Selects: How Mindfulness Works

Summary

Stuff You Should Know: How Mindfulness Works – Episode Summary

Released on January 11, 2025 by iHeartPodcasts

In this enlightening episode of "Stuff You Should Know," hosts Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant delve deep into the concept of mindfulness—its historical roots, evolution in the West, benefits, and potential pitfalls. Drawing from their comprehensive 2022 discussion, they unpack the multifaceted nature of mindfulness, offering listeners a thorough understanding of its mechanisms and implications in modern society.

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1. Introduction to Mindfulness

Josh Clark kicks off the episode by reintroducing a previous discussion from 2022, aiming to shine a light on mindfulness as a timely topic for self-improvement enthusiasts.

"[...] we cover its origins, how it became a thing in the west, and the upsides, and yes, drawbacks. I hope it changes your life for the better."
— Josh Clark [00:30]

2. Defining Mindfulness

Hosts navigate the foundational aspects of mindfulness, emphasizing its Buddhist origins and the significance of the Pali term "sati."

• Historical Context:
  Chuck Bryant explains that "sati" translates more accurately to "memory of the present" rather than the commonly used "mindfulness." He underscores the importance of understanding mindfulness within its original Buddhist framework.

  "It's kind of a middle Indo Aryan liturgical language from the early branches of Buddhism. [...] It's a lot to take in."
  — Chuck Bryant [05:10]

• Translation and Evolution:
  Josh Clark highlights how British colonial administrators in the 1880s introduced "sati" to the Western lexicon as "mindfulness," facilitating its spread but also altering its original connotations.

3. Mindfulness in Western Culture

The conversation shifts to how mindfulness has been adopted and adapted in the West, particularly through figures like Jon Kabat-Zinn.

• Jon Kabat-Zinn's Influence:
  Chuck Bryant and Josh Clark discuss Jon Kabat-Zinn's pivotal role in secularizing mindfulness, making it accessible outside Buddhist contexts.

  "Jon Kabat-Zinn was among those people. Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein."
  — Josh Clark [23:53]

• Modern Applications:
  The hosts explore the integration of mindfulness in corporate settings, healthcare, and education, noting its prevalence in areas ranging from Silicon Valley offices to military training programs.

4. Benefits and Scientific Backing

Chuck Bryant and Josh Clark examine the empirical evidence supporting mindfulness practices.

• Emotional and Mental Health:
  They cite studies indicating that mindfulness can reduce self-reported anxiety, depression, and stress while enhancing overall well-being.

  "They reduce self reported anxiety, depression and stress and increase wellbeing as opposed to people who got no treatment at all."
  — Chuck Bryant [33:05]

• Physical Pain Management:
  The discussion touches on how mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) can alleviate the subjective experience of pain.

  "MBSR can reduce severity of chronic pain or improve daily functioning and depression about like, associated with that pain."
  — Chuck Bryant [40:29]

5. Criticisms and Potential Drawbacks

The hosts do not shy away from addressing the criticisms surrounding the commercialization and misapplication of mindfulness.

• McMindfulness Concept:
  Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant introduce the term "McMindfulness," coined by Miles Neal and expounded upon by Ronald Purser, highlighting how mindfulness has been stripped of its ethical and spiritual underpinnings to serve corporate interests.

  "True mindfulness is deeply and inextricably embedded in the notion of wholesomeness. [...] it denigrates into mere attention."
  — Andrew Olensky [49:40]

• Unintended Psychological Effects:
  They discuss studies revealing that mindfulness practices can sometimes unearth unresolved traumas, leading to increased anxiety or the need for prolonged therapy.

  "People have to go to therapy for years after having gone on basically a bad trip at a meditation retreat."
  — Chuck Bryant [40:12]

• Corporate Appropriation:
  The hosts critique how corporations utilize mindfulness as a tool for productivity without addressing underlying issues like overwork and systemic stressors.

  "Here's a mindfulness room so you can help correct all that. Like, it totally puts the onus on the employee..."
  — Chuck Bryant [45:44]

6. Effectiveness of Mindfulness Practices

The effectiveness of mindfulness is further scrutinized through recent studies and practical applications.

• Social Psychology Study:
  A 2021 study highlighted how mindfulness training increased participants' willingness to help individuals outside their immediate social groups.

  "The mindfulness group actually kind of crossed lines way more than was expected."
  — Josh Clark [35:25]

• Listener Mail Highlight:
  The episode features a heartfelt email from a listener, Mike Man, who shares how the podcast helped him and his father reconnect and find solace through nature and shared learning.

  "You gave him that happiness and made his life that much better over the last couple of years of his life."
  — Chuck Bryant [51:28]

7. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant wrap up the episode by reaffirming the value of mindfulness while urging listeners to approach it with informed caution. They emphasize the importance of understanding mindfulness in its full depth beyond commercialized versions.

"If you want to know more about mindfulness, go, go research it and see if it's for you."
— Josh Clark [50:10]

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Josh Clark [06:10]:
  "But it got translated into the word mindfulness, sati, into mindfulness by a British colonial administrator in Ceylon, which is now Sri Lanka, back in the 1880s."

• Chuck Bryant [05:10]:
  "It's kind of a middle Indo Aryan liturgical language from the early branches of Buddhism. [...] It's a lot to take in."

• Andrew Olensky [49:46]:
  "True mindfulness is deeply and inextricably embedded in the notion of wholesomeness. [...] it denigrates into mere attention."

• Chuck Bryant [35:42]:
  "There's something to be said for that."

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Final Thoughts

This episode serves as a comprehensive guide to understanding mindfulness, tracing its journey from ancient Buddhist practices to its current widespread adoption in Western society. While acknowledging the undeniable benefits supported by scientific studies, Josh and Chuck also shed light on the complexities and challenges of integrating mindfulness into a modern, secular context. They advocate for a balanced approach, encouraging listeners to engage with mindfulness thoughtfully and authentically.

