Jon Kabat-Zinn

Rick Rubin

Tetragrammaton.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

It was a kind of a co op for me, working on revising something I wrote 30 years ago, in part because the world has changed so much, also in part because I've changed so much. I mean, 30 years is 30 years. And I kind of felt at the time that it was a pretty good book. There was nothing more that I wanted to do with it, that it was kind of like I accomplished my goals at that moment with it when I wrote it. And then there was an opportunity to come out with a 10th anniversary edition, and they said, do you want to write a new foreword to it?

And I said, no, I wouldn't want to touch the beginning of it, but I'll put an afterword on it, which is what happened. And then 20 years later, when I looked at it again, when they proposed this 30th anniversary edition, I realized I thought this book was fabulous, but I'm not that happy with it in a certain way. But I'm not gonna rewrite the whole book. I mean, it's like it's a piece of a certain time. So what I'm gonna do is put a new forward on it, put a new afterword on it that's got part of the old one, and then everything that rings a bell as I go through the entire manuscript that feels a little off or needs something else, I will just tweak it in whatever way feels necessary.

And that's what I did, and that's what you've got. It feels like there's something more than was in the original volume. It feels more alive. And there's also a new audio because I've lived with the old audio for a long time. Oh, and the new audio is infinitely better than the old audio.

Well, coming from you, I mean, I don't know what to say when we're talking about the audio world. Giving voice to what's in your heart, but that's also in linear words on a page is its own challenge in a certain way. And I was wishing in my heart of hearts that you were in the studio with me while I was doing it. You would have caught, I think, a lot more places where I caught myself a lot of the time, more the producer who was doing it, and I said, no, I got to go back and take another run at it. And I did that quite a few times.

Rick Rubin

It felt very natural to me, and I felt like you were speaking to me, and it makes me feel good, and it relaxes me, and I feel like every time I listen, I learn something new, even though I've been reading the book since it originally came out 30 years ago, it's a very powerful book. Well, thank you. I mean, that book is, in a certain way, what has connected us. So I'm very grateful to it for just that reason. I mean, you know, which I told you, I think that my daughter gave me the gift of the creative act.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

I had never actually heard of you, which surprises a lot of people, but that just says something about my own age and, you know, so forth. But when I started reading it, I felt like, oh, my God, this is a mindfulness book. This is pure meditative wisdom, but rounded out in so many fabulous ways to make it infinitely commonsensical and also completely supportive of the reader's uniqueness beyond success and failure and the potential for confidence in him or her their self. However, you put it in a way that lets the creativity go through multiple cycles across a lifespan, rather than simply being identified with a particular moment of success or a particular work. Beautiful.

Rick Rubin

Tell me the story 30 years ago of the original book. How did the original book come to be? Well, my first book is called Full Catastrophe Living, and it came out in 1990. And many editors told me, you can't put the word catastrophe in the title of a book. Nobody will buy it.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

And as a first time author, I spent several years while I was writing on that book, which is about the mindfulness based stress reduction program that I started at the University of Massachusetts Medical center. So I went through about 2000 titles, and I could not get rid of that title, in part because of Zorba the Greek and Anthony Quinn. And that whole notion of the, the full catastrophe is a metaphor for the human condition, the good, the bad and the ugly. So not just the bad and the ugly. And so I had to argue with my editors, and finally they said, well, it's your book.

You put your title on it, but don't blame us. And people got it. And like, if in 1990, people wondered, what is the full catastrophe of the human condition in 2024? That's a moot point. Everybody knows what the full catastrophe is, and in a certain way, it's us.

So that was the first book. And it goes through the entire eight week program of taking people with a vast range of medical conditions, chronic ones, that usually people aren't getting full satisfaction from the healthcare system. And so a lot of time, especially with pain conditions, a doctor might say, well, you're going to have to learn to live with this after you've tried a bunch of different treatments. And then that's usually the end of the conversation. And what MBSR is about is like, okay, and we have a clinic here at the hospital that can teach you the arc of that learning, so that you can actually engage with the most unwanted aspects of your own life, whether it's your body or your mind, or your social circumstances or whatever it is, and find a certain degree of agency and originality in learning to live the life that's yours to live, given the conditions as they are.

And it turns out that's like a safety net in the hospital to catch all the people falling through the cracks of the healthcare system. And if there were cracks in the healthcare system in 1979, when I started the MBSR program, well, now it's chasms. It's like grand canyons in the healthcare system, very sadly, and really needs to be reconfigured in enormous ways. All they pay attention to is how to get it paid for, but not what the it is that needs. And the whole idea of MBSR, or mindfulness based stress reduction was to invite people to participate in their own healthcare by mobilizing their own interior beauty, let's say.

Or the way I sometimes put they're interior resources for learning, growing, healing and transformation. And those are innate to being human, so everybody has them. But we're never taught in school or anywhere else, how to actually engage in the actuality of our own lives and creativity. To loop back to your work and to recognize that basically every human being, to a first approximation, is an absolute genius, and with multiple intelligences and some more in evidence than others. But there's always something to draw from, and we're always taught that education is about putting stuff into you, as opposed to the other aspect of it, which is deep inquiry into who the you is that we're putting all this stuff into and what is already here and resourceable.

Parenthetically, I was giving a talk once, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, out in Alberta, where there are like the big oil fields, and I was doing all this stuff in healthcare, but somehow some corporate group heard about my being there and invited me to come and talk to the oil magnets. So early one morning they were having a breakfast meeting, and I actually show up at this unbelievable environment that I would never actually have been in. And the way I framed it to them, because in meditation, you start to roll your eyeballs and they said, well, you know how you folks, what you're into is drilling. You're into drilling or shale oil, and what are you drilling for? You're drilling down into the earth to draw out deep resources from the earth that you can use to hopefully instantiate good things in the world.

Well, that's exactly what meditation is. It's deep drilling into your own interior resources that are hidden beneath the surface very often, but a huge reservoir of potential that when you learn how to tap into it and draw it into the rest of your life as it unfolds, then you have the potential to learn things that ordinarily you never would have come in contact with. And why do we send kids to school? Or what is learning anyway? Even if you don't go to school or homeschooled, learning seems to me to be all about growing more as a human being into your potential.

Right? I mean, it's like, why do we learn? So that we can be more effective or more reflective or have more wisdom, or at least information available for solving problems. And so what happens when you go through that learning and then growing, especially if you're having suffering of some kind in the world, in your life, in your body, or whatever as you age. Which most of us do.

