Jon Kabat-Zinn

Tetragrammaton It was a kind of a kowang for me working on revising something I wrote 30 years ago in part because the world has changed so much also in part because I've changed so much in 30 years and I kind of felt at the time that it was a pretty good book that it was nothing more

than I wanted to do with it that it was kind of like I accomplished my goals at that moment with it when I wrote it and then there was an opportunity to come out with a tenth anniversary edition and they said do you want to write a new forward to it and I said no I wouldn't want to touch the

beginning of it but I'll put an afterward on it which is what happened and then 20 years later when I looked at it again when they proposed this 30th anniversary edition I realized I thought this book was fabulous but I'm not that happy with it in a certain way but I'm not going

to rewrite the whole book I mean it's like it's a piece of a certain time so what I'm going to do is put a new forward on it put a new afterward on it that's got part of the old one and then everything that rings a bell as I go through the entire manuscript that feels a little

off or needs something else I will just tweak it in whatever way feels necessary and that's what I did and that's what you've got it feels like there's something more than was in the original volume it feels more alive and there's also a new audio because I've lived with the old audio

for a long time and the new audio is infinitely better than the old audio well coming from you I mean I mean I don't know what to say when we're talking about the audio world giving voice to what's in your heart but that's also in linear you know words on a page is its own

challenge in a certain way and I was wishing in my heart of hearts that you were in the studio with me while I was doing it you would have caught I think a lot more places where you know I I caught myself a lot of the time where the producer who was doing it and I said no I got to go

back and take another run at it and did it quite a few times it felt very natural to me and I felt like you were speaking to me and it makes me feel good and it relaxes me and I feel like every time I listen I learn something new even though I've been reading the book since it originally came out

30 years ago it's a very powerful book well thank you I mean that book is in a certain way what has connected us so I'm very grateful to it for just that reason I mean you know which I told you I think that my daughter gave me the gift of the creative act I had never actually heard

of you which surprises a lot of people but that just says something about my own age and you know so forth but when I started reading and I felt like oh my god this is a mindfulness book this is pure meditative wisdom but rounded out in so many fabulous ways to make it infinitely common

senseical and also completely supportive of the reader's uniqueness beyond success and failure and the potential for confidence in him or her or their self however you put it in a way that lets the creativity go through multiple cycles across a lifespan rather than simply being identified

with a particular moment of success or a particular work beautiful tell me the story 30 years ago of the original book how did the original book come to be well my first book is called full catastrophe living and it came out in 1990 and many editors told me you can't put the word

catastrophe in the title of a book nobody will buy it and I as a first time author I spent several years while I was writing in that book which is about the mindfulness based stress reduction program that I started at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center

so I went through about 2000 titles and I could knock every to that title in part because of Zorba the Greek and Anthony Quinn and that whole notion of the full catastrophe is a metaphor for the human condition the good the bad and the ugly so not just the bad and the ugly and so

I had to argue with my editors and finally they said well it's your book you put your title on it but don't blame us and people got it and like if in 1990 people wondered what is the full catastrophe of the human condition in 2024 that's a move point everybody knows what the

full catastrophe is and and in a certain way it's us so that was the first book and it goes through the entire eight-week program of taking people with a vast range of medical conditions chronic ones that usually people aren't getting full satisfaction from the healthcare system and

so a lot of time especially with pain conditions a doctor might say well you're going to have to learn to live with this after you've tried a bunch of different treatments and then that's usually the end of the conversation and what MBSR is about is like okay and we have a clinic here at the

hospital that can teach you the arc of that learning so that you can actually engage with the most unwanted aspects of your own life whether it's your body or your mind or your social circumstances or whatever it is and find a certain degree of agency and originality in learning to live the

life that's yours to live given the conditions as they are and it turns out that's like a safety net in the hospital to catch all the people falling through the cracks of the healthcare system and if there were cracks in the healthcare system in 1979 when I started the MBSR program well now it's

chasms it's like grandcannions in the healthcare system very sadly and really needs to be reconfigured in enormous ways all they pay attention to is how to get it paid for but not what the it is that needs and the whole idea of MBSR or mindfulness-based stress reduction was to invite people to participate in their own healthcare by mobilizing their own interior beauty let's say or the way I sometimes put it is their interior resources for learning growing healing and transformation and those

are in need to be in human so everybody has them but we never taught in school or anywhere else how to actually engage in the actuality of our own lives and creativity to look back to you know your work and to recognize that you know basically every human being to first the

approximation is an absolute genius and with multiple intelligences and some more in evidence than others but there's always something to draw from and we're always taught that education is about putting stuff into you as opposed to the other aspect of it which is deep and creative

who the you is that we're putting all this stuff into and what is already here and resourceable I was parenthetically I was giving a talk once maybe 15 or 20 years ago at Alberta where they're like the big oil fields and I was doing all this stuff in healthcare but somehow

some corporate group heard about my being there and invited me to come and talk to the oil magnets so early one morning they were having a breakfast meeting and I actually show up at this you know unbelievable environment that I would never actually have been in and the way I framed

it to them because you know meditation you start to roll your eyeballs and they say well you know how you folks what you're into is drilling you're into drilling or the shell oil and what are you drilling for you're drilling down into the earth to draw out deep resources from the earth

that you can use to hopefully instantiate good things in the world well that's exactly what meditation is it's deep drilling into your own interior resources that are hidden beneath the surface very often but a huge reservoir of potential that when you learn how to tap into it and draw it into

the rest of your life as it unfolds then you have the potential to learn things that ordinarily you never would have come in contact with and why do we send kids to school or what is learning anyway even if you don't go to school or home school learning seems to me to be all about

growing more as a human being into your potential right I mean it's like why do we learn so that we can be more effective or more reflective or have more wisdom or at least information available for solving problems and so what happens when you go through that learning and then growing

especially if you having suffering of some kind in the world and so in your life and your body or whatever as you age or which most of us do must us have some everyone it's part of the human conditions it is part of the human condition and so if you go through an ongoing lifelong

process of learning and growing so it's not just a one shot deal but it's the your default mode then that of that comes healing all those ways in which we're suffering which the root meaning of the word suffer means to carry from the latin superferi so we're carrying a lot and alive it's

burdensome it's heavy it's weighing down and if we learn how to heal that healing isn't fixing it's not getting rid of everything that's wrong with me so that I'll be perfect but to recognize that you're actually perfect exactly as you are this is sometimes really hard for people to hear

if there's all sorts of things that they have to deal with all of us but that you in some sense are perfect exactly as you are and that healing is a coming to terms with things as they are it's not liking it is not trying to fix anything but it's a kind of okay okay I see the size of the cloth

you're no longer in a fight with it exactly and that's kind of like profound acceptance but it's not a cognitive or conceptual acceptance it's going a bunch bigger than that and then what comes of that is like you're transformed as a human being you're bigger than who you thought you were

you realize that you have always been bigger than who you thought you were because your stories are always too small no matter how great your story is first of all one of the problems is it's always about me right on the star of my own show and while it's totally understandable and fine

there's a certain way which I think we both recognize through our own meditation practice that it can also be imprisoning because then you you know think like you have to perform yourself or you have to do what you used to do or what other people expect you to do and so you get into these

kind of prisons prisons of our own making and it inhibits creativity and inhibits spontaneity and inhibits a certain kind of optimism about the possible when you bring the entirety of your being into any moment and that's what meditation is like bring the entirety of your being into any

moment which turns out to be very available because any moment is always this moment there's no other moment and it's very forgiving because if you miss this moment well here it is again so in that sense the whole idea of this kind of work in medicine has been and healthcare has been

to reveal to people this innate genius aspect that we have that is deeply associated with healing with well-being and with genius and creativity well all healing is always done ourselves the medical establishment can create the environment that allows us to heal ourselves

but that's all yeah doctors don't heal us no they create the conditions to allow us to heal but we're always doing the healing yeah and even if you're using drugs the drugs are interacting with the universe the extremely complex universe of our biology and when they are really helpful

they actually do carry us over the threshold into a self-sustaining kind of healing that you don't need the drugs anymore for hopefully or you do for maintenance but it's a self-healing system did you ever have a pushback from the medical community on mindfulness to reduce stress considering

they have pills to reduce stress that's a wonderful question and the answer to it surprisingly and I got used to get asked that question a lot because now we've been at it for basically 45 years so you know it's a meditation has been in the mainstream of medicine now with a lot of scientific