For those intrigued by the multifaceted exploration of mindfulness, this episode offers both depth and practical insights, making it a valuable listen for anyone interested in the intersection of ancient practices and contemporary well-being.

Transcript

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[Josh Clark]

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[Josh Clark]

Hi, everybody. Since self improvement is kind of in the air this time of year, I thought I would choose our 2022 episode on mindfulness. We cover its origins, how it became a thing in the west, and the upsides, and yes, drawbacks. I hope it changes your life for the better. Enjoy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartrad.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. And there's Chuck. And Jerry's here. Ish. And this is stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Ish.

[Josh Clark]

This is full on stuff you should know, Charles.

[Chuck Bryant]

Remember that point? I feel like it was about 10, eight to 10 years ago where everyone was just saying ish on the end of things instead of saying, like, you know, finding the real word that they were looking for.

[Josh Clark]

So. So like an approximation of the word or of the thing they were describing. So like I'm. I'm 40ish.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, not even that. Like when there's like a real word that could be used and they would just throw ish on another word.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know what you're talking about.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, yeah, it was. It was a thing. It swept the nation.

[Josh Clark]

When was it?

[Chuck Bryant]

Or maybe I'm thinking of the Macarena.

[Josh Clark]

That's what you're thinking.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay. All right.

[Josh Clark]

Man, that really did sweep the nation. Remember that? Who let the dogs out? It was like a one chance.

[Chuck Bryant]

Who did let the dogs out? Did they ever find that out?

[Josh Clark]

No, I think it was a rhetorical question.

[Chuck Bryant]

Ish.

[Josh Clark]

It's the kind of rhetorical question you could ask yourself, Chuck, while you're meditating. Yeah. But first, thanks. Thanks. But I'm going to step all over the segue because before we get started, Chuck, I want to do, if you'll allow me, another shout out for my little niece Mila's movie, big time movie called no Exit that's coming out as far as when this episode drops tomorrow. So February 25, 2022. No matter when you hear this, just immediately go onto Hulu. Subscribe if you haven't yet. And check out my niece Mila in no Exit, because she is.

[Chuck Bryant]

She sent me the trailer.

[Josh Clark]

Amazing. What'd you think?

[Chuck Bryant]

It looks like a taught thriller. She looks fantastic. From what you can tell from a trailer. I know. You just saved all the bad parts for the movie.

[Josh Clark]

I don't think they did. I was reading an interview with the director, and he was saying, like, she was. She was doing such an amazing job of being terrified and freaked out and everything that, like, after. In between takes, like, the other cast members would be like, are you okay? And she'd be like, yeah, are you okay?

[Chuck Bryant]

You know I'm acting, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, exactly. She's like. It's acting like John Lovett. Yeah. So on Hulu, no exit, February 25. My niece Mila just kills it. There you go.

[Chuck Bryant]

Can't wait.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks again for that, Chuck. So let's get started. Thank you for not passing judgment on that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Either way, you're re. Segueing because we're talking. Because passing judgment, it means I'm not being mindful. Because a big part of mindfulness, huge, is to not judge.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So that's like. This is one of those ones, you know, those episodes where we just start talking about the thing without defining it. This is not gonna be one of those episodes. Cause I think it would be kind of rough otherwise, you know?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I guess if you're gonna define mindfulness, you need to kind of go back in time. I mean, I guess we could hop in the Wayback Machine. We haven't done that in a while.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's been. Been a while.

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's pull the old cover off. It's quite dusty in here.

[Josh Clark]

And a little bit of mildew.

[Chuck Bryant]

A little mildew. There's some old crystals, boxes.

[Josh Clark]

Those are yours. Remember, you had them accidentally delivered to your house?

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. And then we went back to the old west to celebrate.

[Josh Clark]

You're thinking of Back to the Future three?

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, right, right, right.

[Josh Clark]

I called Mary Steenburgeon. Meaning I get to play her, not date her or anything.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I would date Mary Steenburgen. I always had a big crush on her.

[Josh Clark]

Isn't that. Oh, really? That's Ted Danson's old squeeze. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's his current squeeze. I'm not gonna fight him for it.

[Josh Clark]

Are they still together?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I think so.

[Josh Clark]

Gosh. They've been together for a while.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Good couple.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. Great.

[Chuck Bryant]

Good stuff. So who knew we were gonna be talking about Ted Danson at the beginning.

[Josh Clark]

Of mindfulness, not me. I could have picked Richard Gere, but Ted Danson's a big surprise.

[Chuck Bryant]

If we get in the Wayback Machine and go back in time to sort of the beginning of Buddhism, you'd have to look at the language Pali and the word sati. Pali is P A L I, Sati is S A T I. There are a lot of different words for mindfulness, but the one that we kind of identify with, it's kind of been used most from Pali, which is a middle Indo Aryan liturgical language from the early branches of Buddhism. Yeah, it's a lot to take in.

[Josh Clark]

The reason that Pali is so important is because they say that it was the language of the Buddha, and at the very least, it was the first language that the Buddha's words, which have been passed down orally, were written down in. So it's like legit old school Buddhist thinking and teachings. And one of the basic parts of that is, like you said, sati, which has been translated to mindfulness. But it was translated by a British colonial administrator, wasn't it?

