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Hey everyone, it's Shawn. You know, it's a chaotic time and it can be really hard to stay focused when things are so crazy. When I feel like that, I turn to one of my all time favorite episodes of the Gray Area. It's a conversation with Jon Kabat Zinn. Jon helped pioneer the mindfulness movement in the late 70s and early 80s and he's just a remarkably calm and generous person. There is a lot here, but really it's a conversation about being more present in your own life and why that can be so hard. John is very insightful and he actually helped me think through some of my own struggles in this episode. Anyway, here's the show. Capitalism is undefeated. That's a line you've probably heard me say a few times on this show. Usually when I'm talking about the way that capitalism co ops are culture's best ideas. Whatever the domain, fashion, music, wellness industry will find a way to take something cool, something special and make it banal, turn it into a product. Mindfulness meditation is an interesting example. The number of Americans who've tried meditation has tripled since 2012. The practice is being offered in workplaces, schools, healthcare facilities. There are tons of meditation apps you can download. On the surface, that may seem like a great thing, and in many ways it is. But but has the mainstreaming of mindfulness come at a cost to the practice itself when meditation becomes a productivity hack? Have we just lost the plot? I'm Sean Elling and this is the Gray Area. Today's guest is Jon Kabat Zinn. He's a scientist, writer Teacher and the author of several books, most notably his mega bestseller, wherever you go, there you are. It came out in 1994 and has just been republished as a 30th anniversary edition. John is a pioneer of the mindfulness movement in America. I followed his work for a while and I've always found him to be an uncommonly thoughtful and generous person. So on the anniversary of his book, I invited him onto the show. We had a wide ranging discussion about mindfulness. We talked about what it means to him, why it's so damn hard to practice in everyday life, and what meditation has come to represent in our culture. Jon Kabat Zinn, welcome to the show.
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B
Thank you. Pleasure to be here, Sean. Thank you.
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A
It is truly hard to believe that it's been 30 years, basically since you publish. Wherever you go, there you are. You know, back then, mindfulness wasn't a part of the lexicon at all. Now it is everywhere. You know, of course I want to know what the term means to you, but instead of asking it straightforwardly, I think I'd rather ask you what do you think the opposite of mindfulness is? Because I think that's actually more clarifying.
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B
The opposite of mindfulness is mindlessness. And what that means to me is unawareness. One is actually out of touch with aspects of reality that are salient and potentially vital to living life fully. So mindfulness in my vocabulary is synonymous with awareness, with human awareness. So it's not something you have to acquire. It's basically you're born with this capacity for awareness. But the opposite of mindfulness really is inattention.
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A
What is the goal? Is it some kind of inner peace? Is it freedom? Is it happiness?
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B
What Actually, it's the one human activity that you engage in for no purpose, not for some kind of contrived goal that you want to attain. And then you'll be happy or proficient at something or whatever. But this is more so that you actually are living the life that's yours to live in. The only moment that you ever have to live it, which we don't usually realize, is this one now. So we're always on the way to some better place, better moment, or running away from the awful moments. And so we haven't developed that skill that you could learn in elementary school to actually be with things as they are, whether they're pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. You're just neutral and see how that actually feels. There's no place to go, there's nothing to do, and there's no special state or feeling that you're supposed to attain. It's more about can you be with things in your body in this moment as they actually are? And what does that feel like? And that's a real discovery that, holy cow, I can actually inhabit this moment and not be tyrannized completely by my thoughts. And that's a skill. I mean, that's something that, like, is really a useful sk. To be able to not miss your life.
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A
It is pretty horrifying to realize that at the end of our lives, it is practically certain that at least one of our biggest regrets will be that we wasted so much of our attention, that we simply cared about the wrong things. And yet very, very few of us live as though we've internalized that insight. Right? I mean, I certainly don't. If you look closely, in fact, I think you'll see that most of us live as though we think we're going to live forever. Because that would be the only justification for wasting so much fucking time, wouldn't it?
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B
Beautifully put. There's a certain way in which I think you can live forever, and that is live in this moment. Because this present moment has no dimension to it. So it's not like, oh, it's over. It's like a dwelling place. You can reside in the present moment outside of time. So that is as close as I think we're ever going to get to immortality.