Rick Rubin

Most of us have everyone. It's part of the human condition. It is part of the human condition. And so if you go through an ongoing, lifelong process of learning and growing, so it's not just a one shot deal, but it's your default mode, then out of that comes healing. All those ways in which we're suffering, which the root meaning of the word suffer means to carry from the Latin.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

So we're carrying a lot. And of a lot of it's burdensome, it's heavy, it's weighing down. And if we learn how to heal, that healing isn't fixing. It's not getting rid of everything that's wrong with me so that I'll be perfect. But to recognize that you're actually perfect exactly as you are, this is sometimes really hard for people to hear if there's all sorts of things that they have to deal with, all of us, but that you, in some sense, are perfect exactly as you are.

And that healing is a coming to terms with things as they are. It's not liking it, it's not trying to fix anything, but it's a kind of, okay, okay, I see the size of the cloth. You're no longer in a fight with it. Exactly. And that's kind of like profound acceptance, but it's not a cognitive or conceptual acceptance is much bigger than that.

And then what comes of that is like you're transformed as a human being. You are bigger than who you thought you were. You realize that you have always been bigger than who you thought you were, because your stories are always too small, no matter how great your story is. First of all, one of the problems is it's always about me, right? I'm the star of my own show.

And while that's totally understandable and fine, there's a certain way in which I think we both recognize through our own meditation practice that it can also be imprisoning. Because then you think, like, you have to perform yourself or you have to do what you used to do or what other people expect you to do. And so you get into these kind of prisons, prisons of our own making, and it inhibits creativity, it inhibits spontaneity, inhibits a certain kind of optimism about the possible when you bring the entirety of your being into any moment. And that's what meditation is, it's like you bring the entirety of your being into any moment, which turns out to be very available because any moment is always this. This moment.

There's no other moment. And it's very forgiving, because if you miss this moment, well, here it is again. So in that sense, the whole idea of this kind of work in medicine has been in healthcare, has been to reveal to people this innate genius aspect that we have that is deeply associated with healing, with well being and with genius and creativity. Well, all healing is always done ourselves. The medical establishment can create the environment that allows us to heal ourselves, but that's all.

Rick Rubin

Yeah, doctors don't heal us. No, they create the conditions to allow. Us to heal, but we're always doing the healing. Yeah. And even if you're using drugs, the drugs are interacting with the universe, the extremely complex universe of our biology.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

And when they are really helpful, they actually do carry us over the threshold into a self sustaining kind of healing that you don't need the drugs anymore for, hopefully, or you do for maintenance, but it's a self healing system. Did you ever have a pushback from the medical community on mindfulness to reduce stress, considering they have pills to reduce stress? That's a wonderful question. And the answer to it, surprisingly, and I used to get asked that question a lot because now we've been at it for basically 45 years. So, you know, meditation has been in the mainstream of medicine now with a lot of scientific research and neuroscience research supporting a whole range of different kinds of effects that it has on health and well being and the mind and the brain.

But the answer to your question is, I didn't get any pushback at all. At the same time that I have zero credentials for doing what I did. I'm not a physician. And so for me to set up a successful outpatient clinic in the department of medicine and the medical school is like, you got to ask the question, and many people did in the old days. How the hell did that come about?

And there's only a one word answer. I mean, the rest is like a gigantic story, which you could tell a million different ways. I don't know how it came about. Just came about. The one word answer would be karma.

And part of that karma is that. And I could see this at the time, that as a young guy, I was pretty convincing, in part because of my history. So everybody projected onto me, well, he must know what he's doing, because he has a PhD in molecular biology from MIT with a Nobel laureate. And that's all I needed that level of confidence to say, okay, we believe in you enough. Show us whether this will work or not.

Rick Rubin

Well, I was going to say, the two words that came to mind of why it happened is because it works. No, that's exactly right. You see what happens if you create the conditions where people empower themselves? So it's not like I can't even say it's the meditation practice per se. It's the interaction of the invitation to.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

And maybe we'll get into whatever meditation really is with the universe of genius of a human being. That's unbelievably powerful. When people. In the first couple of years, people would come with all sorts of conditions that, you know, there was no help for them. I mean, they had run the gamut of their medical treatments.

Three or four back surgeries for back pain, or, you know, all sorts of other kinds of things. And then since this clinic was available, they said, well, we don't know what to do with it. We send them to the stress reduction clinic. Which is exactly what I wanted. Yeah, I want the people that you don't know what to do, do with.

And then we'll test the following presumption. Or in my case, I thought it was an axiom. If people are geniuses, the way we said, then they can find ways to participate in their own trajectory towards greater health and well being across the lifespan, starting from wherever they are. Which means if they're in pain or they've had three surgeries, or whatever the catastrophes are, this is a wonderful place to start. We'll start exactly where you are.

We're not saying where you are is pleasant or a good thing or anything, but we're saying, is it possible for us to mobilize those deep interior resources that we were just talking about in an eight week period of time. So it's not forever, but here's eight weeks. Come to a hospital once a week for a two and a half or three hour class with a group of maybe 30 or 40 other medical patients, all with different medical conditions. So we mix people, which is exact opposite of 100 years of medicine. We mix people with all different diagnoses and put them in the same room.

And one of the reasons we can do that is we've noticed over the years of very careful observation that it turns out they all have bodies. Sometimes they have to be wheeled in on a stretcher or they have to come in on crutches or in a wheelchair, but they all have bodies, they're all breathing. And that's all you need, is a wonderful place to start. And it turns out, of course, if you know anything about the meditative world and Buddhism and so forth, the first foundation of mindfulness in the buddhist tradition is the body. So as long as you're conscious and you have a body, there's good raw material here for working.

And that's all I felt we needed. And then the proof was in the actual unfolding of the clinic, and we documented all the outcomes. And it was very gratifying because often the patients would go back to their doctors in the first couple of years when it was mostly chronic pain patients, and they'd say things like, that program you sent me to, that was eight weeks. I learned more in those eight weeks, and I got better in those eight weeks, more than I've gotten better in eight years with your treatments. And so that's a way of like, kind of educating physicians that, oh, don't shortchange or underestimate the potential of people who are suffering with various kinds of medical diagnoses for doing something in a participatory way as a complement to whatever drug and surgical treatments you can do for them.

And that has actually transformed medicine to the point where NIH now has a model of medicine that includes, as one of its four P's participation. But we accept it now as in the mainstream. But that's only because 45 years ago, you did this work. That's why it is. Well, yeah, I had a lot of help along the way, a lot of colleagues and friends.

And then it grew because, you know, in part, I mentioned neuroscientific studies of mindfulness. Well, it turns out that in the sixties, of course, meditation was, you know, starting to become a thing. The way I got into it was when I was a graduate student at MIT. Various meditation teachers used to come through Cambridge because Cambridge, Mass. I mean, it's like, you know, Cambridge and Berkeley, that's where everybody was going.