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. And it kind of more accurately is translated as memory of the present, which I think is a really kind of a cool way to look at mindfulness.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, absolutely. It really kind of reveals what's going on, especially once you kind of learn a little more about it. You're like. That actually works about as perfectly as can be. But it got translated into the word mindfulness, sati, into mindfulness by a British colonial administrator in Ceylon, which is now Sri Lanka, back in the 1880s. So it was some British guy who said sati means mindfulness, and actually kind of gave it to us today, although there was a long period where it had been forgotten. But I think you can't really talk about mindfulness, even though it's changed so dramatically, especially in the last decade or so, without kind of describing what it was originally meant to describe or what it still describes if you're a practicing Buddhist. And that is that, like, you are not only, like, paying attention to the moment and like, experiencing this moment without letting your thoughts wander to the past or the future or anything like that, but that whatever you're experiencing in the moment, no matter what it is, you're experiencing with equanimity, which means that you're not passing judgment on it as good or bad or anything else. It just is. And it sounds easy to describe, but if you've ever tried it, it's one of the hardest things a human being can ever set out to do.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's very, very natural for a human to seek out and contemplate and think about the things that feel good and please them and to try and stuff down and get rid of and avoid things that either hurt, literally hurt, or emotionally hurt or things that are painful or unpleasant. And, boy, that is a tough thing to overcome, my friend. Just the condition of being human makes that very difficult.

[Josh Clark]

But, yeah, and you just nailed it on the head not once, but twice, Chuck, when you said that. It's a very human condition. And part of sati, the point of Sati, as far as, like, Buddhists are concerned, is that it's a step that you take on the path to enlightenment to free yourself from the sight of, like, life and death and rebirth and to become, like, a truly enlightened being that's freed from all of that. And so you have to free yourself from that human condition. And a big part of that is to free yourself from yearning, from wanting. Because yearning and wanting or being repelled by something and wanting to get away from it. There are two sides of the same coin as far as sati is concerned, which is you are wishing that something is different or was different than it actually is. And that's the basis of suffering. And suffering is the thing that keeps you in that cycle of life and death and rebirth. So meditating to become mindful and nonjudgmental about your present experience is one step toward relieving yourself of suffering and then freeing yourself from that shackle of being born and reborn and reborn again.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, you, my friend, have just spoken about the noble truths, in part because craving is the cause of suffering is the second noble truth. And to cease that craving will bring about the ceasing of that suffering, which is the third noble truth. And basically experiencing the moment without everything about the moment without judgment is sort of the goal. And for modern, we're gonna talk a lot about the beginnings of mindfulness and kind of how it's become kind of a hip thing to do here in the United States starting in about the 1970s and on and especially today. But we're kind of talking in American modern terms about stress and de stressing. And the Buddhists have a term for that, which is dukkha D u k k H a And that is, you know, again, to avoid or destroy something that we don't like. And what we usually don't like is something that's going to put a stress on us.

[Josh Clark]

Right? Exactly. And they're saying, like, dude, this is part of the point of life. I'm reading this really amazing book by Thich Nhat Hanh right now, rereading it, actually. It's one of those ones you just kind of go back and reread. Very, like, easy, slim volume. It's called no mud, no lotus. And it basically says, like, without suffering it, you can't have happiness and vice versa. Pretty basic stuff, but, like, he really gets into explaining how to confront suffering and understand that it's just part of life. And that's a huge part of the Buddhist approach to mindfulness. It's not to get away from suffering. It's to recognize it as it is and also simultaneously not make a bigger deal out of it than it is, because suffering's enough. It's bad enough as it is, but another part of the human condition is to make it way worse by anticipating, worrying about it, like, focusing on it after it happens. There's a lot of stuff we do to our own suffering that explodes it. And part of mindfulness training is to stop doing that as well, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

You ain't kidding. And the lack of judgment is a big, big part of all of this. And we're gonna talk quite a bit here and there about Jon Kabat Zinn, who is easy, far and away the sort of leader of the modern American mindfulness movement in a lot of different ways. And we'll get to him in more detail later. But he says that awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose, and that's another big part of it. It's. It's a very purposeful practice. But not meditation, which we'll get to that as well, because meditation is a true physical practice that you and mental practice, whereas mindfulness is more of a state of being that you're trying to get to.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

But he says on purpose, in the present moment and non judgmentally, they always have to kind of hammer home the lack of judgment being a key.

[Josh Clark]

Right, Exactly. And he's a proponent and kind of one of the founders of what you can refer to as secular mindfulness, which is this current incarnation of mindfulness that's sweeping the West. It's, like you said, hip. That's been kind of removed deliberately, as we'll see. Removed from its Buddhist roots and Buddhist context to make it more palatable and scientific seeming. Yeah, Secular, secular.

[Chuck Bryant]

Strip it of all the religion and maybe we can sell it to Americans.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

In an app.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. The upshot of all this, though, Chuck, is that no matter who you are or where you're coming from, if you're talking about mindfulness. You're talking about paying attention to the present moment and doing the best you can at not judging anything that's going on in that present experience and just taking it on its face value and engaging in it fully. That's mindfulness in a nutshell.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And it's not anything that the Buddhists had a corner on. They just probably did it better because all different kinds of religions throughout antiquity had, you know, chanting or some kind of mindfulness practice, maybe prayers or through songs or dance. You know, that kind of thing has been around as long as people have been practicing religion. So the Buddhists did not invent it, but I think they got it fairly right.

[Josh Clark]

So let's talk a little more about how we got here today, historically speaking, after a break. What do you think about that?

[Chuck Bryant]

It sounds great. I'm going to breathe in the meantime.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, let me teach you something I've been using that Thich Nhat Hanh taught me. Not personally, but through his writing in a book that was published that I purchased with money.

[Chuck Bryant]

Smash your hand with a hammer.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. He said, try to focus on anything else. Chump.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right?