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A
Do you think if you meditate long enough, you eventually come to the conclusion that the self is an illusion? That the self, at least what we mean by the self, is really just a story that gets reinforced by our environment?
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B
Totally. It is a narrative. The story of me, starring me, Put it up on the marquee. The story of me, you know, starring me, with all the trials and tribulations and triumphs or whatever. And, well, when you sit down to meditate, the first thing you realize. Because everybody wants to be good at everything, right? Well, if I'm going to meditate, I better get a good result. But remember I just said this isn't about having. It's the one thing that you do for its own sake without getting a result. But that doesn't matter because you'll sit down and after a few moments, you know, something's going to drive you crazy. Either your body's going to get fidgety, and you say, well, what's the point of this? I mean, this is ridiculous. Or you're going to fall into some kind of narrative. And what I'm going to have for dinner or what I forgot at the grocery store when I Went shopping, whatever it is, you begin to realize that, oh my God, that narrative never stops, but your awareness of it isn't touched by it. So you already, in that present moment, present moment, have a new degree of freedom. You don't have to fall into the thought stream. You can attend to it by just kind of observing.
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A
We're talking about this. And as with a lot of things, it is much easier said than done. It sounds really nice and lovely. You just, you just be aware. You just, you just drop into the moment and yada, yada, yada.
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B
Well, do you practice, do you have a meditation practice yourself?
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A
I do. It is inconsistent and embarrassing and, you know, I. I'm trying to live mindfully and I do have a practice, but my experience has been one of consistent failure and frustration. I don't know, I think maybe the very sophisticated question I'm asking here is, why is it so fucking hard to be mindful, John? Why is this so difficult to do?
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B
Because we're so reactive. I mean, that the. The mind generates this illusory self. And this is a fundamental message of the Buddha. The fundamental insight is you are not who you think you are. You're much, much larger than the story of me.
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A
But even when I'm sitting here talking to you, I'm doing my very best to listen and be fully present. But my mind is running a million miles an hour. I'm wondering, am I saying the right things or am I asking the questions I wanted to ask? What is the plan? Am I saying things that sound smart and lucid, or am I tripping over my words? It just won't stop it, just the chatter.
- [10:42]
B
But at the same time, we are connecting. We're in conversation. So if we just stop for a moment and not worry about where it's going, but just let ourselves experience it. You and your body, me and my body. And then with the miracle of like this technology allows us to be on each other's screens and in each other's ears. Well, this is fine for now. And of course, I'm guessing lots of people are going to be listening to this and maybe it'll be fine for them now, too. I'm guessing that everybody who's tuning in is breathing. It's just a wild guess, but I'm guessing that the breath is moving in and out of everybody's body and everybody's thinking and wondering what's going to get said next. But let's just tune into this moment and this breath, and then how do we do that? Well, we do it by attending, paying attention, and then that's the gateway into awareness.
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A
Well, I know you said earlier that it's wrong to think of it in terms of a purpose or a goal, but if I'm hearing you right, maybe it is actually that life itself becomes the meditation.
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B
Exact ament. I couldn't have said it better myself. Exact Amal. Life itself is the meditation practice. Not sitting on the cushion, not doing body scans. I mean, all of these things are formal meditation practices that are of profound value in the moment that you're practicing with them for their own sake. But then if that's what happens on the cushion or in bed when you're lying in the corpse, suppose doing a body scan or whatever, and then you think, okay, now the meditation's over. Now I go live my life. You've made a very, very big mistake.
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A
But the world around us does sort of conspire to keep us there, right? I mean, I've probably had a couple of moments in my life where I've had what you would call transformative experiences. Inhaling a bag of mushrooms will do that to you. And it's hard to explain, but in the aftermath of those experiences, I would say that I was more present in my life, more present than I'd been before. And what happened is that it just didn't. It just didn't survive contact with the world. Because when you drop back into everyday life, you're just bumping into other isolated egos. And most people aren't really present, aren't really listening. And so we kind of just go back to playing that game.