And so you could have a whole separate education just going to things that were happening in Cambridge, very often sponsored by the universities, where you could hear these great meditation teachers, Krishnamurti, and, you know, sort of this korean Zen master that I studied with. I mean, just all sorts of people coming through. And so you could get, like, double educations, you know, like, you go to school, but you were also getting all this other stuff. And in those days, medicine was very, very different. And it was like, the doctor knows best.

Don't even ask them questions. Don't tell the patient they have cancer. Can you believe it? That was like, the dominant thing is that we don't want to disturb the person by telling them. We'll tell the family that they have a cancer diagnosis.

Nowadays, that would be considered gross malpractice. But it was really a different era. And so medicine and meditation have converged. These are two very ancient systems of understanding well being. And for the first time on the planet, they've come together, kind of like glaciers moving out of separate valleys and then combining and moving down.

And one of them is what the Buddhists again called dharma. That's the dharma stream of the potential of every human being to wake up, which is what the word Buddha means, as you know. And, of course, the first noble truth in the buddhist tradition is the actuality of suffering. People often misunderstand it, and they will say things like, oh, the Buddhists, they're so pessimistic because they say life is suffering, but there's never life of suffering. It's a wrong translation or misunderstanding.

It's like there is the actuality of suffering. It's a diagnostic of humanity. If you were born, you're going to die, so there's going to be suffering along the way and loss and the giving up of everything. So why not embrace that as part of the curriculum and see if between birth and death, you can actually even have a few moments of presence? Because if you're not careful, you'll zoom through the whole thing on autopilot.

And then, as Thoreau said in Walden, wake up when you're just straight about to fall into your grave and realize that you hadn't lived because you were living in the story of me instead of the actuality of experience.

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Rick Rubin

How did you develop the eight week course? Well, it was ten weeks, so the first two years actually, and then two things came up. One, I wanted people to have a more extended experience of meditation than just 45 minutes a day, six days a week, which was the absolute requirement. You had to agree to do that whether you liked it or not for those eight weeks. But then I wanted to introduce a day long session.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

So I cut it down from ten weeks to eight weeks and introduced a day long session on the weekend where it's like a mini meditation retreat with at least 6 hours of silence, but guided meditations, sometimes hundreds of people in the room, because we'd be having five, six, seven classes at the same time. The other thing is that it was just a logistics thing, because if you start in September after a summer vacation on the east coast, and then you're going to run into Thanksgiving, you're going to lose a lot of people over Thanksgiving, and then you run into Christmas. So it was better to have an eight week cycle that starts in September and ends before Thanksgiving, and then another one after Christmas and New Year's, and then another one the spring, and then another one the summer. So it kind of like the world dictated how long it takes. Can you walk through what happens in the eight weeks each of the eight weeks?

Yeah. And that's the subject of full catastrophe, living in quite some detail. So I won't go through it in great detail, but the first thing is like, oh, if you're going to invite medical patients who have every conceivable medical diagnosis under the sun, and they haven't gotten full satisfaction, or they would be happy with medicine, wouldn't be bothering to come to the stress reduction clinic. So these are people who are suffering in one way or another. So asking them to, say, sit on a cushion on the floor in the full lotus, say, for 45 minutes, would not be possible, never mind wise.

So the first meditation that we introduce people to is actually a lying down meditation. And I know that you are a big fan of lying down when you're doing your work, and maybe some people don't understand that. I think you're falling asleep. But the whole point is actually you can use lying down to full awake, at least in what I'm talking about. So the first thing was to just teach people how to lie down in a way that was comfortable.

If they could lie down comfortably and then drop into the present moment. And usually turns out that's very easy to say. It's probably the most difficult thing for human beings to do, as, you know, even string two moments of mindfulness together, of presence, of mind and heart and body. You need an anchor for your attention, and the very convenient one is breath sensations in the body. So we have people lying down in the body scan, and then we get in touch with our breathing, and we just feel the breath, and we don't try to push it or pull it.

And this is something most people don't actually realize until it's pointed out to them, because we're always saying, like, if I asked you, are you breathing? You'd say, yeah, of course I'm breathing. But if it was up to you to be breathing, you would have died a long time ago because you'd get distracted, something would catch your attention, or you go to sleep, and we don't have a problem breathing in our sleep. So it's taken care of for us in a very profound way. But the conceit is that we're breathing.

And this will come back to maybe further down the road in our conversation about the personal pronouns I, me, and mine, and how much we take credit for things that are not really ours to take credit for. And we really don't know who's doing the talking when we say, I, me, and mine. And we're much bigger than whoever's doing that talking. So we do this body scan, introduce people in the first week, and that's what they go home with for homework. In 1979, it was audio tapes, and that was a revolutionary thing to say.

Okay, we can't just teach them the body scan, send them home. Nobody will remember what the hell to do. And they need support. How do you get support? Well, it turns out the technology of the late sixties and early seventies.

It turns out that there was like cassette players, and usually they were big, they were boom boxes at first and stuff like that. And not everybody even had them in 1979, so we had to give out tape players to people. They'd never even heard of them. Well, this is a cassette. You plug it in and you just do what it says to do on the tape.

And so that's how it started. And then the flip side of the tape is a guided yoga sequence, guided mindful yoga. And then there were two tapes in MBSR. So the first yoga sequence is on the floor, very gentle stretching of the body, moving of the body with moment by moment awareness so that you're really in your body. Yoga is a form of meditation.

So much better to do it mindfully than on autopilot or some kind of performative thing. And then they got a second tape four weeks into the program where we introduced them to sitting meditation. And by that time, we had been introducing people week by week into sitting meditation. Not on the floor, on Zafus, by the way, but on chairs. Really nice.

You got the hospital by us, really nice chairs, very important. And so we gave them another 45 minutes CD, a guided sitting meditation that takes you through a number of objects of attention. So you start with your body sitting there, breathing, and then it turns out, well, there are other things in the environment that we can be aware of, like hearing sounds. And hearing isn't just hearing sounds, it's hearing silence. It's hearing the spaces between sounds.

You can't have music without space between the notes, right? So you're basically hearing rather than listening. You're not reaching out to grab sounds, you're letting them come to you. And then we expand from sounds to thoughts. Like, you know, just as you could have, like, a sound mirror, and things could come in front of the mirror and you'd hear this sound, that sound, this space, that space.

What about a thought mirror? Where thoughts arise, they disappear, they come, they go. And the mirror doesn't go chasing the thought. If red comes, it's red. Red goes, it goes, then blue comes.