research and neuroscience research supporting a whole range of different kinds of effects that it has on health and well-being and then mind and the brain but the answer to your question is I didn't get any pushback at all at the same time that I have zero credentials for doing what I

did you know I'm not a physician and so for me to set up a successful outpatient clinic in a department of medicine and the medical school is like you got to ask the question and many people did in the old days how the hell did that come about and there's only a one-word answer I mean

the rest is like a gigantic story which you could tell a million different ways I don't know how it came about just came about the one-word answer would be karma and part of that karma is that and I could see this at the time that as a young guy I was pretty convincing in part because of

my history so everybody projected on to me well he must know what he's doing because he has a Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT with a Nobel laureate and that's all I needed that level of confidence to say okay we believe in you enough show us whether this will work or not well I was going to

say the two words that came to mind of why it happened is because it works no that's exactly right you see what happens if you create the conditions where people empower themselves so it's not like I can't even say it's the meditation practice per se it's the interaction of the invitation to

and we maybe we'll get into whatever meditation really is with the universe of genius of a human being that's unbelievably powerful so when people in the first couple of years people would come with all sorts of conditions that you know there was no help for them I mean they had run the gamut

of their medical treatments three or four back surgeries for back pain or you know all sorts of other kinds of things and then since this clinic was available they said well we don't know what to do it they were a send them to distress reduction clinic which is exactly what I wanted yeah I

want the people that you don't know what to do with and then we'll test the following presumption or in my case the third axiom if people are geniuses the way we said then they can find ways to participate in their own trajectory towards greater health and while being across

the lifespan starting from wherever they are which means if they're in pain or they've had three surgeries or whatever the catastrophes are this is a wonderful place to start we'll start exactly where you are we're not saying where you are is pleasant or a good thing or anything but

we're saying is it possible for us to mobilize those deep interior resources that we were just talking about in an eight week period of time so it's not forever but here's eight weeks come to our hospital once a week for two and a half or three hour class with a group of maybe

thirty or forty other medical patients all with a different medical condition so we mix people which is exact opposite of you know hundred years of medicine we mix people with all different diagnosis we put them in the same room and one of the reasons we can do that is we've noticed over

the years of very careful observation that it turns out they all have bodies sometimes they have to be wheeled in on a stretcher or they have to come in on crutches or in a wheelchair but they all have bodies they're all breathing and that's all you need to say wonderful place to start and

it turns out of course if you know anything about the meditative world and Buddhism and so forth the first foundation of mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition is the body so as long as you're you know conscious and you have a body there's good raw material here for working and

that's all I felt we needed and then the proof was in the actual unfolding of the clinic and and we documented all the outcomes and it was very gratifying because often the patients would go back to their doctors in the first couple of years where it was mostly chronic pain patients

and they'd say things like that program you sent me to that was eight weeks you know I learned more in those eight weeks and I got better in those weeks more than I've gotten better in eight years with your treatments and so that's a way of like kind of educating physicians that

hold on short change or underestimate the potential of people who are suffering with various kinds of medical diagnoses for doing something in a participatory way as a complement to whatever drug and surgical treatments you can do for them and that is actually transform medicine to the

point where NIH now has a model of medicine that includes has one of its four Ps participation but we accept it now as in the mainstream but that's only because 45 years ago you did this work that's why it is well yeah I had a lot of help along the way a lot of colleagues and friends and

and then it grew because you know in part I mentioned neuroscientific studies of mindfulness well it turns out that in the 60s of course meditation was you know starting to become a thing the way I got into it was when I was a graduate student at MIT various meditation teachers used to come

through Cambridge because Cambridge Mass I mean it's like you know Cambridge and Berkeley that's where everybody was going and so you could have a whole separate education just going to things that were happening in Cambridge very often sponsored by the universities where you could hear

these great meditation teachers Christian Merty and you know sort of this Korean Zen rest that I studied with I mean just all sorts of people coming through and so you can get like double educations you know like you go to school but you're also getting all this other stuff and in those

days medicine was very very different and it was like the doctor knows best don't even answer them questions don't tell the patient they have cancer can you believe that that was like the dominant thing is that we don't want to disturb the person by telling them will tell the family that they

have a cancer diagnosis now a days that would be considered gross malpractice but it was really a different era and so medicine and meditation have converged these are two very ancient systems of understanding well-being and for the first time on the planet they've come together kind of like

glaciers moving out of separate valleys and then combining and moving down and one of them is what the Buddhist again called Dharma that's the Dharma stream of the potential of every human being to wake up which is what the word Buddha means as you know and of course the first noble truth

in the Buddhist tradition is the actuality of suffering people often misunderstand it and they will say things like oh the Buddhist they're so pessimistic because they say life is suffering but it was never life is suffering it's a wrong translation or misunderstanding it's like there

is the actuality of suffering it's a diagnostic of humanity if you're born you're going to die so there's going to be suffering along the way and loss and giving up of everything so why not embrace that as part of the curriculum and see if between birth and death you can actually even

have a few moments of presence because if you're not careful you'll zoom through the whole thing on autopilot and then as Thoreau said in Walden wake up when you're just straight about to fall into your grave and realize that you hadn't lived because you were living in the story of me

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how did you develop the eight week course well it was ten weeks so the first two years actually and then two things came up one I want that people to have a more extended experience of meditation than just 45 minutes a day six days a week which was the absolute you know requirement you had

to agree to do that whether you liked it or not for those eight weeks but then I wanted to introduce a day long session so I cut it down from ten weeks to eight weeks and introduced the day long session on the weekend where it's like a mini meditation retreat with at least six hours of

silence but guided meditations sometimes hundreds of people in the room because we'd be having five six seven classes at the same time the other thing is that it was just a logistics thing because if you start in September after summer vacation on the east coast and then you're going to run into

Thanksgiving you're going to lose a lot of people over Thanksgiving and then you're running to Christmas so it was better to have an eight week cycle that starts in September and ends before Thanksgiving and then another one and after Christmas and New Year's and then another one in the spring

and then another in the summer so it kind of like the world dictated how long it took to walk through what happens in the eight weeks each of the eight weeks yeah and that's the subject of full catastrophe living in quite some detail so I won't go through it in great detail but

the first thing is like oh if you're going to invite medical patients who have every conceivable medical diagnosis under the sun and they haven't gotten full satisfaction or they would be happy with medicine wouldn't be bothering to come to the stress reduction clinic

so these are people who are suffering in one way or another so asking them to say sit on a cushion on the floor in the full lotus say for you know 45 minutes would not be possible never mind wise so the first meditation that we introduce people to is actually a

mind-down meditation and I know that you are a big fan of lying down when you're doing your work and maybe people don't understand that I think you're falling asleep but the whole point is actually you can use lying down to fall awake at least in what I'm talking about so the first thing was

to just teach people how to lie down in a way that was comfortable if they could lie down comfortably and then drop into the present moment and usually turns out that's very easy to say it's probably the most difficult thing for human beings to do as you know to even strengthen two

moments of mindfulness together of presence of mind and heart and body you need an anchor for your attention and the very convenient one is breath sensations in the body so we have people lying down in the body scan and then we get in touch with our breathing and we just feel the breath and we

don't try to push it or pull it and this is something most people don't actually realize until it's pointed out to them because we're always saying like if I asked you are you breathing you'd say yeah of course I'm breathing but if it was up to you to be breathing you would have died a long

time ago because you get distracted something would catch your attention or you go to sleep and we don't have a problem breathing in our sleep so it's taken care of for us in a very profound way but the conceit is that we're breathing and this will come back to maybe further down the road

in our conversation about the personal pronouns i, me and mine and how much we take credit for things that are not really ours that they credit for and we really don't know who's doing the talking when we say i, me and mine and we're much bigger than whoever's doing the talking

so we do this body scan introduce people in the first week and that's what they go home with for homework in 1979 it was audio tapes and that was a revolutionary thing to say okay we can't just teach them a body scan send them home nobody will remember what the hell to do and they need

support how do you support well it turns out the technology of the late 60s and early 70s it turns out that there was like cassette players and usually they were big they were boom boxes at first and stuff like that and not everybody even had them in 1979 so we had to give out tape players