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B
That's exactly right. And this is described in the classical traditions, and I certainly describe in the same way. It's a liberative practice. It is actually freeing us. And then, yeah, of course, you'll get caught in a million different things, and you'll sooner or later recognize that the recognizing is the awareness thing. So you're already back. And if mind goes off, bring it back. Mine goes off, bring it back, mine goes off. Don't want to bring it back. Well, there's a certain discipline associated with this. As he said, you bring it back anyway. And especially if you're doing this, tuning the instrument on the meditation cushion, after a while, that does become more your default mode. You live in the room rather than living in the agitation of your conceptual reality. But you don't lose the conceptual reality. So it's not like you get stupid. No, I mean, the most effective people I know are meditators.
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A
And what do you do when you have Lapses of attention or what do you do when you become ensnared by that ego inside?
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B
Well, I have good friends that can mirror it back to me, for instance, and, you know, in my family and in my circle of friends. But for the most part, I just recognize all of those things. And it happens constantly. I mean, not different from anybody else. You know, everybody has their straight jackets that we put ourselves into or particular kinds of emotional reactivity or thought channels that we get stuck in. Recognize, recognize, recognize. That's the awareness functions. As soon as you recognize it, you can step out of it. Now, if you can get your ass on the cushion every single day as if your life depended on it, then the recognizing, recognizing, recognizing will just go on for a time. And you'll learn to kind of just not do anything. Try to have some special feeling and say, oh, yeah, this is the meditative. This is the pot of gold at the end of the race. No, this is it, this moment as it is. And when you hold that in awareness, there's no place to go. There's nothing to do, there's nothing special to attain. And in that, nothing is absolutely everything. This practice really is a love affair. I mean, it really is a love affair with life. It's so easy to miss the moment or miss a hundred moments or miss a month or miss a year, or miss, like your children growing up, your whole life.
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A
It's easy to miss your whole fucking life.
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B
Your whole life. So we should be highly motivated to not miss it. And the way to not miss it is to just tend to this moment when you're tending to this moment and with tenderness. That is the kind of attention that. That gives you access immediately to pure awareness. And that is your true nature. Awareness is much more your true nature than your name or your age or your gender identification or anything else. And I'm suggesting to listeners, don't take my word for it. Try it.
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After this short break. What happens when mindfulness goes mainstream? We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Deleteme. If you're online, then your personal information could be compromised. Deleteme wants to help. Our colleague Claire White recently tried Delete me. I've had Deleteme for a year, and in this year, consistently, they're still finding and removing unsafe places where my data is on the Internet. I'm super grateful for that because I had to just set it up once, and it's continued to work for me and keep me protected and keep me private as a person online. Deleteme makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. With Deleteme, you can protect your personal privacy or the privacy of your business from doxing attacks. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Deleteme now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your delete Me plan when you go to join deleteme.com Vox and use promo code VOX at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com Vox and enter code Vox at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com Vox code Vox support for the show comes from Mint Mobile. We all have that stubborn friend who insists on doing things the hard way. Like your friend whose car only starts 60% of the time, or your other friend who never drinks water and for some reason always has a headache. Well, let's make sure you're not the friend who's overpaying for wireless in 2026. Go with Mint Mobile instead. Same coverage, same speed, just without the inflated price tag. The premium wireless you expect unlimited talk, text and data, but at a fraction of what others charge. Ready to stop paying for more than you have to? New customers can make the switch today and for a limited time, get unlimited premium wireless for just $15 per month. Switch now@mintmobile.com grayarea that's mintmobile.com grayarea upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 month plan required or $15 month equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only. Over 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. Additional terms apply. See mintmobile.com. Support for the show comes from bombas. It's the New Year, so you probably have a long list of resolutions to make your life happier and more productive. Everyone has their own system. Here's mine. I take last year's resolutions and change. I resolve to I resolve not to. This year I've resolved not to drink less wine, not to do more exercise, not to be a more patient, attentive and gracious husband and father. And not to make smoother segs and ads for bombas if you're trying to hit the gym or get more active. The all new Bombas sports socks are engineered with sport specific comfort for running, golf, hiking, skiing, snowboarding and all sport for those every day around the house. Resolutions Bombas also has you covered with the super luxurious Sherpa Sunday slippers and new squishy Saturday suede slip ons for comfort on the go. You may know I've tried out BOMBAS myself. I've been rocking the sports socks for over a year now. They are my favorite. I work out in them, I run in them. I use them basically every day. You can head over to bombus.com gray area and use code gray area for 20% off your first purchase. That's a B O M bas.com gray area code gray area at checkout. I'm sure you've heard this term McMindfulness, which is meant to capture how mindfulness practice has been co opted by industry. I'm curious, what do you think about this and the kinds of problems it's created in the broader mindfulness movement? Or do you think it's created any problems at all?