So this is another way of being in relationship to thinking, is that rather than getting caught in the stream of thoughts, you're just seeing them as events in the field of awareness. And then, of course, they're all freighted with emotions of one kind or another, and stories about our favorite subject, which is always me. So they tend to carry you away, and then you forget you have a body, you forget your breathing, right? So then you notice, holy cow, I was supposed to be aware of the present moment, but I've been lost in thought having dinner with somebody in LA, and I'm here in Massachusetts. And then you realize, oh, my goodness, the mind has a life of its own, and it's running me more than I'm running yet, and I'm a prisoner.

And sometimes, especially if you're suffering from anxiety or depression, which so many people are. So people had come with medical diagnosis, but they all had anxiety to one degree or another, or depression or various kinds of psychological challenges. So in a way, mindfulness is like such a big pot that you can put everything into it. And that's why we could combine people with different kinds of diagnosis, because the final common pathway is your awareness, your embodied awareness, which you can always come back to. And so we teach people, okay, this is really hard stuff.

Like, we're gonna ask you to just be aware of the present moment. That's almost impossible for us to do for any stretch of time. So we're gonna give you a kind of ally in the process. We're gonna invite you to feel your breath in the belly or at the nostrils or wherever it's most vivid. Okay, I'm going to feel the breath as it comes in and as it goes out, and then another one comes in, and you can already feel yourself dropping into stillness, into silence.

And, you know, it's possible that maybe the best way we can make use of the rest of this time that we have is to just not say another word and just be in this silence, but fully present, fully embodied, with no agenda other than to fall awake, stay awake, and rest in awareness, be it completely at home. Beautiful. I never heard of the thought mirror idea before. I think it's very beautiful. I love that.

Yeah. Thank you. It's like the sound mirror, too. I like to relate thoughts to sounds because people get that. Sounds come and go, you know?

And we often, like, if we're on retreat, sometimes for seven days or five days, we start 06:00 in the morning. These are for professional training retreats and so forth. And very often, you know, the doors and the windows are open when it's summertime and you hear sounds. So you could say, well, I'd be having a great meditation, but there's all these sounds going on. No, if there are sounds, then that's part of the present moment.

So then afterwards we might ask, well, what did you hear when you were attending to hearing? And people will say, birds or something like that, and they'll say, none of you heard birds. What you heard was some version of tweet, tweet, and then the mind turned it into a bird. I recognize that sound. That's.

And then people are really good at birding. They will know which kind of bird and stuff like that. But it's once removed, it's kind of colored by thought that you say bird. What you're really hearing is the purity of the sound. And then when you can come back to that, sometimes that's referred to as original mind or original hearing before thinking sets in and colors.

And there's a huge amount of creativity there, because then you can see connections that before you never actually saw. Because we're so lost in thought all the time that it's not just being turned into birds, but everything is turned into thought so quickly that the other forms of our native intelligences, and there are multiple ones, never get a chance because we're so lost in thought and caught in our heads. And then if you fold emotion into it, then it's even more complex than that. Do you think that there was a time in our ancient past when we were aware and awake? Purely?

I do. And the reason I think this, people write about this in so worth, and I don't know what the accepted anthropological thinking about it is, but the fact is that if we didn't have that, we would get eaten. Right. You're out there in the jungle. All you need to do is go the Amazon and try to spend the night in the Amazon, even in a tree, whatever you want to do.

And you'll begin to realize that you're going to be food for lots of insects and other things that prowl and that are terrifying, potentially. So I do think that we evolved with enormous sensitivity around the various kinds of signaling in the present moment simply to stay alive and to be in community, you know, in wherever you go. There you are. One of the chapters is called sitting around the fire. And the reason for that is that when we were living as hunters and gatherers for millions of years, or hundreds of thousands of years, that's all we did at night.

You couldn't do anything else but sit around the fire. I mean, there was like danger in the dark. You sit around the fire and you sit together and, yeah, you tell stories and you sing and everything else, but at the end of the evening and you watch the coals, which is like really amazing because, like, you get universes of different stuff going on in the coals. And at a certain point, things quiet down, right? People get quiet and just stare into the embers.

So I think we were meditating naturally as homo sapiens sapiens all through that hunter and gather period of tens of hundreds of thousands of years, and that we were really embodied in the natural world in a way that our precocious intellectual, historical, cultural intelligences have made a little bit less accessible to us, and that what the sort of meditative renaissance, if you want to call it that, in a certain way, is doing is inviting us to not lose that genius just because we have other geniuses that have also made their appearance in a much more complex, culturally determined world. Yeah. So we were connected, and then we had progress. Yeah. In quotation marks.

Yeah. How did your old academic MIT life inform the rest of your life? I went to MIT because I was in love with science. And I was in love with science in part because I was born into a family where my father was a scientist. His field was immunochemistry, and he was a professor at Columbia Medical School, and he was a scientist scientist.

I mean, he really lived it. And my mother was a painter. And while my father was really well known in this field and recognized, my mother never showed her work and only sold one painting. She had her first show when she turned 100 and was living in an assisted living. And she had a show with five other artists, and she showed a number, and she got so much wonderful feedback for it.

She loved it. But she sold one painting in her life, and then she regretted it for the rest of her life. She wanted that painting back. So I grew up in this household where there was art, on the one hand, that was not recognized, but she didn't need recognition. She didn't crave any recognition.

She was so happy doing her painting, and she was prolific, I mean, just in lots of different forms. So not just painting, but also, you know, all sorts of other things, inkblots and just every conceivable kind of artistic medium. And she was just as happy as a clam just being in that world, you know? So I grew up, like, seeing this as a young boy and seeing, like they appreciated who each other were. But my mother could not crock molecular immunology and immunochemistry, for sure, although she helped my father with all his proofreading of his books and stuff like that in those days.

And my father, we would go to the Museum of Modern Art every Sunday, and they put me into a school at five years old at the Museum of Monarch to do stuff. And I still have the elephant that I made when I was four or five years old. But I could see that my parents were subtending different dimensions of reality and creativity. And even as a young boy, and I remember this very vividly, I sort of was wondering, well, there must be a way to unify those worlds. They can't be separate.

And then when I heard this talk at MIT when I was 21 years old, by Philip Kaplow, who wrote this book called the Three Pillars of Zen, I think the year was 1965. And I went to this talk, and out of all of MIT, like thousands and thousands of people, there was Houston Smith, who had invited him, who was a professor of philosophy and religion, Kaplo. And then three people in the audience, and I was one of those people. And it took the top off my head, and I started meditating that night. Wow.