to people they'd never even heard of them well this is a cassette you plug it in and you just do what it says to do on the tape and so that's how it started and then the flip side of the tape is a guided yoga sequence guided mindful yoga and then there were two tapes in MBSR so the first

yoga sequences on the floor very gentle stretching of the body moving of the body with moment by moment to word so that you're really in your body yoga is a form of meditation so much better to mindfully than on autopilot or is some kind of performative thing and then they got a second tape

four weeks into the program where we introduce them to sitting meditation and by that time we had been introducing people week by week into sitting meditation not on the floor on Zafu's by the way but on chairs really nice got the hospital bias really nice chairs very important and so we

gave them another 45 minute CD a guided sitting meditation that takes you through a number of objects of attention so you start with your body sitting there breathing and then it turns out well there are other things in the environment that we can be aware of like hearing sounds and hearing

isn't just hearing sounds it's hearing silence hearing the spaces between sounds you can't have music without space between the notes right so you're basically hearing rather than listening you're not reaching out to grab sounds you're letting them come to you and then we expand from sounds to

thoughts like you know just as you could have like a sound mirror and things could come in front the mirror and you'd hear this sound that sound the space that space what about a thought mirror where thoughts arise they disappear they come they go and the mirror doesn't go chasing the

thought red comes its red red goes its goes then blue comes so this is another way of being in relationship to thinking is that rather than getting caught in the stream of thoughts you're just seeing them as events in the field of awareness and then of course they're all

afraid it with emotions of one kind or another and stories about our favorite subject which is always me so they tend to carry you away and then you forget you have a body you forget your breathing right so then you notice whole cow I was supposed to be aware of the present moment but I've been lost

in thought having dinner with somebody in LA and I'm here in Massachusetts and then you realize oh my goodness the mind has a life of its own and it's running me more than I'm running yet and I'm a prisoner and sometimes especially for suffering from anxiety or depression which so many people are

so people had come with medical diagnosis but they all had anxiety to one degree another depression or various kinds of psychological challenges so in a way mindfulness is like such a big pot that you can put everything into it and that's why we could combine people with

different kinds of diagnosis because the final common pathway is your awareness your embodied awareness which you can always come back to and so we teach people okay this is really hard stuff like I'm going to ask you to just be aware of the present moment that's almost impossible for

us to do for any stretch of time so we're going to give you a kind of ally in the process we're going to invite you to fuel your breath in the belly or at the nostrils or wherever it's most vivid okay I'm going to feel the breath as it comes in and as it goes out

and then another one comes in and you can already feel yourself dropping into stillness into silence and you know it's possible that maybe the best way we can make use of the rest of this time that we have is to just not say another word

and just be in this silence but fully present fully embodied with no agenda other than to fall awake stay awake and rest in awareness be it completely at home beautiful I never heard of the thought mirror idea before I think it's very beautiful I love that yeah thank you it's like

the sound mirror too I like to relate thoughts to sounds because people get that sounds come and go you know and we often like if we're unretreat sometimes for seven days or five days we start six o'clock in the morning these are for professional training retreats and so forth and very often

you know the doors and the windows are open when it's summertime and you hear sounds so you could say well I would I'd be having a great meditation but there's all these sounds going on no if there sounds then that's part of the present moment so then afterwards we might ask well

what did you hear when you were attending to hearing and people will say birds or something like that and they'll say none of you heard birds what you heard was some version of tweet tweet and then the mind turned it into a bird I recognize that sound that's a and then people are really

good at birding they will know which kind of bird and stuff like that but it's once removed this is kind of colored by thought that you say bird what you're really hearing is the purity of the sound and then when you can come back to that sometimes that's referred to as original mind or original

hearing before thinking sets in and colors and there's a huge amount of creativity there because then you can see connections that before you never actually saw because we're so lost in thought all the time that it's not just pre-tweeted being turned into birds but everything is turned

into thought so quickly that the other forms of our native intelligences and they're multiple ones never get a chance because we're so lost in thought caught in our heads and then if you fold the motion into it then it's even more complex than that do you think that there was a time

in our ancient past when we were aware and awake purely I do and the reason I think this people write about this and so forth and and I don't know what the accepted anthropological thinking about it is but the fact is that if we didn't have that we would get eaten right you're out there in the

jungle all you need to do is go the Amazon and try to spend the night in the Amazon even in the tree whatever you want to do and you'll begin to realize that you're going to be food for lots of insects and other things that prowl and that are terrifying potentially so I do think that we evolved

with enormous sensitivity around the various kinds of signaling in the present moment simply to stay alive and to be in community you know in wherever you go there you are one of the chapters is called sitting around the fire and the reason for that is that when we were living

as hunters and gatherers for millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years that's all we did at night you couldn't do anything else but sit around the fire I mean there's like danger in the dark you sit around the fire and you sit together and yeah you tell stories

and you're seeing and everything else but at the end of the evening and you watch the calls which is like really amazing because like you get universes of different stuff going on in the calls and at a certain point things quiet down right I mean people get quiet and just stare into the

embers so I think we were meditating naturally as homo sapiens sapiens all through that hunter and gather period of tens hundreds of thousands of years and that we were really embodied in the natural world in a way that our precocious intellectual historical cultural intelligences

have made a little bit less accessible to us and that what the sort of meditative renaissance if you want to call it that in a certain way is doing is inviting us to not lose that genius just because we have other geniuses that have also made their appearance in a much more complex

culturally determined world yeah so we were connected and then we had progress in quotation marks yeah how did your old academic MIT life inform the rest of your life I went to MIT because I was in love with science and I was in love with science in part because I

was born into a family where my father was a scientist his field was immunochemistry and he was a professor at Columbia Medical School and he was a scientist scientist I mean he really lived it and my mother was a painter and while my father was really well-known in his field and recognized

my mother never showed her work and only sold one painting she had her first show when she turned 100 and was living in an assisted living and she had a show with five other artists and she showed a number and she got so much wonderful feedback for it she loved it but she sold one painting

in her life and then she regretted it for the rest of her life she wanted that painting back so I grew up in this household where there was art on the one hand that was not recognized but she didn't need recognition she didn't crave any recognition she was so happy doing her painting

and she was prolific I mean just in lots of different forms so not just painting but also you know all sorts of other things in plots and just every conceivable kind of artistic medium and she was just as happy as a clam just being in that world you know so I grew up like seeing

this as a young boy and seeing like they appreciated to each other a world but my mother could not rock molecular immunology and immunochemistry for sure although she helped my father with all these proofreading of his books and stuff like that most days and my father we would go to the

museum of Mon-Nor at every Sunday and they put me into a school at five years old at the museum of Mon-Nor to you know do stuff and I still have the elephant that I made when I was four or five years old but I could see that my parents were subtending different dimensions of reality and

creativity and even as a young boy I and I remember this very vividly I I sort of was wondering well there must be a way to unify those worlds that can't be separate and then when I heard this talk at MIT when I was 21 years old by Philip Kaplow who wrote this book called The Three Pillars

of Zen I think the year was 1965 and I went to this talk and out of all of MIT like thousands and thousands of people there was Houston Smith who had invited him who was a professor of philosophy and religion Kaplow and then three people in the audience and I was one of those people and it

took the top off my head and I started meditating that night and I never stopped and I started an awful lot of things in my life and didn't go anywhere but not that and then did you seek out other teachers from that point on yeah yeah a lot of different teachers and I studied and

sat retreats with teachers in various traditions and so forth and the older I get the more I consider it and speak about it that way as a love affair like meditation's not one more thing that is good for you and you have to stick into your already too scheduled and busy day meditation is a love

affair with the present moment which is the only moment wherever I live in and if you miss it as a certain way which you miss that moment of your life and they're not forever and so it's a kind of love affair with embodied wakefulness and then a deep inquiry into who am I actually

who am I on this planet between birth and death with the story of me you know my father my mother or everybody else the whole story of it but then the story is not who we really are that's just kind of a fiction and as we know depending on who you want to impress or what you want you could tell the story 50 billion different ways and a lot of it's just ego wanting to make a certain kind of impression but who are you really that's the fundamental meditative question LMNT element electrolytes