[Josh Clark]

There's a bunch of different mantras you can say, and I'm not even sure that's the right word, but one that I keep using is. And it's just striking what taking a breath and deliberately focusing on that breath, just breathing in once and breathing out once can do to just suck you right out of wherever your mind is in the past or the future. It's really striking how it can do that. But his was. It's breathing in. I noticed that I'm alive and then breathing out. I'm happy to be alive. And just doing it once, like, immediately brings me back into the present moment. And it's really cool. I like it. It's all very new for me, but I think it's. It's pretty cool.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, there's a lot of value there. And, you know, you can, like, practice something like this and those breathing techniques. It's not exclusive to mindfulness or meditation or Buddhism. I. You know, that's a great technique if you have kids. I found that, you know, if my daughter is having a bad time, just kind of get her to slow down and take a couple of good, deep breaths. Always a good thing to do. And Emily, who is someone who has a lot of anxieties in her life as a struggling small business owner, we will do this thing where we have hug breathing, where I will go up to her and we will Have a good tight bear hug embrace and we'll breathe in together. And it's sort of like doubles the power of it.

[Josh Clark]

Wow, that's neat. Chuck, is that your own? Did you come up with that?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure. I mean, I didn't get it from anywhere, but I'm sure I didn't invent that.

[Josh Clark]

It sounds like a Viking mindfulness, like Hell's Angels. Sure, yeah. It's the Hells Angels technique you came up with. You can call it whatever you want. It's your invention. It's a good one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. There's something about breathing together that close physically, it's pretty powerful.

[Josh Clark]

So if you went back a few hundred years, couple hundred years even, and you spoke to any Buddhist around the world and said, hey, how often do you do mindfulness meditation? They would look at you like they had no idea what you were talking about. And if you said, you know, sati, they'd say, oh, that's not for us. That's for, like the monks and the nuns up in the caves in the mountains. Like, we don't do that kind of stuff. We're super Buddhist. We care about morality and we worship local deities and all that stuff. But that's kind of advanced. That's more than the average Buddhist does. And it wasn't until, I think, the late 19th century in Burma that that was finally kind of broken up and meditation and mindfulness together were kind of introduced for the first time to, like, lay Buddhists, like just the normal, everyday, average Buddhist living their life.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, this is pretty cool. Like, I know we love it when we can kind of pinpoint when things happen or when things change. And this is one of them. On November 28th in 1885, this is when the British Imperial army conquered Burma and said, king, we're going to mispronounce some of these. Thibau, maybe.

[Josh Clark]

I think that's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

You're out of here. And that King was promoting mindfulness and promoting Buddhist institutions throughout the nation. The Brits, of course, said, no, we're not going to really do that. So it fell to the lay people to get organized, to find new places to meet, to find their own, you know, gathering grounds. And a lot of times these were monasteries and it would go through monks, but they would. It basically went to them to kind of figure it out. Because it wasn't, I don't want to say state sponsored, but it kind of. State sponsored.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Or state supported or something like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But so. And so, rather than being like, oh, Well, I don't know who. I guess we're not Buddhists anymore. They. They took it by the horns and they did something with it. But one of the outcroppings of that was that these monks who used to just go meditate out in the mountains or the hills or in the woods now had audiences of everyday people who were practicing Buddhists that they were teaching this stuff to. And it was one of these guys, Ledi Sayadao, who was a Buddhist monk, who said, you know what? This isn't just for us. This is for everybody. And closely in Ledi Sayadao's footsteps came Mingun se Yao S a Y a w, say yao. I think that's right. And that monk was the first one to actually teach mindfulness and meditation to regular people. I think around 1911.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, it's cool stuff. Like, I love the idea that Leti Sayadal kind of put forth, which was, you don't have to go to a monastery, even, like, we've set these up for you, and you can. You don't have to retreat to a cave. You don't even have to go into a deep meditative state or anything. Like just momentary bits of mindfulness are very helpful, and that's a good way to reach regular laypeople. And I think through practice is when Syel came along and said, hey, that all sounds great and buddy, I'm going to teach it, right?

[Josh Clark]

So the people in what is now Myanmar are the ones who kind of broke out, broke mindfulness and meditation out of its little slumber. Sure. Cage or something like that, all right. And democratized it a little bit. But it was, as far as the people in the west are concerned, it was the Japanese and their development of Zen Buddhism that we have to thank because this is. You can pretty much trace a direct line between the mindfulness and the meditation and the approach to Buddhism in the west today back to the 20th century Japan and specifically a guy named Daisetsu Teitaro DT Suzuki. So DT Suzuki was kind of a. What's called a Buddhist modernist thinker who said, there's different things we can do with this, but let's approach this a little more rationally, a little less dogmatically, and open it up to people like our friends in what's soon to be Myanmar. And not only that, let's start relating to the West a little more. And DT Suzuki actually kind of carried this message, this idea of Zen Buddhism with him over to America and Europe, and it just started to catch on. Like wildfire.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I think it's really interesting, too, that it was another act of war that led to, you know, that helped give rise to someone like Suzuki. Just like when the Brits overthrew BURMA, when the U.S. navy attacked Tokyo harbor in 1853. There was, you know, basically, Japan was like, you know, we gotta start relating to the West a little bit more and sort of modernize. And this was known as the Meiji Restoration. And part of that was saying, hey, Shinto is gonna be our religion, our main religion, and not Buddhism. Which led the Buddhists to say, hey, maybe we should modernize our religion as well, you know, so we don't get left by the wayside. And that gave rise to someone like DT Suzuki.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So it was from that modernization that Buddhist modernism came about. And it's basically what you would recognize as Buddhism today. Like, very thoughtful, very interior dwelling. The idea that the universe is all connected. All these were, like, Buddhist thoughts before, but it was. It was Buddhism allowing itself to be influenced by modernism and by other groups like the Romantics and the Transcendentalists. Right. So it was.

[Chuck Bryant]

And they jumped on it big time. It was pretty. It was like a confluence of perfect timing as far as coming to the United States and like the counterculture ready for this.