I never stopped. Wow. I started an awful lot of things in my life, and they didn't go anywhere, but not that. And then did you seek out other teachers from that point on? Yeah.

Yeah, a lot of different teachers. And I studied and sat retreats with teachers in various traditions and so forth. And the older I get, the more I consider it and speak about it that way as a love affair. Like, meditation's not one more thing that is good for you, and you have to stick into your already too scheduled and busy day. Meditation is a love affair with the present moment, which is the only moment we're ever alive in.

And if you miss it, there's a certain way in which you miss that moment of your life, and they're not forever. And so it's a kind of love affair with embodied wakefulness and then a deep inquiry into who am I actually? Who am I on this planet between birth and death? With the story of me, you know, my father, my mother, or everybody else, the whole story of it. But then the story is not who we really are.

That's just kind of a fiction. And as we know, depending on who you want to impress or what you want, you could tell the story at 50 billion different ways. And a lot of it's just ego wanting to make a certain kind of impression. But who are you really? That's the fundamental meditative question.

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Rick Rubin

Tell me about the difference between meditating yourself, your daily practice, versus meditating in a room with hundreds of people all meditating together. Well, in a way, I feel like I'm in that room even when I'm by myself, because I've got the whole planet with me. When you begin to realize that the mind is limitless, and when I mean the mind, I mean awareness. So this is something that's not particular to me or you or people who, like, really are devoted to meditation, everybody. The nature of the human mind is that it's limitless.

So it's not your mind or your awareness. It's awareness. If you use the word my or your, you've made a fundamental error and collapsed the universe in a certain way around those pronouns. And while, yes, you have to use those pronouns to get through life. And, you know, you can't go to the bank and say, you know, give me somebody else's money.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

You have to say, give me my money. But when you don't know who's talking and you haven't investigated that, then you tend to fall into and believe the story of me in one way or another. And a lot of the time, the story of me is very unhappy. It's like, what's wrong with me? Why am I so depressed?

Rick Rubin

It's closer to the old mainframe computing system where there's this great computer somewhere, and we all have terminals, but we don't have a laptop that does everything itself. We're just connected to the main source, and we're all connected to this main source. So awareness is, when we tap into it, it's, again, not ours. It's the awareness. So beautifully said.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

And you ask me about, like, how my scientific training has informed that view. I could go on at great length about that, because let's go back to awareness for a moment, okay? Can you find the center of your awareness? Just experiment. Can I find the center of my awareness?

And then you might expand that inquiry. Can I find the periphery or the circumference of my awareness? And at some point, maybe if we have enough time, and you care to. We could just, like, sit in silence for an extended period of time, which has enormous value of its own. And I remember when you talked to Anderson Cooper, you proposed that actually to sit together for a period of time, and anybody would be watching on a screen or on tv would say, they're not doing anything, and they'd be right in the sense that you're not doing anything, but you are being.

And there's an infinite universe of that. And when that happens on the screen, as happened when Bill Moyers filmed MBsR in his PBS special healing in the mind, 40 million people saw it, and they were entrained into the stretches of silence where they broke the television rules about dead airspace. And they had under a minute. But it says like anathema to television to have a minute of silence. And they had a very long stretch of us at the end of a meditation in the classroom with 40 medical patients just being no sound.

Of course, the microphones were on, so it wasn't dead air sound, but just room tone with all of us breathing. And 40 million people saw that program at one point or another. And some major proportion of those people were entrained into. I don't know what I just saw or felt, but I want that. And we heard about it, and we'd set up a phone bank so that our patients actually took the calls from people saying, whatever that was, I want that.

And turned out to be MbSR, you know, so we could give it to people. But this is kind of the real beauty of awareness is that you can't find the center, you can't find the circumference of the periphery. And you already, I don't want to say have it, because it's like you don't have awareness. It'd be more appropriate to say you are awareness. That's in some sense your nature, a significant part of your nature.

And so what is awareness most like that we know in the domain of science what has no center and no periphery. The universe. You know, the greatest cosmologists will tell you that the universe is boundless and it's also accelerating. So it's, like, really unbelievably mind blowing that it's not like things are accelerating in space. Space is accelerating out of nothing.

In other words, awareness is growing. It's comparable to that. Okay, no one understands this, but it's phenomenal to think about. They may be one in the same. Look, here we are on planet Earth, right?

We're despoiling the planet to the point where it's really questionable about whether future generations, I mean, and even generations that are alive now are going to be able to live lives as comfortably as because of the ways in which we're killing each other all over the planet, but also because we've given the planet a fever that could get out of control, runaway fever, and turn earth into Venus or something like that. So it's time for us human beings to actually wake up. So in that sense, you could say human beings on Earth, we don't know about life anywhere else, but human beings on earth are aware through the James Webb space telescope and the Ligo observatories that measured the kind of Einstein predicted, gravitational waves and so forth, the science is actually showing us that we're the universe's way of knowing itself, at least in our neighborhood called this solar system. And one of the things we discovered is that, like, we're made of, you know, I mean, if you remember chemistry in high school, you probably had a periodic table of the elements in your classroom that is such a mind blowing, meditative thing to actually contemplate. You've got hydrogen and helium, which are the only things that came out of the big bang.

It's just hydrogen and helium. And helium is inert, so it doesn't do anything but out of hydrogen and huge, unimaginable periods of time, billions and billions of years out of this explosion, out of nothing. So we don't know what was before the big Bang. But you get all this energy. Finally it collapses into hydrogen and helium.

And then out of that, you get stars, first generation of stars. Then when the stars explode, they make oxygen and phosphorus and nitrogen. So you can't get them from regular stars. You have to get them out of the energy of stars that explode. So you're making these atomic nuclei, and you get the periodic table.

Well, you know, you couldn't have iPhones without some of the rare earth elements that no one's ever heard of, but you need them for electronic batteries and all sorts of things in our technology nowadays. So when is humanity actually going to recognize that on this tiny, little, extremely fragile planet that maybe we need to wake up to the full dimensionality of our possibilities so that we don't kill each other or despoil the entirety of the planet for future generations? Just when we could actually recognize that we're in intimate balance with all sorts of other alive elements of this planet that we are also threatening with extinction. And so mindfulness isn't just kind of a medicine for individual people suffering with various kinds of physical or psychological ailments. We could say that nowadays, mindfulness may be medicine for the planet.

And when I say mindfulness, I also mean heartfulness. The words are the same in all asian languages. So it includes compassion, it includes kindness, it includes love, basically, but a love that's informed by what we were talking about, about the emptiness of those personal pronouns so that you can't take them seriously. Putting on your scientist hat for a moment is all matter. Everything that we perceive, physical matter made up from the elements on the periodic table, that's all.