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element electrolytes LMNT tell me about the difference between meditating yourself your daily practice versus meditating in a room with hundreds of people all meditating together well in a way I feel like I'm in that room even when I'm by myself because I've got the whole planet with me when

you begin to realize that the mind is limitless and when I mean the mind I mean awareness so this is something that's not particular to me or you or people who like really are devoted to meditation everybody the nature of the human mind is that it's limitless so it's not your mind or your

awareness it's awareness if you use the word my or your you've made a fundamental error and collapse the universe in a certain way around those pronouns and well yes you have to use those pronouns to get through life and you know you can't go to the bank and say you know give me somebody

else's money you have to say give me my money but when you don't know who's talking and you have an investigated that then you tend to fall into and believe the story of me more wear another and a lot of time the story me is very unhappy it's like what's wrong with me

why am I so depressed it's closer to the old main frame computing system where there's this great computer somewhere and we all have terminals but we don't have a laptop that does everything itself we're just connected to the main source and we're all connected to this main source so

awareness is when we tap into it it's again not ours it's the awareness so beautifully said and you're asking me about like how my scientific training has informed that view I could go on at great length about that because let's go back to awareness for a moment okay

okay can you find the center of your awareness just experiment can I find the center of my awareness and then you might expand that inquiry can I find the periphery or the circumference of my awareness and at some point maybe if we have enough time and you care to we could just like

sit in silence for an extended period of time which has enores value of its own and I remember when you talked to Anderson Cooper you proposed that actually to sit together for a period of time and anybody would be watching on a screen or on TV with is well they're not doing anything

and they'd be right you know in the sense that you're not doing anything but you are being and there's an infinite universe of that and then when that happens on the screen as happened when Bill Moyer's filmed in BSR in his PBS special healing in the mind 40 million people saw it and

they were entrained into the stretches of silence where they broke the television rules about dead airspace and they had under a minute but it says like anathema to television to have a minute of silence and and they had a very long stretch of us at the end of a meditation in the

classroom with 40 medical patients just being no sound of course the microphones were on so it wasn't dead air sound but just room tone with all of us breathing and 40 million people saw that program at one point or another and some majors were portion of those people were entrained

into I don't know what I just saw or felt but I want that and we we heard about it I mean because when we'd set up a phone bank so that our patients actually took the calls from people saying whatever that was I want that and turned out to be a BSR you know so we could give it to people

but this is kind of the real beauty of awareness is that you can't find the center for you can't find the circumference of the periphery and you already I don't want to say have it because it's like you don't have awareness it'd be more appropriate to say you are awareness that's in some

sense your nature a significant part of your nature and so what is awareness most like that we know in the domain of science what has no center and no periphery the universe you know the greatest cosmologists will tell you that the universe is boundless and it's also accelerating so it's

like really unbelievably mind blowing that it's not like things are accelerating in space space is accelerating out of nothing in other words awareness is growing it's comparable to that okay no one understands this but it's phenomenal to think about they may be one in the same look here we

are on planet earth right we're dispoiling the planet to the point where you know it's really questionable about whether future generations I mean in even generations that are alive now are going to be able to live live as comfortably as you know because of you know the ways in which

we're killing each other all over the planet but also because we've given the planet a fever that could get out of control runaway fever turn earth into Venus or something like that so it's time for us human beings to actually wake up so in that sense you could say human beings on earth we

don't know about life anywhere else but human beings on earth are aware through the you know James Webb Space Telescope and the LIGO observatories that measured the kind of Einstein predicted gravitational waves and so forth the science is actually showing us that we're the universe's way of knowing

itself at least in our neighborhood called this solar system and one of the things we discovered is that like we're made of you know I mean if you remember chemistry in high school you probably had a periodic table of the elements in your classroom that is such a mind blowing meditative

thing to actually contemplate you've got hydrogen and helium which are the only things that came out of the big bang it's just hydrogen and helium and helium's inert so it doesn't do anything but out of hydrogen and huge unimaginable periods of time billions and billions of years

out of this explosion out of nothing so we don't know what was before the big bang but you get all this energy finally collapses into hydrogen and helium and then out of that you get stars first generation of stars then when the stars explode they make oxygen and phosphorus and

nitrogen so you can't get them from regular stars you have to get them out of the energy of stars that explode so you're making these atomic nuclei and you get the periodic table well you know you couldn't have iPhones without some of the rare earth elements that no one's ever heard of but you

need them for you know electronic batteries and all sorts of things and our technology nowadays so when is humanity actually going to recognize that on this tiny little extremely fragile planet that maybe we need to wake up to the full dimensionality of our possibilities so that we don't

kill each other or dispoil the entirety of the planet for future generations just when we could actually recognize that we're in intimate balance with all sorts of other alive elements of this planet that we are also threatening with extinction and so mindfulness isn't just kind of a medicine

for individual people suffering with various kinds of physical or psychological ailments we could say that nowadays mindfulness may be medicine for the planet and when I say mindfulness I also mean heartfulness the words are the same in all Asian languages so it includes compassion

it includes kindness it includes love basically but a lot that's informed by what we were talking about about the emptiness of those personal pronouns so that you can't take them seriously putting on your scientist hat for a moment is all matter everything that we perceive

physical matter made up from the elements on the periodic table at that's all that's the entire menu of everything we used to think that and again here like now I'm just going on the basis of being an informed citizen because I'm not a cosmologist or a theoretical physicist but it turns out

that it's been recently discovered I mentioned that the universe is expanding and it's not just expanding it's accelerating in that rate of expansion and that's called dark energy nobody knows what's driving that nobody knows not the smartest people on the planet know what is going on okay

and that's something like 75 or 74% of all the energy in the universe is dark energy because they can figure this out then it turns out there's also dark matter that it turns out that there's all this gravitational force in the universe that is not made out of atoms and molecules of the

kind that's in the periodic table so it turns out that stars and the periodic table of the elements in the earth and the planets and everything we constitute what they estimate to be 4% of the entirety of reality 4% and the rest we don't know so I had this Korean Zen Master that

he was the third number in years name Song-San and he used to talk about not knowing mind and he had a wonderful way of talking about it because of his Korean accent and the energy behind him so he would say don't know he would just go like don't know where is your mind don't know

and then he'd say keep this don't know mind keep this don't know mind well all great scientists that's what they most need us do not know because otherwise you're imprisoned by what you do know and you can't go beyond that to the next discovery of just what's right beyond the horizon of the

known Christian Murdi wrote a wonderful book called Freedom from the Known because it can be so imprisoned and so keeping don't know mind that's what mindfulness is about is not falling into the cognitive stream or waterfall or however you want to frame it it doesn't mean that you're

not thinking or that you're going to get stupid it means that you're recruiting other dimensions of intelligence and I like to speak about him as superpowers so thinking is fantastic I mean we wouldn't have it without thinking our condition would be unthinkable but there's another power

that we have that never gets any airtime or until recently and that is awareness so we you ever taught anything about awareness embodied awareness in school you were taught a lot about thinking and structure of sentences and how to you know sort of talk and read and stuff like that but

so that's all great and that's all about thinking but then this is other superpower that we're born with it's like we have to get it we have it called awareness and we don't even know the territory just lost in it and then so we don't want to go there we just want to stay in our

thoughts and emotions a lot of it's reactive but what mindfulness is what all meditative practices are their doorways into awareness into who you already are beyond thinking beyond name and form as they say in the heart sutra and when you enter one of those doors and they're an infinite number

of doors into awareness so it's not like parochial or one-size-fits-all or anything like that then there's the potential for us to each live our moments as if they really really really really mattered really mattered that's why wherever you go there you are okay because it's like you only

get this moment yes if you're not paying attention it's gone well here's another one so you've got another chance but if you're zoning along on autopilot not liking the way things are now but desperately grasping at something in the future that's going to make it all come together for you

that's a kind of a signature of a certain kind of delusion I'm not saying one shouldn't have ambition and creative drive and faith and confidence in one's own powers but it's very very easy to miss one's moments all the way into the grave welcome to the house of macadamias macadamias are a

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visit house of macadamias.com slash tetra so the first book full catastrophe living is really after years of this eight week course no and teaching a two-wire audience who are not just there to do exactly I wrote it after I started the stress reduction clinic in 79 and that book came so it was like 11 12 years before that book came out and then the book wherever you go there you are which we know talking about the 30th anniversary of it I wrote that you know three or four years later it came out