[Josh Clark]

But in a weird way, it was like the United States, unbeknownst to the counterculture beats and then later the hippies that their predecessors, like the Transcendentalists, had pre influenced what was coming back to them. So it was already in a very palatable form for Americans who were open to the idea of, like, mind expansion and taking acid and, you know, and meditating. And we're just open to the ideas of other cultures of becoming, like, more in tune with the universe. It was. They were just waiting for it. And it came to them in the. In the briefcase, I guess, of DT Suzuki. And it just kind of took off from there. So the idea. Everything we understand about mindfulness and meditation you can trace back to, like, DT Suzuki and those beats.

[Chuck Bryant]

Absolutely. And there were three people in particular in the 60s and 70s practicing this. Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg, who were not together, but they studied separately. Meditation in Burma, and then in the mid-70s, founded the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, which became sort of the center of the Vipassana meditation movement here in the United States. And they're still around. They're still doing their thing.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So it was from that same group. There was actually a time where Jon Cabot Zinn, the guy we mentioned Earlier.

[Chuck Bryant]

Zi, by the way. Not Z E, N. That would be too far on the nose.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, wait.

[Chuck Bryant]

What if his name was spelled Z E, N?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I got you, boy. I was not paying attention.

[Chuck Bryant]

Was that not obvious?

[Josh Clark]

The current experience. Very well. I'm sorry.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, that's okay. That'd be like a boxer being named Boxer. Yeah, it would be spelled differently.

[Josh Clark]

Right. For some reason, I was going more toward the cabernet Zinn play on.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, because you're with that eyes in there.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So he's known as the godfather of modern mindfulness, according to the Guardian, at least, which is a pretty legit newspaper. And by the way, thank you also to Livia for helping us out with this one. Chuck.

[Chuck Bryant]

This is a tough one to wrangle. She did a great job.

[Josh Clark]

She did, she did. But John Kabat Zinn was among those people. Jack Kornfield, great name. Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein. He actually taught at their Insight Meditation Society. And he was a big time practitioner of Zen Buddhism. And he was on, I guess, a meditation retreat. And he had a bit of insight, I guess an epiphany is probably what you call it, that he was meant to help apply Buddhist techniques to help people who are in pain. He had either a microbiology or molecular biology degree, and he ended up applying it to medicine and figuring out how to join Buddhist practices and medicine to help people in the 70s. And it really started to take off from there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, he sort of had the same idea as previous cultures, which was, hey, if we want to and not sell for money, but if we want to popularize this, we should get a little bit away from the religion part, the sort of hippie, dippy, New Agey part. And he really wanted to start talking in concrete terms about things that everyone worried about, which was stress. And, like, if you want to make your life less stressful, here's a way to do it. And more on mindfulness and less on meditation, which was still a tough sell to mainstream America and still is today, I think.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. But it's gotten less and less. I feel like he finally overcame the threshold that was keeping it back in the last 5, 10 years and achieved what he was looking for. I mean, think about. Mindfulness is everywhere today, and it is almost totally divorced from any kind of religious connotations. It seems like a neuroscience tool more than anything, the way that it treated in the West. And that was his goal. He was trying to get it to the most people possible, study it scientifically, and then apply it to help People. And specifically, again, he was initially looking at how it can help people with pain. And he came up with Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction mbsr, which is still very much in use today. And then there was an offshoot, too, Chuck. Mindfulness Based Cognitive therapy. And that takes cbt, which is a proven type of talk therapy used extensively in psychology, and applies John Cabot Zinn's approach to mindfulness to it. Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I think one of the big tenets here is to interrupt automatic thoughts and the automatic thoughts that can lead to an automatic behavior. So the automatic thought might just be your propensity to feel that stress and reach for a drink immediately and not even think like, oh, boy, I need a drink because I'm stressed out. And that'll help out. It becomes this automatic thing. And he was all about. And the practice of mindfulness is all about disruption and disrupting that flow without judgment.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because one of the big things in cognitive behavioral therapy is that you have a thought. Your thought leads to a feeling, and your feeling leads to a behavior. And oftentimes it's like you said, it's very destructive. And you don't even realize it's going on until your life is kind of falling apart or it's certainly not as good as it could be. And it doesn't even have to be a drink. It could be a donut, it could be yelling at a cashier at a grocery store, like all sorts of different things. And you are totally out of control of it. The idea behind this mindfulness, adding mindfulness to cognitive behavioral therapy, is that you are training yourself to detach yourself from all thoughts and emotions so that you can evaluate them clearly, so that none of them can jump out of nowhere, pounce on you. And the next thing you know, you've eaten a dozen donuts and had six gotchas, and you have no idea why. You do have the idea why. And you probably haven't gotten to that point because you've stopped the whole process by recognizing it the moment it began. Ideally, theoretically, on paper. That's the purpose of using mindfulness to help, especially with mental health.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. There's a journalist named Robert Wright, and he kind of put it in a way that I kind of like, which was to think of your thoughts and emotions as transient. So it's not like that kind of goes back to the no judgment thing. You can have these bad feelings and bad emotions and bad tendencies, but if you allow them to just flow through you, they become transient. They don't stick around the same Sort of ideas that you can't. Why worry about things that you can't control? But not in a. An office poster kind of way. You know what I mean?

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

It runs a bit deeper than that. It's not like a Pollyanna thing.

[Josh Clark]

No. And as a matter of fact, like, if you want to trace it all the way back to its original Buddhist roots, it's that, like, we have very little, if any control over life. And that recognizing that will free us from all of our desires. And the idea that, like, we have to have things and we want to hang on to it, like it just lets you let things flow by and you can enjoy them and experience them as they come. Rather than hoping for the next one, needing the next donut, or fearing the next loss, you. You just experience life as it comes. That's kind of the point of that, of understanding that everything is transient and impermanent, including your own. Your own life. Like, you're going to die one day. There's ultimately the big, like, you know, like, bingo number.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Like, that's ultimately what it's leading to, is you're going to die. You yourself are impermanent. And so understanding that through getting there, through meditation, daily meditative practice is kind of the goal.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And it's interesting. They found that it's. Even though something like MBSR is more rooted in that sort of neuroscience y thing and not spirituality or religion, they found it's sort of a chicken and the egg deal where once you do participate in bsr, you may become more spiritual as a result, even though you weren't going in.