Rick Rubin

That's the entire menu of everything. We used to think that, and again, here, like now, I'm just going on the basis of being an informed citizen because I'm not a cosmologist or a theoretical physicist, but it turns out that it has been recently discovered. I mentioned that the universe is expanding, and it's not just expanding. It's accelerating in that rate of expansion that's called dark energy. Nobody knows what's driving that.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Nobody knows. Not the smartest people on the planet know what is going on, okay? And that's something like 75 or 74% of all the energy in the universe is dark energy, because they can figure this out. Then it turns out there's also dark matter, that it turns out that there's all this gravitational force in the universe that is not made out of atoms and molecules of the kind that's in the periodic table. So it turns out that stars and the periodic table of the elements and the earth and the planets and everything, we constitute what they estimate to be 4% of the entirety of reality.

4%. And the rest we don't know. So I had this korean Zen master that I studied with for a number of years named Sung san, and he used to talk about not knowing mind, and he had a wonderful way of talking about it because of his korean accent and the energy behind him. So he would say, don't know. He would just go like, don't know.

Where is your mind? Don't know. And then he'd say, keep this, don't know mind. Keep this, don't know mind. Well, all great scientists, that's what they most need is to not know, because otherwise, you're imprisoned by what you do know, and you can't go beyond that to the next discovery of just what's right beyond the horizon of the known.

Christian Murdig wrote a wonderful book called freedom from the known because it can be so imprisoning and so keeping. Don't know mind. That's what mindfulness is about. It's not falling into the cognitive stream or waterfall or however you want to frame it. It doesn't mean that you're not thinking or that you're going to get stupid.

It means that you're recruiting other dimensions of intelligence. And I like to speak about them as superpowers. So thinking is fantastic. I mean, we wouldn't have it without thinking. Our condition would be unthinkable.

But there's another power that we have that never gets any air time or until recently, and that is awareness. So were you ever taught anything about awareness? Embodied awareness? In school you were taught a lot about thinking and structure of sentences and how to sort of talk, read and stuff like that. But.

So that's all great, and that's all about thinking. But then there's this other superpower that we're born with. It's not that we have to get it, we have it called awareness. And we don't even know the territory. We're just lost in it.

And then. So we don't want to go there. We just want to stay in our thoughts and emotions. A lot of it's reactive. But what mindfulness is, what all meditative practices are.

They're doorways into awareness, into who you already are, beyond thinking, beyond name and form, as they say in the heart sutra. And when you enter one of those doors, and there are an infinite number of doors into awareness, so it's not like parochial or one size fits all or anything like that, then. And there's the potential for us to each live our moments as if they really, really, really mattered. Really mattered. That's why wherever you go, there you are.

Okay? Because it's like you only get this moment. Yes. If you're not paying attention, it's gone. Well, here's another one.

So you got another chance. But if you're zoning along on autopilot, not liking the way things are now, but desperately grasping at something in the future that's going to make it all come together for you. That's a kind of signature of a certain kind of delusion. I'm not saying one shouldn't have ambition and creative drive and faith and confidence in one's own powers, but it's very, very easy to miss one's moments all the way into the grave.

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Rick Rubin

So the first book, full catastrophe living, is really after years of this eight week course and teaching it to a wider audience who are not just there to do. Exactly. I wrote it after I started the stress reduction clinic in 79, and that book came. So it was like 1112 years before that book came out. And then the book, wherever you go, there you are, which we're now talking about the 30th anniversary of it.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

I wrote that, you know, three or four years later. It came out in 1994. It's a very different book. Yeah. Tell me the story of that book.

Rick Rubin

Why, then? I love that you're even interested in this. I mean, I feel like there's a certain impulse I have to turn the tables and start interviewing you because we're having this kind of conversation, and it can't be by accident or just kind of random. And so I'm really interested in the fact that since we've crossed paths, there's a certain way in which I feel like, even though I know almost nothing about you, that we're on the same wavelength in some fundamental way. And I'm really interested in that more than I'm interested in the story of me.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Even if, you know, we're doing it for some kind of express purpose, which is not to sell books, but to ignite passion for something that's a deep human inheritance, that nobody is missing anything lacking in this regard. But we often think we are, and so we feel like inadequate in a certain way. And what we say to our patients, before I come around trying to answer your question, if you still want me to, you know, when we first encounter our patients in the stress reduction clinic, and we listen to their stories, which we do, which is really important, to listen and not interrupt them, which constantly happening in medicine, we say, well, listen from our point of view, no matter what diagnosis you're here with, and you're here with every conceivable diagnosis, from our point of view, as long as you're breathing, there's more right with you than wrong with you. And what MBSR is going to do is pour energy into what's right with you. Let the rest of the medical center take care of what's wrong with you.

And after eight weeks, see what happens. And what happens is that they recruit those interior resources we were talking about before. They tap into them like the oil drillers, and they come up to the surface and they put them to work as a formal and informal meditation practice. So that ultimately, maybe in eight weeks, but certainly in eight years or 80 years, you discover that life itself is the meditation practice, that every moment is incredible invitation to show up in your fullness, in your beauty, no matter what. Even if you're depressed, even if things are not going well at the moment, even if you've run out of creative ideas and all of that awareness doesn't care.

The thought, I've run out of creative ideas. If you hold it in awareness, awareness is just going to laugh at that one. Yeah. There's an infinite source of wisdom that we can tap into at any moment if we get out of the way. And I know that you're famous for that, and also infamous in a certain way for that, because it's pretty unusual, actually.

And it's even more unusual that you share it with the world in an embodied way. And I just want to bow to you for that. I feel like I never would have believed it. But you know that I've actually encountered somebody where I can connect in a way where there's no separation, and it's way beyond whatever the stories were that brought us here, and that we know that instinctively. And if we never even saw each other again, it wouldn't matter.

It's beyond time and space. Well, the truth is, is that in some ways, I am a product of your teaching, so that it makes sense. It's like you recognize in me, it's the mirror thing. And I also know that what's in your book, you didn't create. You recognized it.

Rick Rubin

It's the. So you pointed it out to me, but you're pointing. I'm pointing. We're pointing at the same thing. We're all.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Exactly. We're all pointing. Yes. And I get the sense, again, I don't want to go beyond my capacity to even say anything remotely authentic in this regard. But a work of art in particular, a piece of music or even a song, everybody hears it differently.

I'm imagining that the artist, even if it's a single artist, or if it's a group, their relationship to it changes over time. If they were to re record it, they would record it differently over time. That it's a kind of manifestation of the present moment. It's a kind of flowering of a certain kind of actuality in multiple dimensions. And everybody resonates with it, however they will, given their unique filters and history and everything else.