1994 it's a very different book yeah tell me the story of that book why then I love that you're even interested in this I mean I I feel like I there's a certain impulse I have to turn the table since start interviewing you because we're having this kind of conversation and it can't

be by accident we're just kind of random and so I'm really interested in the fact that since we've crossed paths there's a certain way which I feel like even though I know almost nothing about you that we're on the same wavelength in some fundamental way and I'm really

interested in that more than I'm interested in the story of me even if you know we're doing it for some kind of express purpose you know which is not to sell books but ignite passion for something that's a deep in human inheritance that nobody is missing anything lacking in this

regard but we often think we are and so we feel like inadequate in a certain way and what we say to our patients before I come around try me answer your question if you still want me to you know when we first encounter our patients in the stress reduction clinic and we listen to their stories

which we do which is really important to listen and not interrupt them which constantly happen in medicine we say well listen from our point of view no matter what diagnosis you're here with and they're here with every conceivable diagnosis from our point of view as long as you're breathing

there's more right with you than wrong with you and what MBSR is going to do is poor energy into what's right with you let the rest of the medical center take care of what's wrong with you and after eight weeks see what happens and what happens is that they recruit those interior

resources we were talking about before they tap into them like the oil drillers and they come up to the surface and they put them to work as a formal and informal meditation practice so that ultimately maybe in eight weeks but certainly in eight years or eighty years you discover that

life itself is the meditation practice that every moment is incredible invitation to show up in your fullness in your beauty no matter what even if you're depressed even if things are not going well at the moment even if you've run out of creative ideas and all of that awareness doesn't care

the thought I've run out of creative ideas if you hold it in awareness awareness is just going to laugh at that one yeah there's an infinite source of wisdom that we can tap into at any moment if we get out of the way and I know that you're famous for that and also infamous in a certain way for that

because it's pretty unusual actually and it's even more unusual that you share it with the world in an embodied way and I just want to bow to you for that I feel like I never would have believed it but you know that I've actually encountered somebody where I can connect in a way with

there's no separation and it's way beyond whatever the stories where they brought us here and that we know that instinctively and if we never even saw each other again it wouldn't matter it's beyond time and space well the truth is is that in some ways I am a product of your teaching so

that it makes sense it's like you recognize in me it's the mirror thing and I also know that what's in your book you didn't create you recognized it it's the so you pointed it out to me but you're pointing I'm pointing we're pointing at the same thing exactly we're all pointing

yes and I get the sense again I don't want to go beyond my capacity to even you know say anything remotely authentic in this regard but a work of art or a particular piece of music or even a song everybody hears it differently I'm imagining that the artist even if it's a single artist or if it's

a group their relationship to it changes over time because they were to rerecord it they would record it differently over time that it's a kind of manifestation of the present moment it's a kind of flowering of a certain kind of actuality in multiple dimensions and everybody resonates

with it however they will given their unique filters and history and everything else and when we can agree that in general we'll say something like we love this this is awesome then it also lets us recognize how interconnected we are how we aren't isolated monads how we

often love the same things and we need each other to point out the beauty and also the places where we need to grow it feels like magic to me it is it is magic and and the reason you're pointing to it and now I'm pointing to it is because we love it that's the only reason it's the only reason it's all devotional yeah and that's why you know after close to 60 years of having a formal meditation practice and and of course what I'm talking about is not that easy to do because

who has the time and it seems so much like nothing but what I've come to is like if you take your seat in the morning and I'm using sitting as a metaphor for any door into mindfulness or lying down standing on your head you know jumping out of an airplane with a parachute whatever you're doing

that the present moment is an invaluable gift and you're willingness to enter into it in a fully embodied, wakeful way it's a love affair with life itself and it's also in a certain way a karmic assignment it's like hey if the world produced you why not give the world back

everything that you are and if you doubt that the world needs it just recognizing that's just the thought and it's about as true or as useful or interesting as what you had for breakfast three weeks ago no one cares you don't care so when you start to investigate your thoughts with mindfulness

meditation you begin to realize that if you have one really good thought in your entire life you are ahead of the curve most thoughts are just rehashed same old same old and they're usually not true and especially the ones that have to do with eye me in mind because we don't know who's

talking when we use those we're kind of in the story of me and the way I like to put it is that we're so much bigger than the story awareness if it's boundless we've already proved that like your co-extensive with the entire universe when you drop underneath thinking into awareness

and what could be more amazing than that not to be missed okay not to be missed so life is not to be missed so wherever you go can you be fully present in this moment without pushing anything away without pursuing anything and without generating a story of like yeah now I'm meditating

where now I'm like a big shot or you know or or I'm worthless or whatever the thought is those thoughts will happen but when you are in awareness you recognize that's just an event in the field of awareness it's called the thought frayed it with very often with negative emotion you see it

as like a cloud in the sky it just comes you don't have to do anything it just sort of evaporates by itself sooner or later comes goes you don't take it personally then you're fully alive in this moment fully embodied and that's a radical act in this day and age it's a radical act of sanity to engage your moments in that way and not what I'm saying is I've discovered for myself that it's a radical act of love so when I sit in the morning which I do on an absolutely regular basis and I

sit on the floor on the Zafu but I'm not recommending other people to that maybe in 10 years or 20 years my legs won't be able to handle that because they're an infinite number doors into what I'm calling sitting or awareness but when I do take my seat I see it as a radical act of love not one more

thing I have to do in the morning before I get going on my day but like a radical act of love and in a certain sense a tuning of one's instrument before you take it out on the road for the day to do whatever you're going to do and then your entire day becomes mindful in this practice and

that's what wherever you go there you are it's about it's like life is the meditation practice not sitting meditation or yoga or standing on your head life is the meditation practice and there's no separation from music sound silence creativity possibility and then when does this also not just

for your own sake but for the sake of the world so with their suffering rather than running away from and saying well I can't go towards the suffering you instinctively bodhisattva life actually turn towards the suffering because you can't be whole when other people are told you can't be

entirely at home with genocide or with injustice of a certain kind it's just not possible because otherwise you're compromising your own moral integrity so in a world that's suffering you know meditative awareness really seems to me now to be a kind of karmic assignment for humanity as a whole

so that we don't destroy this beautiful gem of a planet because we don't as they like to say well puns intended we don't have a planet be one of the things that I so love about wherever you go there you are is I read it 30 years ago when it came out I was already a meditator for probably

15 years and I remember as I was reading it feeling like this is the best book on meditation I've ever read and I'd read quite a few at that point and I would give this to someone who's interested in meditation and who's never done it and I would give it to someone who's been meditating for

50 years and there's no better guide book regardless of where you are on the path to connect to the practice in a new deeper and more profound way well speechless it's true and incredibly gratified because of course you know why do we do it with the work that we're doing why do we

put anything out there in the world we want other people to be touched by it to be moved by it in a way that is beneficial to them that's healing that's something or other that is filling some kind of space in a way that's profound tell me how your practice has changed over

the course of your life from the early days to now in a way it hasn't changed at all you know it's really interesting I still love it in the same way in fact I value it more than ever as I get older because you know there is that law of impermanence and this is why there is you

know suffering in the world is that things don't stay the same and so there's inevitable loss and if you have a body it goes through changes and then ultimately it dissolves back into the elements and it's really important for me to live the life that's mine to live while I have the chance so my my practice really hasn't changed so much if anything I'm getting more and more deeply into the yoga the older my body gets really spending a lot of time on the floor in my meditation room

on my yoga mat experimenting and exploring with stuff lying on my belly and pretending I'm swimming in the water I'd love to swim but being in New England I only swim in this summertime but there's something about swimming in the air that you know you have to deal with gravity and

limitations and stuff like that and you know I have an almost 80 year old body now but I'm recognizing that it's really a powerful meditation practice to listen deeply and experiment with subtle motions what the body wants to do loves to do and is nurtured by doing not just to prevent

you know accidents or to be strong but because it's a kind of investigation of the body aging the body not being a 20 year old body or even a 40 year old body anymore it's like but it's this body and it's the only one I have so the yoga has become more and more profound for me

and the sitting has become just more and more of a love affair so to speak that's you know for the first like 40 years that I was meditating I would wake up at very early in the morning like four or five and sit for an hour and then do yoga for an hour and stuff like that but as I've

gotten older I've gotten a lot more relaxed about the kind of heavy-duty discipline after 40 years you'd think I had enough momentum to ease off a bit so sometimes I'm meditating bad and I actually recommend it more and more to people because you know you probably had this