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B
To tell you the truth, no, I don't think it's a big problem. I think that people who try to capitalize on something, especially something as intangible as mindfulness, after a while they're going to find something more tangible to invest in because this one is really not going to carry them all that far. I remember when the term mindfulness got first shown to me. I was in the UK doing some stuff with mindfulness in Parliament and you know, somebody showed me this paper that somebody wrote about McMindfulness and was really angry about taking mindfulness out of the Buddhist context and just offering it to the world in medicine and so forth. And you know what I learned a long time ago, you don't have to wrestle with those kinds of accusations. Just let time take care of it. If it's true that it's not true, dharma, it will fall away. And so I can't take responsibility for everybody who's hyping mindfulness here, there, or everywhere else. And I don't feel like it's my job to police the waterfront, that the dharma in some sense will take care of itself. Meanwhile, the reason mindfulness is so popular is because starting in 1979, I started a stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical center. And it's an eight week program and being trained as a basic scientist, I realized I'd have to be studying this and writing up the studies and the medical literature did all that. And then it went exponential. So the curve of the number of scientific papers in the medical literature, which used to be zero, is now more than 1000 a year. Mindfulness based stress reduction, Mindfulness based cognitive Therapy, mindfulness based childbirth and parenting. Mindfulness based, lots of stuff. And now that has led to kind of. That growth in this interest in science and medicine and health care has led to its expanding into other domains. Like, I trained the 1984 Olympic rowing team in mindfulness. Gradually, that's moved more and more into professional sports, into all sorts of other areas, into business. And so now it's kind of in the mainstream. And the hope is that actually people are practicing because otherwise it's just blah, blah, blah.
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A
Is it true that you consulted for the Red Sox back in the 70s?
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B
Yeah. Yeah.
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A
That must have been wild. Tell me about that.
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B
When I first started the stress reduction clinic, the chief of orthopedics comes into my office and plunks himself down in his white coat. His name is Art Pappas. And it turns out not only was he the head of the orthopedics department, but he was also a part owner of the Red Sox. And he said, I've got this player who really is in a slump. And I've heard that you teach people how to regulate their mind and their attention. I wonder whether you'd be willing to come down to Fenway park and work with Jim Rice.
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A
That's amazing.
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B
You know, Jim Rice was like one of their super sluggers. He's in the hall of Fame. And I said, sure, I'm willing to give that a try.
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You better have said, sure. Are you kidding me?
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B
Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. So I did. I went down and met all the players, and I did work with Jim Rice. Now, I'm not a baseball player. So what is a guy who's not a baseball player going to teach Jim Rice about being in the batter's box facing down a pitcher 90ft away? You know, what the hell could I possibly tell him? It was a real eye opener in terms of the potential for this in sport. Anybody who's a real athlete understands that training the body is not enough. You gotta train the mind for, you know, being equanimous and being present in ways that go way beyond fear about what might happen or attachment to getting a hit or scoring a touchdown or anything like that. You've gotta be like, free.
- [25:29]
A
I think the fear or the concern that people have is that mindfulness is becoming another tool for productivity and self optimization. Or it's becoming a kind of hack for self gratification, which in the end, of course, just amplifies the sources of our disconnectedness and unhappiness and seems to undermine the spirit of mindfulness teaching. You know, I Mean, it's got to give you the heebie jeebies a little bit to think that, I don't know, a company like Facebook probably has all kinds of meditation rooms and it's in its corporate headquarters at a company that exists to harvest the attention of billions of people around the planet. Right. That there's a fatal contradiction there.