And when we can agree that in general, we'll say something like, we love this, this is awesome, then it also lets us recognize how interconnected we are, how we aren't isolated monads, how we often love the same things, and we need each other to point out the beauty and also the places where we need to grow. It feels like magic to me. It is. It is magic. And the reason you are pointing to it, and now I'm pointing to it, is because we love it.

Rick Rubin

That's the only reason. The only reason it's all devotional. Yeah. And that's why, you know, after close to 60 years of having a formal meditation practice. And of course, what I'm talking about is not that easy to do because who has the time?

Jon Kabat-Zinn

And it seems so much like nothing. But what I've come to is, like, if you take your seat in the morning, and I'm using sitting as a metaphor for any door into mindfulness. So lying down, standing on your head, you know, jumping out of an airplane with a parachute, whatever you're doing, that the present moment is an invaluable gift. And your willingness to enter into it in a fully embodied, wakeful way, it's a love affair with life itself. And it's also, in certain way, a karmic assignment.

It's like, hey, if the world produced you, why not give the world back everything that you are? And if you doubt that the world needs it, just recognizing that's just a thought, and it's about as true or as useful or interesting as what you had for breakfast three weeks ago. No one cares. You don't care. So when you start to investigate your thoughts with mindfulness meditation, you begin to realize that if you have one really good thought in your entire life, you're ahead of the curve.

Most thoughts are just rehashed, same old, same old. And they're usually not true, and especially the ones that have to do with I me and mine, because we don't know who's talking when we use those. We're kind of in the story of me. And the way I like to put it is that we're so much bigger than the story awareness. If it's boundless, we've already proved that, like, you're coextensive with the entire universe.

When you drop underneath thinking into awareness. And what could be more amazing than that? Not to be missed. Okay, not to be missed. So life is not to be missed.

So wherever you go, can you be fully present in this moment without pushing anything away, without pursuing anything, and without generating a story of, like, yeah, now I'm meditating, or now I'm like a big shot, or, you know, or I'm worthless, or whatever the thought is, those thoughts will happen. But when you are in awareness, you recognize that's just an event. In the field of awareness, it's called the thought freighted with, very often with negative emotion. You see it as like a cloud in the sky. It just comes, you don't have to do anything.

It just sort of evaporates by itself sooner or later. Comes, goes. You don't take it personally, then you're fully alive in this moment, fully embodied. And that's a radical act. In this day and age, it's a radical act of sanity to engage your moments in that way.

And now what I'm saying is, I've discovered for myself that it's a radical act of love. So when I sit in the morning, which I do on an absolutely regular basis, and I sit on the floor on the zafu, but I'm not recommending other people to that, and maybe in ten years or 20 years, my legs won't be able to handle that, because there are an infinite number of doors into what I'm calling sitting or awareness. But when I do take my seat, I see it as a radical act of love. Not one more thing I have to do in the morning before I get going on my day, but like a radical act of love. And in a certain sense, a tuning of one's instrument before you take it out on the road for the day to do whatever you're going to do, and then your entire day do becomes a mindfulness practice.

And that's what, wherever you go, there you are is about. It's like life is the meditation practice, not sitting meditation or yoga or standing on your head. Life is the meditation practice. And there's no separation from music, sound, silence, creativity, possibility. And then one does this also, not just for your own sake, but for the sake of the world.

So with their suffering, rather than running away from it and saying, well, I can't go towards the suffering, you instinctively bodhisattva, like, actually turn towards the suffering, because you can't be whole when other people aren't home. You can't be entirely at home with genocide or with injustice of a certain kind it's just not possible, because otherwise you're compromising your own moral integrity. So in a world that's suffering, meditative awareness really seems to me now to be a kind of karmic assignment for humanity as a whole so that we don't destroy this beautiful gem of a planet, because we don't, as they like to say, all puns intended, we don't have a planet. B one of the things that I so love about wherever you go, there you are is I read it 30 years ago. When it came out, I was already a meditator for probably 15 years.

Rick Rubin

And I remember as I was reading it, feeling like, this is the best book on meditation I've ever read. And I'd read quite a few at that point. And I would give this to someone who's interested in meditation and who's never done it, and I would give it to someone who's been meditating for 50 years. And there's no better guidebook, regardless of where you are on the path, to connect to the practice in a new, deeper and more profound way. Well, I'm speechless and incredibly gratified.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Because, of course, you know, why do we do the work that we're doing? Why do we put anything out there in the world? We want other people to be touched by it, to be moved by it in a way that is beneficial to them, that's healing, that's something or other that is filling some kind of space in a way that's profound. Tell me how your practice has changed over the course of your life from the early days to now. In a way, it hasn't changed at all.

You know, it's really interesting. I still love it in the same way. In fact, I value it more than ever as I get older because, you know, there is that law of impermanence, and this is why there is, you know, suffering in the world, is that things don't stay the same. And so there's inevitable loss. And if you have a body, it goes through changes, and then ultimately it dissolves back into the elements.

And it's really important for me to live the life that's mine to live while I have the chance. So my practice really hasn't changed all that much. If anything, I'm getting more and more deeply into the yoga, the older my body gets. Really spending a lot of time on the floor in my meditation room, on my yoga mat, experimenting and exploring with stuff, lying on my belly and pretending I'm swimming in the water. I love to swim, but being in New England, I only swim in the summertime, but there's something about swimming in the air that you have to deal with gravity and limitations and stuff like that.

And I have an almost 80 year old body now. But I'm recognizing that it's really a powerful meditation practice to listen deeply and experiment with subtle motions of what the body wants to do, loves to do, and is nurtured by doing, not just to prevent accidents or to be strong, but because it's a kind of investigation of the body aging, the body not being a 20 year old body or even a 40 year old body anymore. And it's like. But it's this body, and it's the only one I have. So the yoga has become more and more profound for me, and the sitting has become just more and more of a love affair, so to speak.

That's, you know, for the first, like, 40 years that I was meditating, I would wake up at very early in the morning, like four or five, and sit for an hour and then do yoga for an hour and stuff like that. But as I've gotten older, I've gotten a lot more relaxed about the kind of heavy duty discipline. After 40 years, you'd think I had enough momentum to ease off a bit. So sometimes I meditate in bed, and I actually recommend it more and more to people, because you've probably had this experience yourself, but all meditators, it's like, do I want to get up out of bed in the cold and go meditate? And it's like, well, you don't have to get out of the bed to meditate, just wake up.