[Josh Clark]

But I think the reason why is because even if these people don't know it, even if they're at a corporate mindfulness retreat, they're engaging in a deeply spiritual practice. They're kind of doing it wrong, as we'll see. But it's still, you know, part of this very long established tradition that's. That actually has, like, legs. It's not. It's not mumbo jumbo. Like, it actually has a pronounced effect on the human brain, the human psyche, the outlook that we have on life. And so depending on the context you're doing it in, it can be very useful. It can be harmful, or it can be totally useless in some cases, too. But it is a spiritual act, so it makes sense that it would make you more interested in spirituality.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I say we take our second break if that's good.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

And because we're stuff you should know, we have to talk about whether or not this works. And if there have been studies that tell us one way or the other. So we'll get into that right after this. All right. It's fun to sit around and talk about mindfulness.

[Josh Clark]

So fun.

[Chuck Bryant]

And to just sort of zen out and lose ourselves, become one with each other through these headphones.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, man, you sound like Rory Cochran in Daisy Confused.

[Chuck Bryant]

Martha knew, man.

[Josh Clark]

What was his name?

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, Slater.

[Josh Clark]

Was he Slater?

[Chuck Bryant]

Maybe.

[Josh Clark]

Slater, you hippie, give me drugs, man. Yeah, Slater, you're right.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no, no.

[Josh Clark]

Get some from your mother, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's funny, I've seen him and he's been in a bunch of stuff since then and it's always impossible to see him as anyone other than Slater.

[Josh Clark]

I mean, he was on CSI Miami, I think, for years and years and years.

[Chuck Bryant]

And you're just waiting for him to whip out of Doobie.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. And he's all clean cut and everything and you just still can't not see it. I totally agree with you.

[Chuck Bryant]

He's not fooling anybody. All right, so does this stuff work? There have been plenty of studies, of course, and there is a lot of evidence that mindfulness programs can help people through emotional problems, through mental problems. They've done controlled trials of MBSR programs in clinical settings and non clinical settings and they generally found that they do. And this is self reported stuff obviously, but they reduce self reported anxiety, depression and stress and increase wellbeing as opposed to people who got no treatment at all.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, so yes, I mean it does seem to be effective. There's also, especially with self reporting, Chuck, that seems to be like the big one, that if you, if you look at studies where they're using self reporting, like it has the most pronounced effect. Objective tests there does seem to register some sort of effect, like on the objective experience of say like pain or something like that. But social psychology has jumped all over this. It's like, we're going to study this. And there's this one study from 2021 which I have to give a hat tip to Yumi because she turned this one up. But it was a study of white people, some of whom received mindfulness training, and a control group who received sham mindfulness training, which is hilarious. And the effect that it had on their willingness to help black people who they saw in need and not like in need, like you know, homeless or something like that. Like they would be subjected to a test unwittingly where they'd be in a room and like a black person would come in and like drop their papers. And their willingness to help that person pick up the papers, or if a black person entered the room and they were on crutches, their willingness to give up their seat. And apparently black people tend to help black people more. White people tend to help white people more. Hispanic people tend to help Hispanic people more. People help their in group more. But this mindfulness group actually kind of crossed lines way more than was expected, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, I think that kind of says it all. You do help your in group more. But the people that receive the real mindfulness training were definitely far and away more willing to step outside their in group and help someone of another race. There's something to be said for that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And I mean, it was significant. Three times more is really significant, statistically speaking, for a study. And it seems like it was a pretty good study. Like, the fact that they had sham mindfulness training ruled out the possibility that the group that got mindfulness training was behaving a certain way because they thought, like, that's what was going to be the result of it. Almost like a placebo effect. So the group that received sham training thought they were getting mindfulness training.

[Chuck Bryant]

What was that like?

[Josh Clark]

That's what I want to know.

[Chuck Bryant]

I would love to know what sham mindfulness training is like.

[Josh Clark]

Breathe in, really concentrate on all the anger. Really feel it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or they'd let them in like Lamaze breathing, where there's like a. You're like, I don't think that's right. That doesn't feel right.

[Josh Clark]

They start to float away.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's really funny. And shout out to Cal State San Marcos and Professor Daniel Berry and I guess Yumi for all that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, sure. The trifecta.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, sure.

[Josh Clark]

What's Cal State San Marcos's mascot? Geez, I'm going to bet $5 on the Lobos.

[Chuck Bryant]

That sounds good.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, let's go with that.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right.

[Josh Clark]

Los Lobos even.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's. The Bandless Lobos is their mascot and.

[Josh Clark]

Not coincidentally, their halftime entertainment. As.