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B
You nailed it. You nailed it. And mindfulness is very popular in Silicon Valley and there are all sorts of paradoxes associated with life. You know, you pointed to some of them earlier on in a conversation. So there's no stopping what's going on in technology. It's mind blowing. It's also terrifying. The people who are doing it are mind blown and terrified and also driven by greed, hatred and delusion, just like everybody else. And they're talking about not billions of dollars of potential profit, but trillions of dollars of potential profit. So that is kind of very corrupting potentially the whole thing about artificial general intelligence where, you know, the machinery trains the next generation of machine learning so that after a while, even the humans who have programmed things don't actually know what, say, ChatGPT is doing. It's doing stuff that it wasn't actually programmed to do, or the programs didn't realize that they were programming it to do it. And then the question comes, and you can read it in the New York Times every single day now, what happens in the nightmare doomsday scenario when the machines actually start doing other interesting stuff like sentience, where they actually become aware of themselves. Now, since we don't know how the brain does it, we don't know how the machines might do something similar. So you're pointing to something that's really terrifying. And in a certain way, this makes the need to drop into our core multiple intelligences, including awareness, more than ever, and to do it, engage in it in a way that is ethical. And this is a very important part of it. And it's been an ethical foundation to mindfulness from the time of the Buddha. The Bodhisattva vow is in some sense in parallel with the Hippocratic oath in medicine. And what's the Hippocratic oath in medicine? First, do no harm. But how would you even know if you're doing harm unless you're aware?
- [28:35]
A
So it's really interesting to me, when you go and do these mindfulness workshops or retreats for these Silicon Valley types, do you do them any differently than you would in some other context? Because of the audience and the power they have in our culture and what their creations are doing? To our culture. How do you approach that?
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B
I think I annoy a lot of people because I keep bringing up this question of ethics and, and the, the shadow side, the dark side, that nobody's immune to greed, hatred and delusion. That would be the ultimate liberation. Okay. Where nothing would tempt you to privilege yourself, even a trillion dollars. Why? Because you know that there is no yourself, that that's a construct that's empty of essential actuality. So that would be wisdom. And then that would be. From an ethical point of view, we don't engage in anything that is potentially going to be harmful and we don't know how this is all going to unfold. So without getting hysterical or into nightmare scenarios, the more we can bring ethics, compassion, mindfulness to this unfolding, the more we can at least, I think, tilt things in the direction of minimizing harm and maximizing well being for all, not for a privileged few.
- [30:04]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think this certainly gets at something I think about a lot. The dangers of something like mindfulness divorced from any kind of ethical foundation. You know, like from my point of view as a political person, the hazard of too much focus on our inner lives or too much focus on meditation techniques to help us cope with the brokenness around us is that it can actually distract us from the struggle to face that brokenness and change the world. Like, I am all for self compassion and self love and that kind of thing. But if your journey inward doesn't eventually lead you away from your ego and toward the world around you, toward the people around you, then it's a dead end, ethically and politically.
- [30:51]
B
It's never wise to prognosticate about the future. But I do feel like the stakes are incredibly high at the moment on the planet as a whole for us to wake up and practice medicine for the world. Okay, in other words, bring the Hippocratic oath to the planet first. Do no harm. So let's roll back all the ways that we see ourselves doing harm. If you were like really just going into business for maximizing the amount of money that you could make, well, of course high tech would be one. But let's not forget arms manufacturing. We're building autonomous weapons where the killing is actually going to be a function of AI and not even, you know, a human being pulling the trigger. I don't know what the ultimate difference to that is going to be to an innocent child or a woman trying to cross the street. But this is the world that we've created. We've created it. We can create something else. We're in a new world. In a new world. This is not 1979. The stress that we were dealing with in 1979 seems like 1979. It was like paradise compared to what we're dealing with now. And we need to be up to the task. And all human beings who want to participate in this kind of thing need to ask deep questions about who we are and what we love, and then enact that as if not only our lives depended on it, which they do, but the world depends on it, which it does.
