger reactive to this or that. You seem a little bit cooler, a little bit more relaxed, less stressed and stuff like that. And often other people notice it before you do. And we’re not meditating to get that way. We’re meditating to realize that we’re already that way and we just keep getting in our own way, which prevents it from flowering.
TS: As always, Jon, I love talking with you. Thank you so much.
JKZ: Right back at you. And I’m very honored to be able to do this. We are not seeing the people who are tuning in, whether they’re tuning in real time while we’re having this conversation or will tune in later, but if I could just say a word to all of those people, I want you to know that this conversation… And Tami too, I want you to know that this conversation is really an invitation for you to befriend yourself and to recognize that there may be aspects of your own capabilities, possibilities, potential, that are really untapped. And when you tap them through these meditative practices in whatever ways you care to, it’s like drilling down into the earth and coming up with natural resources. But these are non-polluting, ecologically friendly, natural resources in your own humanity, right down to the atomic level of your universe body.
TS: You’ve been listening to Jon Kabat-Zinn. He’s the author of a new book with Sounds True, it’s called Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief. Thanks everyone for being with us. Sounds True, waking up the world. And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after the show Q&A conversations with featured presenters and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us at Join.SoundsTrue.com. Sounds True, waking up the world.