experience yourself but all meditators it's like do I want to get up out of bed and the cold and go meditate and it's like well you don't have to get out of the bed to meditate just wake up we say every time we come to the end of the night I woke up but it's probably not true it's

probably like I partially woke up and I jumped out of bed on an autopilot and I was already late and I miss brushed my teeth and I was like lost in thought and driven well why not before you drop into autopilot why not finish the job and wake up completely for this moment why not feel

your whole body you don't have to do a 45 minute body scan but put your mind in your body and and feel the body breathe with the body and really feel your hands because they're miraculous you wouldn't want to be without one but we take them for granted so much of the time to touch

the longest entry in the Oxford English dictionary is touch touch has so many meanings I mean it goes on for I don't remember how many pages because now it's all digital but uh metaphorically literally physically when you put your attention in your hands you're touching

the universe in a certain way the universe of your body and your body is like the result of 13.8 billion years of evolution from the Big Bang has resulted in this constellation of atoms and molecules in the form of you waking up this morning holy moly maybe I shouldn't miss this maybe I shouldn't

had jumped out of bed on autopilot but really appreciate the amazingness of being in the body then you can take your mind your attention out of your hands and put them in your feet and play around in whatever playful ways you want and then get out of bed and maybe even form the intention

that maybe life itself is the real meditation practice I'll just be mindful all day and whether you said or you don't said yeah I I feel like people dilute themselves into thinking well I'll just be mindful all the time it's mindfulness in everyday life that's a subtitle of the book

but I'll just do that but it turns out unless you're exercising the muscle on a regular basis in the gym so to speak on your question lots of luck with that one because self-delusion is infinite and getting back into the gym and working with not against the resistance of the mind when it goes

off you bring it back goes off you bring it back goes off you see where it's gone you recognize something and then even if it's seductive you bring it back anyway and stay in the open-hearted spaciousness of not knowing something grows over days weeks once years decades and it's exactly what I think all the great meditation teachers are pointing to and all the great poets for that matter that life is not to be missed and it's so easy to miss it then you know it's almost

come and sensical to fall into the love affair. Tell me about the difference between a meditation practice where you're focusing on what is versus a concentration practice where you're focusing on a mantra or flame or a guided meditation for that matter which is a third category I suppose.

You may wear your listen to somebody else's voice that's guiding you you know. Yes mindfulness is not the same as concentration so there are concentration practices and then there are mindfulness practices so concentration has more to do with stability of attention

okay and kind of one-pointedness or vividness on the one object so you can get very very deeply into selecting one object and attending to you mentioned a candle flame or you know some kind of mantra or a mantra but even those can be used mindfully so it's like it's not it's hard fast boundaries but

a mantra is basically a sound that you internalize oh namashivaya or whatever and until a point where there's no you doing it anymore it's just here doing itself so to speak and you're resting in the embrace of the sound even though the sound is silent so it's very one-pointed

when we talk about concentration practices they are in menta develop what's called samadhi or shamata it's like deep calmness and stability of mind but then there's insight there's vipassana there's this other element of it which we're also born with so we're born with that

capacity for one-pointedness but you have to exercise the muscle in order to really stabilize the mind and then there's mindfulness or vipassana or insight meditation or I mean there's so many different words for it in the different traditions and I won't go into that but where you're just sitting

as the Japanese like to say just sitting nothing more the Japanese for shikantasa just sitting nothing more they don't use the word meditation and I often encourage people to throw out the word meditation because if you have the thought I'm meditating you're bringing a lot of baggage into

that so then you have to am I doing it right am I sitting up straight enough do I look like I'm meditating to other people and it's like wait a minute all that's just garbage it's just all more thinking so if you let go of trying to get anywhere else and just be where you already are

then you're dropping into awareness you're resting in awareness and that is its own stability so that you just add home in that boundless spaciousness Christian Mertikol the choice of awareness it's called zokchen in the Tibetan tradition it's like there are a lot of different

doors but it's basically the same room all the doors are into the same room and the room is human awareness and we already have it I I'm not sure I mentioned or emphasized this before but you don't acquire awareness you're born with it so you already have it we all do but what's

challenging is accessing it and we don't have ready access to it because thinking is like some gigantic black hole that's sucking all of our energy all the time thinking in emotions and self-centeredness so when we dissolve some of the attachment that thought and emotion and

self-being then the pure awareness or we could even call it awareness thing is just available 24 seven and there's no curriculum anymore you're boundless like space and time and as the heart sutra says there's no place to go there's nothing to do and there's no special something

where specialized mindful state that you're supposed to attain so if you're trying really hard to meditate and wondering is this it am I feeling it right and their chapter's about that in the book then you really weigh off base because what you're feeling is the curriculum the question is can

you be aware of what you're feeling and then not try to edit it or get somewhere from it but to just let it be and let it teach you what it is to teach you how does guided meditation work differently than those well all of those can be arrived at just without any guidance but sooner or later

almost everybody needs to be taught how to meditate at least the beginning of it so it's like a glide path you know it's like a plane taking off there's thinking of evil can evil taking off with you know on this motorcycle and jumping over cars or whatever so you need a kind of glide path

of practice but then ultimately you're just resting in awareness and there's no place to go there's nothing to do and there's no special something you're supposed to retain because it's all special there's nothing that's not special when you drop underneath thinking so in a certain way it takes

us into the realm of the poetic where serves pros basically peaters out that you just more words won't do anything more but the great poets of course their challenge just seems to me has always been to take what's impossible to put into words and put it into words you know I'm thinking

of people like Emily Dickinson who's one of my favorite poets and she recognized that a lot of the time we're in a war with ourselves where of two minds we're fighting with each other so one of my favorite poems if if it's okay for me to recite it

deals with these personal pronouns that are so problematic and the Buddha's famous for having said nothing is to be clung to as I me and mine he said his entire 40 years of teaching could be encapsulated in that one sentence nothing is to be clung to the verb to cling as self as I me or

mine oh easy to say not so easy to do that's why we need the discipline a lot of people I mean all of us really we're conflicted a lot of the time and sometimes maybe we even hear ourselves saying something like I'm with two minds about that right I wanted I don't want it I like it I

paid it here's Emily Dickinson because and of course she apparently suffered a great deal in her own life me from myself to banish had I art impregnable my fortress unto all heart but since myself assault me how have I peace except by subjugating consciousness and since we're

mutual monarch how this be except by abdication me of me so very powerful evocation of how much we struggle with ourselves and don't like each other or even hate detest parts of ourselves and try to hide them from people and she just does that so amazingly

as a poet I mean if those were notes I mean it would be a masterpiece you know of music I mean she takes it to totally simple little English pronouns and plays with them in a way that's like mind blowing and then drops it into the impossibility at the end of like me for me you know I banish

myself now a lot of people we do that a lot and live lives of tremendous pain and suffering because we haven't reconciled the warfare between me and myself and what the meditation practices saying is there is no war between you and yourself the awareness can hold that me and myself

and the awareness is the unifying factor and then you see these are just play of thoughts and emotions and they have no actuality beyond what you've nurtured them or feed them with they are just comings and goings that aren't the full story they may have some partial truth but they're not

the full story and if you don't want to live in alienation from yourself for your entire life then you have to as words were said reconciled this court elements that and make them move in one society if we're not the thoughts and if we're not the totality of awareness what are we

well we're closer to the totality of awareness that's interesting we're embodied that's what that's what i would say and then beyond that language gives out or we don't know who we are we are the universe's way of looking at itself in this particular corner of the universe at least

and harking back to what we were saying about science and understanding the big bang and more and more are placed in the universe you know through the amazing technologies that now can look back in time by looking out in space all the way back to you know very close to the

beginning of the big bang and understand that it's like humanity has an amazing role in the universe that we shouldn't disregard we are geniuses we're all geniuses and if we could create a society that recognizes genius and creates laws that prevent certain levels of harm caused to other members

of society and then perhaps we could actually not self-destruct in the next hundred years or fifty years or ten years and that's why I do what I do because in some sense that me for myself to banish it's like all of humanity is struggling with that it's not just Emily Dickinson and

me you know nineteen century struggling with her unrequited love affair so here's another poem if you're okay with it from Derek Walcott another wonderful incredible poet from the island of St. Lucia who went to Nobel Prize some years ago and recently deceased and it's kind of like the