- [32:42]
A
After one more short break, getting to the heart of mindfulness, we'll be right back. Support for the Gray Area Comes from hims ED is more common than you think, but it can also be simpler to treat than you think, too. Through hims, you can connect online with a licensed provider to access personalized treatment options discreetly and on your terms. HIMSS can offer access to personalized prescription treatment options for ED if prescribed. And if prescribed, they say their options range from personalized products to trusted generics that cost 95% less than brand names. HIMSS say they bring expert care straight to you with 100% online access to personalized treatments that put your goals first. You can think of HIMS as your digital front door you can step through to get back to your old self. It's not a one size fits all approach. They say they put your health and goals first with real medical providers, making sure you get what you need to get results. You can get simple online access to personalized Affordable care for ED, hair loss, weight loss and more by visiting hims.com gray area that's hims.com gray area for your free online visit hims.com. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Starting a new business has never been easy, but without the right tools it can feel almost impossible. Shopify says they can help set you up for lasting success. Shopify is the commerce platform used by millions of businesses around the world. They say they can help you tackle all those important tasks in one place, from inventory to payments to analytics and more. No need to save multiple websites or try to figure out what platform is hosting the tool that you need. Everything is all in one place, making your life easier and your business operations smoother. Let Shopify be your commerce expert. With world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond, you can get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today, you can sign up for your $1 per month trial period and start selling today at shopify.com box. Go to shopify.com box that's shopify.com Vox Foreign. For the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. If you're a fan of the gray area, then you probably don't mind holding contradictory ideas in your head or living in the discomfort of not knowing. Claude is designed to accommodate that kind of thinking, and Anthropic is committed to not running ads in Claude, so you don't have to worry about advertiser influence. Now, I haven't used Claude, but we knew that having an ad from Anthropic on the gray area is kind of a complicated thing. So I asked my editor nemesis Jorge to prompt Claude to write the ad for us, starting with the phrase this is how I just used Claude. Hello, Sean. This is what I came up with. It said, this is how I just used Claude. I told it I needed to write
- [36:06]
B
the this ad, that I'd never used
- [36:08]
A
it before, that our audience is skeptical of AI hype. I explained the tension honestly. We have listeners who distress this technology, and here I am taking their money to advertise. Cloud helped me think through how to say that out loud instead of pretending it away.
- [36:22]
B
It's not magic, it's just useful for talking through problems when you're stuck. Let me just try one other thing here. I need a safe for work insult for my esteemed colleague Sean Ailing. He's a podcast host with a philosophy background.
- [36:43]
A
Let's see what he comes up with. Hey, Sean, you're a walking thought experiment. And what happens when someone reads enough
- [36:48]
B
Nietzsche to question everything except their own podcast? Cultural significance.
- [36:53]
A
That is objectively awesome. Try Claude for yourself for free at Claw AI Gray Area. If you were to ask me a ridiculous question like do I think I'm a wise person? I would say no. I would say that I'm reasonably smart in the sense that I know a good bit, which is mostly just a product of an education. But I'm not wise because my actions are often not in alignment with my knowledge. I don't live the way I know I ought to, and I've come to think of that as the very definition of unwisdom. And what I try to do is close that gap and try to not get sucked back into that default mode and to not stop paying attention to avoid all the horrors that come that way or through that to people out There trying to, to do the same thing, fighting that same slog in the day to day world, which as I said earlier, does conspire to keep us unmindful, to use your words. What is your parting advice, Your parting wisdom?