[Chuck Bryant]

But we do need to say that there's another school of thought, and it's not a competing school of thought. It's just a. Hey, be aware that it's not always great for everyone. There's this one article you sent about people that experience trauma in their lives that have buried it and it sits in their body as unconscious trauma, that mindfulness practices and meditation practices can dredge that stuff up. And so they found that when these people, they're studying them and they're doing these mindfulness practice, they're experiencing, like, rage and anxiety, and it's like Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is the opposite of where we're supposed to be headed here. And I think they have figured out in a lot of these cases, it's people that are uncovering these buried traumas.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And here's where we reach like the first initial part where the west has kind of screwed this up. Because it is unexpected when somebody in America goes to a meditation retreat and tries to become more mindful and they're confronted with trauma or they're confronted with rage or self hatred or something like that, and they're not expecting it. If you went and talked to like an actual like Buddhist monk, they'd be like, well, somebody probably should have told you that that's a real possibility.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

That you're not. This isn't all. This isn't like, you know, it's like an acid trip. It's not always like flowers and sunshine. Sometimes it's like the darkest thing you'll ever be confronted with kind of thing. Same thing. The good thing about mindfulness meditation is that you can stop immediately. But it's supposedly in some retreats, in some situations they're like, no, you gotta press through. You gotta press through. And people are kind of enticed or forced into staying in really uncomfortable trauma experiences way beyond their comfort zone. And it can actually be damaging. And it's very rare from what I can tell for there be lasting harm. But there are reports of people having to go to therapy for years after having gone on basically a bad trip at a meditation retreat for years, years of therapy. So it can happen. And I guess, like, I think, Chuck, there's a 2019 study that found like 20 to 25% of people who meditate reported experiencing unwanted effects. Right. Like negative effects that they, they were not planning for. And that's. Yeah, that's the big problem. There's no, there's no. Or very little warnings about this stuff. It's all treated in a very Pollyannish naive manner as if like, you know, America and Europe got its hands on. On like the. The Secret, the Cube from Hellraiser. And just like, this is awesome. Let's figure out how to be more productive using this thing. That's kind of what's going on.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I think another thing that can happen is it can lead to a spiral of anxiety if you're not able to get to that place that you think you should be getting to by practicing it.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So it becomes like this cycle where, you know, you're thinking like, well, I'm practicing this meditation. It doesn't seem to be doing anything for me. Why can I not even do this right? And all of a sudden that is building upon itself and creating anxieties because you feel like you're supposed to reach this sort of moment of like floaty bliss that is, I mean, that's really hard to maintain.

[Josh Clark]

Yes, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or I mean, not maintain, but like even touch, even reach.

[Josh Clark]

Sure. And it's been packaged like that. It's been marketed as something that you will just reach some floaty bliss with. And yeah, I can totally see being stressed out because you don't reach it because it hasn't been explained to you even what you're doing. Right. So there's a. It's a. It's a good little short read. It's called Mindfulness Meditation and Trauma. Proceed with caution. I found it on goodtherapy.org and it doesn't say like, don't do this even if you know you have trauma. Don't meditate, don't try to become mindful. It says some. You know, make sure you find like a good coach, a good guide, a good teacher who understands how to deal with trauma and can prepare you for it and can pull you back and be like, don't forget, life's actually good. You're good. Now let's try a little more and just kind of little by little expose yourself to it rather than like, you know, ripping your shirt off and standing in front of like the baseball pitching machine.

[Chuck Bryant]

There's. When it comes to physical pain, that's a pretty interesting area as far as the studies have been concerned. Like the idea that can it actually help reduce physical pain or at least the subjective experience of pain. And you know, in some studies, in some cases, the people who practice meditation do report lower subjective experience of pain that's deep or what they call pain unpleasantness. So this might be a little bit of a mind over matter. Like the actual pain is still there, but I've gotten my mind to. In such a place that the unpleasantness or the anticipation of that unpleasantness isn't as great as it would be if I weren't able to practice that Mindfulness.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Which ties very closely into a Buddhist tenet of the first arrow of suffering, which is where everyone has to experience that. Let's say you're bitten by an ant, it's not a very pleasant sensation and everybody's going to experience it roughly the same. But there's also a second arrow where you can be worried about being bitten by an ant. And it makes the. Actually makes the first arrow, 10 times worse. Not just twice as bad, but 10 times worse. And the idea is that if you're mindful, if you practice sati, you won't really experience the second arrow, just the first arrow. And that's the best you can hope for in this life.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. Message for you, sir. What that's from. I always just crack up when I. Every time I think of an arrow hitting a human body, I only think of Monty Python when that guy takes the arrow. Message for you, sir. As he's dying. There was one study though, in 2019, a review of studies actually that found that MBSR can reduce severity of chronic pain or improve daily functioning and depression about like, associated with that pain, which is, you know, that's there's something to be said for that. Like, I don't think it should only be looked at as some sort of hippie dippy thing. Like if you have real physical pain, it could possibly help.

[Josh Clark]

Yes, and yeah, for sure. I mean, think that that's kind of like one of the outcomes of it being exposed to westernization is that it's being studied and it's actually hold up in studies.

[Chuck Bryant]

And boy, is it being exposed because if you work for a big corporation, if you especially work in Silicon Valley, chances are there are mindfulness retreats, maybe mindfulness rooms in the offices where they say, hey, we know we work you to death and it's not fair. Why don't we set up this little room that used to be a room for, you know, for your kids to come to work, but we don't let that happen anymore. It used to be the nursery, but we'll put you in here and you can Zen out and be cool. And here's one of the criticisms. As long as you come back and you get all that work done, we think it's a great tool for you.

[Josh Clark]

Right, exactly. And not just corporations, but the military is using mindfulness schools. Little kids are being taught mindfulness and to meditate, prisons, and there's an enormous amount of like out just out there in the culture. It's gotten really popular, I guess in 2012, just over 4% of Americans meditated. Five years later it was up to 14%. That's a pretty big increase in just five years. And I would propose it's probably more than that now in 2022. So it's everywhere. But it's also really kind of lost its way, I guess once it hit America and corporate America in particular. Mindfulness kind of got perverted, I think, is A way you could put it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, that critique is really valid. Like, it's great that a company might take mindfulness into consideration as something beneficial for their employees. But to ignore the root cause, which is you're working too many hours a week and you're overworked and you can't possibly get done what you should get done. And that's where this anxiety is rooted. Here's a mindfulness room so you can help correct all that. Like, it totally puts the onus on the employee to sort of self adjust to what's probably way too much work instead of saying, hey, maybe people wouldn't be in this position to begin with if they didn't have to work 60 hours in a week.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And the same thing goes for social movements as well. Like some people say, hey, you know how like a lot of us are mentally ill these days? That's because society's screwed up. So rather than putting the onus again on the individual person, just kind of suck it up and deal with it in a mindful manner, why don't we focus instead on these social problems that are causing all these other social problems so we don't have to do that. And those are really valid criticisms of Westernized mindfulness in 2000s. And there's actually a term for it that a guy named Miles Neal coined and another guy named Ronald Purser wrote a book using that name. It's perfect. McMindfulness.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I love that word. And they're basically saying like, hey, you guys have so completely detached this from ethics and morals and religion and kind of co opted something that had its roots there that yeah, there needs to be a term for that. You've micked it.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. You've mixed it up.