opposite of the amoeuble Dickinson so I like to use the two of them sometimes in tandem and this poem is called Love After Love do you know it okay so it's called Love After Love the time will come when with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door

in your own mirror and each will smile at the others welcome and say sit here eat you will love again the stranger who was yourself give wine give bread give back your heart to yourself to the stranger who has loved you all your life who you have ignored for another

who knows you by heart take down the love letters the photographs the desperate notes peel your own image from the mirror and this is the classic last line sit feast on your life to you beautiful beautiful celebration of life yeah awesome and very few words and that's what great poets do is they

can take what's really impossible to put into words and they somehow manage and then it resonates I want to give you one more just that fafon and because of music so this is by Rilka the great German poet of the early 20th century from his book of hours which it doesn't have a title my life

is not this steeply sloping hour in which you see me hurrying my life is not this steeply sloping hour in which you see me hurrying much stands behind me I stand before it like a tree I am just one of my many mouths and at that the one that would be still the sunnest I am the rest between two notes

which are somehow always in discord because death's note wants to climb over but in the dark interval reconciled they stay here trembling and the song goes on beautiful wow magnificent tell me about being the mountain there's a practice in where we go there you are called the mountain meditation

and the mountain meditation is really an invitation to experience stability so when you look at a mountain gazette mountain or a picture of a mountain you can actually invite the energies of the mountain into your standing or your sitting even if it's a picture in

your mind's eye it doesn't have to be looking at the mountain itself and realize that you know there are many ways in which we're mountains too we can sit with utter dignity beauty the head lofty elevating itself right up through the neck and top of the head and the the pelvis rooted to

the chair or the cushion or whatever it's rooted on and something grounding with the legs and the feet and so you're taking responsibility in a certain way to recognize that it's possible to drop in on a certain kind of massive magnificent beauty that is utterly stable, unmoving and then

as we say the mountain just sits there it doesn't say well I'm bored I'm going to get up now it just sits and the sun goes across the sky and for a moment a moment the shadows on the mountain they're different the light on the mountain the weather patterns around the mountain the seasons move day

and night and through it all the mountain just sits being it's utterly intrinsic nature and it's not saying oh I don't look so good today because there's too many clouds and fog and the tourist gets maybe or in the midst of ice storms and snow and blizzards the mountain sits

through all of that so when we take our seat in meditation in a similar way we can imagine the body as a mountain of our choice and it's that stable it's rooted in the mantle and the crust of the earth that's stable and with a lofty peak that on a clear day at least has a panoramic

perspective in 360 and as the sun goes across the sky you know as day follows night and the seasons follow each other we can sit in our meditation practice through weather patterns of all kinds in the mind through periods they feel winterize inner fog low hanging ceiling and clouds and then

springtime comes if we're patient and then summer and then fall and there's not one moment that doesn't have its own intrinsic beauty and you're not how the mountain looks the mountain has no concern for how it looks or what other people think of it the mountain just is what it is it's in

its intrinsic nature and in its intrinsic unique beauty and when you meditate so that in some sense your body and the mountain that you're inviting come together then you can actually with every in-breath derive energy from that stability from the image itself and the felt sense of it in the

arms and shoulders and hips and legs and the elevation through the the back coming out of the pelvis and right up through the the neck and the head and that's meant to launch you into the timeless present moment where you can let go of that image and all thought and not be the mountain

anymore but be the beauty that is yourself beautiful great practice yeah people find that really strengthening or motivating in a certain way because it's intuitively obvious that the mountain is beautiful and the mountain is stable why can't I be beautiful and stable

and lo and behold your discover you can there's a line in wherever you go there you are talking about being able to experience the seasons in a breath and it was just a beautiful image it caught me when the first begins speaking to people I guess as soon as I opened my mouth but maybe long

before that I never know we're all speaking to each other all the time by virtue of our embodied presence so when we're at home and our own skin other people recognize it in a certain way and they want to be close to it and they usually project on to the other person that there's something

special about that person and if the person is wise enough they will recognize that as a projection and as basically wrong and remind the person that they to share all of those energetic qualities and that it doesn't take a lifetime to realize them because they're already here what it really

takes is getting out of our own way and that's why I'd have guided meditations and right books and stuff like that is so that they're all glide paths as we said into your own experience of your own life and taking responsibility for it in such a way that it's an adventure of discovery

there's a lot of stress pain and challenges in life and it doesn't always work out or happened the way we wanted to and sometimes it's merely annoying and sometimes it's actually tragic but with this kind of equipping of ourselves so to speak for the challenges of the arc of

a life lived fully not only can we do it the word doing is the wrong word we can be it okay it's not about doing it's about being and there's a lot in wherever go there you are about the distinction between being and doing but we're doing it together

what may fall within the sphere of tetragramatine counterculture tetragramatine sacred geometry tetragramatine the avant-garde tetragramatine generative art tetragramatine the tarot tetragramatine out of print music tetragramatine biodynamic tetragramatine graphic design tetragramatine mythology and

magic tetragramatine obscure film tetragramatine beach culture tetragramatine esoteric lectures tetragramatine off the grid living tetragramatine alt spirituality tetragramatine the canon of fine objects tetragramatine muscle cars tetragramatine ancient wisdom for a new age upon entering

experience the artwork of the day take a breath and see where you are drawn can you guide me through a short body scan sure lefto let's do it well experiencing the body as a whole line here or sitting if you're sitting

and noticing that awareness can hold the entirety of the body right in this moment the entire universe of sensations associated with the envelope of the skin and the entirety of the body lying here or sitting here and coming to rest and awareness so that you're basically at home in awareness

with things exactly as they are and we're going to invite into awareness the body as it is sitting here lying here and experiencing it as a totality in its wholeness and the first thing you'll notice is of course that there's breathing going on and we're just aware of the breath coming into the body

and then peeking at the apex of the in-breath and then leaving the body flowing out and then a little trough at the end of the out-breath and then what do you know the next in-breath we gifted with it and so rather than the conceit that we're breathing recognizing that the body is breathing for sure

but we can just go along for the ride and not have to interfere or push or pull the breath in anyway but just rest in awareness of the body as a whole lying here or sitting here and when you're ready then just bringing awareness to the feet and we'll do both feet together

and noticing that as I invite you to do it you know how to do that you can feel the feet I'm not asking you to think about the feet but to simply feel the sensations or if you can't feel the sensations then feeling the lack of sensation or numbness so whether it's warmth or tingling or

any other sensations or lack of sensation just holding whatever is here for you now in this moment as we attend to the sensations in the feet and then when you're ready taking a slow deep more intentional breath in and breathing all the way up into the lungs so that you're filling the lungs to their capacity and then on an out-breath just letting go of the breath and as you do that letting go of the feet as well and moving your attention into the lower legs

and the knees and just feeling again whatever sensations are here from this region of the body or lack of sensation and just holding it in awareness feeling them attending to them without thinking just directly experiencing them of course they may be thinking going on as well

but we're focusing on the direct tending to sensation and then here too taking a deep breath in whenever you care to right down into the region of the lower legs and knees and then on the out-breath letting them dissolve in your mind's eye as well as the breath let's go and leaves the body

and as we move into the region of the upper legs and just feeling again whatever is here to be felt the upper legs and all the way up to the hips on the outside and the the groin on the inside on the surface and deep any and all sensations or lack of sensation

and when you're ready you're too on an out-breath just letting them dissolve as you move into the pelvis and the region of the pelvis and hips and buttocks and genitals and again the only assignment is to bring awareness to this region of the body in particular

and breathe with it as you're holding it in awareness all sorts of memories, thoughts and emotions may arise in this region or any other region of the body everybody's body is different just like whatever thoughts or emotions come come and go when they go

but we're zeroing in on the sensations as best we can and then when you're ready here to one an out-breath letting go as the breath let's go and coming into the whole region of the lower back and abdomen and here you'll feel the belly expanding on the in breaths and receding on the out breaths

and just welcoming any and all sensations or lack of sensation again the important thing is to simply bring vivid awareness to this region and you're not actually doing anything you're just being with it and when you're ready here to one an out-breath letting it dissolve in your mind's eye

as the breath let's go it has the mind let's go as you let go and as we move into the region of thoracic spine the upper region of the chest and the ribcage housing the of course the lungs and the heart and the great vessels and just experiencing the universe of the upper torso