- [38:06]
B
You have to recognize how precious this moment is and how precious you are, how miraculous you are. I mean, the fact is that your eyes work, your ears work. You know, in most cases, everything is working. You don't have the slightest idea how your eyes work or how your ears work or how your heart works and keeps you alive day and night and your lungs work. And you know, when you're healthy, I mean, there's nothing wrong with you. So what is the best way to live into your own fullness? And is there anything that you can contribute that would satisfy your instinct to belong and to make a difference? And you do that, whether it's just taking a walk with somebody you love or contributing to, you know, civic engagement, or going out and protesting or whatever it is you do. Do what you love, what your instinct is telling you to do, and see if you can be present for it at least part of the time. And when you notice, oh, even doing what I love, I'm going on autopilot. The awareness, there's the awareness. It's guiding you because that awareness is not lost. So you just keep coming back and see what happens. Just engage in it as a big adventure because you have nothing to lose except living your life as if it didn't matter.
- [39:45]
A
Actually, I was just wondering if we could close with a short meditation if you have any that come to mind or any. That'd be lovely, would that be okay?
- [39:54]
B
Oh, absolutely, yeah. And let me just say, if you're listening to this in your car and you're driving, do not close your eyes, okay? Driving is a really wonderful mindfulness meditation practice in and of itself. And you don't want to get too distracted and turn to the left or to the right or behind you for more than a fraction of a second. So wherever you find yourself, taking your seat, whatever that means to you, and just letting yourself become aware of the body as a whole. Sitting here, breathing, whatever posture you're in, you could be lying down, you could be standing on your head, you could be running, But just bringing awareness to the body as a whole. And I'll say it, sitting and breathing, since I'm sitting and breathing. And noticing that it's possible to actually, without any effort, hold it in awareness, embrace the body in awareness, feeling whatever's here to be felt in other Words, the entire sensory universe of the skin from the head, the body from head to toe, the skin, the arms, the legs, the torso, the whole body sitting here. And it's exchanging air with the world. And it's not really fair to say that you're doing it because it has happens in your sleep. And no one ever forgets to breathe and dies. So it's more like you're being breathed than you're breathing. And you just drop into awareness of the body sitting here, breathing, And ride on the waves of the sensations in your belly or at the nostrils, or wherever the breath sensations are most vivid. Just riding on the waves of sensation in awareness. So you don't have to do anything. This all just happens as you bring awareness into the body or let awareness suffuse the body. And then the mind will do, of course, whatever the mind will do. And your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to simply let thoughts come and go, let emotions come and go like storms in the mind or clouds or birds flitting through the sky. They're just events in the field of awareness. And you take a presidency in awareness itself, letting it become your address, your domicile, your place of residence here, now, outside of time, in this only moment. And simply living here in awareness, moment by moment, by timeless moment. When. I'm not saying if. When you notice, because it's inevitable that this will happen, that you're. Your mind will wind up carried away in the thought stream. And you'll get caught up in some reverie or fantasy or memory or anticipation, planning, worrying. Sooner or later you're going to notice that that happened, that you were. You gave yourself the assignment of being aware of the body sitting here, breathing. But all of a sudden you're lost in some narrative, some. Something going on in the world of thought or emotion in the moment that you realize that that's a moment of wakefulness. That's a moment of realization. That's the awareness function. Remember minding you and rebodying you, which means just come back to the body sitting here, breathing. You don't criticize yourself for having had your mind wander. You don't pursue what was on your mind. You don't reject what was on your mind, just let it be. And you come back to taking up residence in awareness itself. And if the mind wanders a hundred million times, which it certainly will every time, the invitation is the same. When you realize that it's gone off someplace, noticing what's on your mind, noticing the emotional charge as well as the content, without thinking more about any of it. Just the lightest of touches and then coming back to this moment, sitting here, breathing in full awareness. Hmm.
- [46:28]
A
That was lovely. The one and only Jon Kabat Zinn. Thank you so much for coming in today.
- [46:37]
B
My pleasure, Sean. Really, it's been wonderful having this conversation with you.
- [46:48]
A
All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Like I said at the beginning, this is one of my personal favorites. But as always, we want to know what you think. Let us know that we're not screaming into a void here. So tell us what you think of the episode. You can drop us a line at the gray area@vox.com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. And once you're finished with that, please go ahead. Rate Review. Subscribe to the Pod. This episode was produced by John Ahrens, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays and Fridays. Listen and subscribe. You can now watch episodes of the gray area@YouTube.com vox. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.com members to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.
- [47:53]
B
Sam.