[Chuck Bryant]

You've mix screwed it up.

[Josh Clark]

You miffed it.

[Chuck Bryant]

You've mick miffed it. I like that. In that you can't ignore the theological roots and have it be the same thing.

[Josh Clark]

And HR reps across the country say, oh yes we can, and look what happens. We're really screwing people up. That's right. There's a couple of quotes I found that I really feel like kind of get to the heart of what happened when mindfulness came over here and got picked up by corporate America and the military and just other surprising groups and maybe put to not the best uses. There's a really good New York Times article From back in 2015 that was kind of a meditation on the idea of mindfulness, or the word mindfulness and what it means by Virginia Heffernan and she says that what commercial mindfulness may have lost from the most rigorous Buddhist tenets that it replaced is the implication that suffering cannot be escaped but must be faced. And that's that mis packaging, that mismarketing that we talked about, the idea that if you meditate and you're mindful, it's going to free you from all your problems, make you less stressed and more productive and just happier. And that's not necessarily the case because we in the west tend to really like to, like you said, avoid all of the stuff that really stinks and just get as much of the stuff that we like. And that's not what that's meant for.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, this I think, is from the same article about mindful fracking. Could that be next? Putting a neuroscience halo around a byword for both uppers productivity and downers relaxation to ensure a more compliant workforce and a more prosperous C suite. Right, There it is.

[Josh Clark]

And there's another one too. The Dalai Lama apparently pointed out that even a suicide bomber would likely have to cultivate some sort of mindfulness. It's not inherently ethical. And if it's not inherently ethical, then that means that you could conceivably use it to nefarious ends. And the way that Buddhists for thousands of years kept it from being used to nefarious ends is by encasing it in wholesomeness, like mindfulness. Specifically, what's called right mindfulness by the Buddhists is a wholesome approach in separating wholesome thoughts from unwholesome thoughts. And if you just take the mindfulness practice out of that context, you have a problem. You want to read that quote from Andrew Olensky?

[Chuck Bryant]

True mindfulness is deeply and inextricably embedded in the notion of wholesomeness. Just as a tree removed from the forest is no longer a tree, but a piece of lumber. So also the caring attentiveness of mindfulness extracted from its matrix of wholesome co arising factors denigrates into mere attention.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's the best you can hope for is it just denigrates into mere attention and not something harmful, you know, so yeah, I think it's great. I think it's a. I think it's wonderful that people want this and they're seeking it out and they're trying it. I think the people who are selling it to everybody need to just package it more transparently and explain the true purpose of it and stop using it for productivity.

[Chuck Bryant]

Agreed.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to know more about mindfulness, go, go research it and see if it's for you. And give it a shot and go into it with right eyes, right vision. I can't remember. And since I said I can't remember, of course that means it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm going to call this tribute to Ziggy Baumbach from his son Michael. We got a great email that, and I've been conversing with Michael for the past couple of weeks on this. Good dude. And his dad was a good dude. Hey, guys. Longtime listener. Recently lost my father and had been going through a great deal of grief. My dad was at high risk for catching COVID so I made sure it was my priority to keep him safe. And since being social wasn't an option over the past couple of years, we turned to nature during the pandemic and rekindled our love for the great outdoors, though he never had to rekindle his. He was born in Poland and immigrated to the states in the 60s and was only ever comfortable in his gardener in the woods. He was a simple but passionate man. So we started driving out to western North New Jersey to Stokes Forest to get spring water and go fishing. It's a gorgeous part of the state. It was about 50 minutes each way. Perfect to introduce him to my favorite podcast stuff. You should know.

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

Even though I had to describe to him what a podcast was, he was instantly enthralled. And I can still hear him quietly asking in the car if Chuck and Josh were going to be broadcasting today. It's just adorable. Like me, he adored your ability to convey something complex and tough information such a sweetened, conversational way. He would always come home and tell my mom what he had learned. With so much isolation the past few years, it was warming to hear him happy about all these new subjects that he was learning about. You gave him that happiness and made his life that much better over the last couple of years of his life. I can't thank you enough for everything that you continue to do. There's so much bad in this world right now, and people are hardly operating at their best, but you continue to do something worthwhile and worth making something worth learning. So thank you for making the life of Ziggy Baumbach a little brighter towards his end. And that is from Mike Man. And he sent me a picture of Ziggy and I read the obituary. I looked it up and Ziggy seemed like a great, great guy. And I had to Zen out to reading this so I wouldn't cry. I have cried every time.

[Josh Clark]

That's a really amazing email. Thank you so much. It's impossible to not pass judgment on that one. I'm going to say I feel very proud. Chuck.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. In this case, great judgment. And rip Ziggy, you sound like a great guy.

[Josh Clark]

Yep, rip Ziggy. And thank you, Mike. I'm glad we could help bring you and your dad together. That's pretty amazing stuff. If you want to be like Mike and get in touch with us and write us the email of the century, we are willing to read it. You can send it to [e-mail] Stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

Youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.