of course the ribcage will be expanding with each and breath and receding a bit with each out breath seeing if you can detect the shoulder blades floating on the back of the ribcage seeing if you can detect the collarbones in the front that go back to the shoulder blades and form

the whole mechanism for movement of the arms if you'd like and even see if you can detect your heart beating in your chest and whether you can or can't you're simply at home right here with this region of the body in all its wonder beauty including the chest wall and the breasts the spaces between the ribs and when you're ready here too taking the slow deep intentional breath in and filling up the lungs filling up the lungs right up to the apesies of the lungs behind the collarbones and

all the way back to the shoulder blades and cradling the breath at the very apex of it for a moment and then just letting it wash out maintaining a seamless continuity in the awareness moment by moment by moment and now we can move into the hands just as we did with the feet we'll do them both together and you might marvel at the fact that we can actually hold both feet or both hands in awareness at the same time when you think about it's pretty amazing and feeling the sensations in the

tips of the fingers and thumbs and in the backs of the fingers and thumbs and all around and then feeling the sensations in the backs of the hands and the palms of the hands and maybe if you're very very quiet even picking up on the pulsations and the radial arteries and the

wrists then just breathing with the entirety of your hands and if you like get some point taking a a final breath right into the hands and then breathing out from the hands and letting them go as the breath lets go and as we move into the forearms and rests again and yell both and the upper arms

that they'll take muscles the biceps just feeling the entirety of the rest of your arms and armpits any sensations all sensations no sensations the key invitation is to simply be present in awareness without doing anything just that for handing what's here to be felt sensed known

resting in awareness in this particular region of the body and again whenever you're ready taking a slower deeper more intentional breath in directing it right to that region of the arms and shoulders upper arms armpits and when you're ready here too letting go as we now move into the region of the the neck and overlapping with the shoulders again and not just the neck but the throat and not just the throat but the larynx and holding the hold of this region in awareness and maybe

marveling at what the larynx can do in concert with the lungs and the tongue and the mouth and just holding the entirety of the neck and shoulders in awareness feeling whatever is here to be felt when you're ready just like with every other region of the body letting it go as the breath lets go

now and as we move now into the head and face and just feeling the entirety of your head and face holding it in awareness letting go of any thoughts you might have about it and how it appears just allowing it to be as it is from the inside in its own intrinsic and profound beauty

experiencing the sensations in the lower jaw in the chin and the lips and the teeth and the gums and the tongue and the the upper lips again and the nostrils and the feeling of the air moving in and out of the nostrils in the whole of the nose the cheeks the eyes and eyelids

and eyebrows and the wonder of the eyes behind the eyelids through eyes are closed the marvel of that sense the miracle of it and letting the awareness thread out to include the forehead and the temples and the ears and the whole domain of sound all sensorium of sound hearing what's here to be heard

feeling what's here to be felt and allowing awareness to now include the entirety of the vault of the head and the cranium the back of the head and just reminding yourself that underneath that cranium underneath the vault of the cranium lies the most complex arrangement of matter in

the known universe the human brain which is extended out into the entirety of the body through the senses and many other pathways and so holding the entirety of the head and face and awareness with a certain kind of profound wonder and honoring and recognizing not only its intrinsic beauty and wonder but the intrinsic beauty and wonder of you and your ability to hold it in awareness outside of time in this timeless present moment we call now and then when you're ready once again

plan an outbreath just letting the entirety of your face and head dissolve in your mind's eye just letting it completely dissolve as you flow into an awareness that can include the body sitting or lying here right now but that is also boundless and simply resting here

completely at home with really no place to go no better place to be in this moment than right here nothing to do to fill up this moment because it's already complete and full as it is and no special agenda that needs to be fulfilled or accomplishment to be had nothing to attain beyond this moment

because this is it you you know your whole life right here in this moment the body the breath all of the sensoria and awareness itself fully embodied and so when you're ready you might experiment with opening your eyes if your eyes have been closed

and maybe very very slowly and gently introducing a certain movement maybe in the toes or the fingers and then gradually increasing the moving maybe massaging your face or with your hands or moving your hands together but to simply just recognize that in a way that guided meditation is

over but the awareness the awareness goes out just like the ringing of a bell you know there's the initial kiss of the bells or the clacker in the bell but then the sound goes on just the way Rilka said the song goes on beautiful so life goes on

and it is wonders and it needs you to be fully present to complete the universe and in some sense also I would say to complete your karmic assignment whatever it is beautiful so thank you there you have a slight essay and it felt so good oh thanks for the invitation I mean again it's like

it can be short it can be long it can be elaborate and poetic or it can be much less that way but the important thing is that we realize that it's available 24-7 the doors are everywhere the doors of awareness or of wakefulness because there's so much intimacy in this I mean it's really an invitation of intimacy with yourself intimacy with the present moment but because we're doing this together and you know there's a certain kind of intimacy that arises just in our being together in this way

and I just want to bow to it and acknowledge it it's still working its way through me well it's a little bit like a tuning fork in a way you know you there's the initial knock or hit to set it vibrating but those vibrations in a certain way they because we're not

tuning forks where the extremely complex arrangements of gazillions of atoms and molecules those reverberations never stop and every in-breath magically somehow invites them to renew themselves and I think Rilco was right the song goes on nothing changed and now everything is different

that's beautifully said nothing's changed and everything's different and it's not some special airy fairy weirdo kind of thing that's for sort of leftover hippies from a different generation or anything like that and that's what in a certain way the mainstreaming of mindfulness is

demonstrated that if you're human it's really helpful to wake up yeah and there's a kind of score to it but it's an unwritten score that we have to write the score we're constantly participating in writing co-creating the score of our own place or places in the world

and how we're going to navigate and modulate those interfaces and I would say the world is starving for that absolutely starving for us to show up completely and to take care of what needs taking care of inwardly and outwardly what are your thoughts on prayer because of the way I was brought up

I'm not that kind of familiar with that whole domain of things although I did run a couple of cycles of MBSR back in the old days for the Catholic Church for the Worcester Diasis of the Catholic Church in Worcester and they were really into prayer and what they found by coming and

practicing these meditations they were from a very different tradition they were saying it's the same thing that everything is a prayer every every breath is a prayer so in that sense as long as it's not so me centered and it's a imploring for a special intervention from the divine for

my own betterment even if it is that's just a kind of expression of sorrow and suffering but when one's taking this stance for the the the betterment of the world or for the recognizing of the intrinsic beauty of the world for the sake of all being so to speak then everything becomes a

prayer and everything becomes a meditation and every artistic expression I would say is a kind of I hope this doesn't sound really inflated but a certain kind of sacred offering think that's true that's not meant to be evaluated compared to other sacred offerings

no but to stand on its own as a kind of instance of recognizing the enormity of the mystery yes and that we're a non insignificant insignificant part of it yes is science sophisticated enough to understand spirituality I think it's getting there I don't know with this spirituality is the

right word for for various reasons I stay away from using that word myself most of the time not entirely successfully and the last chapter of wherever you go there you are it's called is mindful of the spiritual and I sort of say some things there because I could ask that question

a lot by journalists or didn't but my definition of spirituality is what makes us human so it becomes like a Zen koan what does make us human well it's a certain point silences the only really responsible response or an offering like what you've made your art what you've constructed what you've

what's come through you and of course you don't have to be or think of yourself as an artist have things come through you because we're all portals in a certain way and things do come through us when we don't obstruct the portal from free flowing so this is where I think the creativity comes in

and that it's intrinsic a part of our humanity as awareness but if it's hidden if it's a kind of hidden in plain sight but not accessible then it takes teachers or mentors or friends who care to nurture that in others as well as in oneself and I'm just intuiting because I know virtually

nothing about it but I'm guessing that that's a one major element of how you have been functioning in the world of music for many many decades how is the nature of reality different than what we perceive we have no idea because we're limited by what we can perceive and think

but one thing we can intuit is that the nature of reality is a lot more mysterious than a philosophy so to speak Harashio so this is the human adventure at its best is to navigate those waters and expand our repertoire beyond the known without being shackled by what we know sometimes I like to say

you know instead of waiting until you die die now die now to the personal pronouns die now to your big ego trip and a story of myself and how horrible or how great or wondrous and by dying now wake up to the beauty of this moment and realizing how much bigger you are than your story see