We say, every time we come to the end of the night, I woke up, but it's probably not true. It's probably like I partially woke up, and I jumped out of bed on autopilot, and I was already late, and I mis brushed my teeth, and I was, like, lost in thought and driven. Well, why not? Before you drop into autopilot, why not finish the job and wake up completely for this moment? Why not feel your whole body?

You don't have to do a 45 minutes body scan, but put your mind in your body and feel the body. Breathe with the body and really feel your hands, because they're miraculous. You wouldn't want to be without one. But we take them for granted so much of the time to touch. The longest entry in the Oxford english dictionary is touch.

Touch has so many meanings. I mean, it goes on for I don't remember how many pages, because now it's all digital, metaphorically, literally, physically, when you put your attention in your hands, you're touching the universe in a certain way. The universe of your body. And your body is like the result of 13.8 billion years of evolution from the Big Bang has resulted in this constellation of atoms and molecules in the form of you waking up this morning, holy moly. Maybe I shouldn't miss this.

Maybe I shouldn't jump out of bed on autopilot, but really appreciate the amazingness of being in the body. Then you can take your mind, your attention out of your hands and put them in your feet and play around in whatever playful ways you want and then get out of bed and maybe even form the intention that maybe life itself is the real meditation practice. I'll just be mindful all day. And whether you sit or you don't sit. Yeah, I feel like people delude themselves into thinking, well, I'll just be mindful all the time.

It's mindfulness in everyday life. That's the subtitle of the book, but I'll just do that. But it turns out unless you're exercising the muscle on a regular basis in the gym, so to speak, on your cushion, lots of luck with that one. Because self delusion is infinite. And getting back into the gym and working with, not against, the resistance of the mind, when it goes off, you bring it back.

Goes off. You bring it back, goes off. You see where it's gone. You recognize something, and then even if it's seductive, you bring it back anyway and stay in the open hearted spaciousness of not knowing. Something grows over days, weeks, months, years, decades.

And it's exactly what I think all the great meditation teachers are pointing to and all the great poets, for that matter, that life is not to be missed, and it's so easy to miss it. Then, you know, it's almost commonsensical to fall into the love affair. Tell me about the difference between a meditation practice where you're focusing on what is versus a concentration practice, where you're focusing on a mantra, a flame, or a guided meditation, for that matter, which is a third category, I suppose. You mean where you're listening to somebody else's voice that's guiding you. Yes.

Mindfulness is not the same as concentration. So there are concentration practices and then there are mindfulness practices. So concentration has more to do with stability of attention. Okay. And kind of one pointedness or vividness on the one object.

So you can get very, very deeply into selecting one object and attending to, you mentioned a candle flame or some kind of. Or a mantra. But even those can be used mindfully. So it's like, it's not hard, fast boundaries, but a mantra is basically a sound that you internalize, om nama shivaya or whatever. And until the point where there's no you doing it anymore, it's just here doing itself, so to speak, and you're resting in the embrace of the sound, even though the sound is silent.

So it's very one pointed. When we talk about concentration practices, they are meant to develop what's called samadhi or samata. It's like deep calmness and stability of mind. But then there's insight, there's vipassana. There's this other element of it which we're also born with.

So we're born with that capacity for one pointedness. But you have to exercise the muscle in order to really stabilize the mind. And then there's mindfulness or vipassana or insight meditation. I mean, there's so many different words for it in the different traditions, and I won't go into that, but where you're just sitting, as the Japanese like to say, just sitting, nothing more. The japanese feel that is shikantasa, just sitting, nothing more.

They don't use the word meditation, and I often encourage people to throw out the word meditation because if you have the thought, I'm meditating, you're bringing a lot of baggage into that. So then you have to, am I doing it right? Am I sitting up straight enough? Do I look like I'm meditating to other people? And it's like, wait a minute.

All that's just garbage. It's just all more thinking. So if you let go of trying to get anywhere else and just be where you already are, then you're dropping into awareness. You're resting in awareness, and that is its own stability, so that you're just at home in that boundless spaciousness. Christian Murdy called it choiceless awareness.

It's called Zok Chen in the tibetan tradition. It's like there are a lot of different doors, but it's basically the same room. All the doors are into the same room, and the room is human awareness, and we already have it. I'm not sure I mentioned or emphasized this before, but you don't acquire awareness. You're born with it.

So you already have it. We all do, but what's challenging is accessing it. We don't have ready access to it because thinking is like some gigantic black hole that's sucking all of our energy all the time, thinking and emotions and self centeredness. So when we dissolve some of that attachment to thought and emotion and selfing, then the pure awareness, or we could even call it awarenessing, is just available twenty four seven. And there's no curriculum anymore.

You're boundless, like space and time. And as the heart Sutra says, there's no place to go, there's nothing to do, and there's no special something or specialized mindful state that you're supposed to attain. So if you're trying really hard to meditate and wondering, is this it? Am I feeling it? Right?

And there are chapters about that in the book, then you're really way off base, because what you're feeling is the curriculum. The question is, can you be aware of what you're feeling and then not try to edit it or get somewhere from it, but to just let it be and let it teach you what it is to teach you? How does guided meditation work differently than those? Well, all of those can be arrived at, just without any guidance. But sooner or later, almost everybody needs to be taught how to meditate, at least the beginning of it.

So it's like a glide path, you know, it's like a plane taking off. I was thinking of evil Knievel taking off with, you know, on his motorcycle and jumping over cars or whatever. So you need a kind of glide path of practice. But then ultimately, you're just resting in awareness and there's no place to go, there's nothing to do, and there's no special something you're supposed to attain, because it's all special. There's nothing that's not special when you drop underneath thinking.

So, in a certain way, it takes us into the realm of the poetic, where sort of prose basically peters out that you just. More words won't do anything more. But the great poets, of course, their challenge, it seems to me, has always been to take what's impossible to put into words and put it into words. I'm thinking of people like Emily Dickinson, who's one of my favorite poets, and she recognized that a lot of the time we're at war with ourselves. We're of two minds.

We're fighting with each other. So one of my favorite poems, if it's okay for me to recite it, deals with these personal pronouns that are so problematic. And the Buddha is famous for having said nothing is to be clung to as I, me and mine. He said his entire 40 years of teaching could be encapsulated in that one sentence. Nothing is to be clung to, the verb to cling as self as I, me or mine.

Easy to say, not so easy to do. That's why we need the discipline. A lot of people, I mean, all of us, really, we're conflicted a lot of the time. And sometimes maybe we even hear ourselves saying something like, I'm of two minds about that, right? I want it.

I don't want it. I like it. I hate it. Here's Emily Dickinson, because. And of course, she apparently suffered a great deal in her own life.

Me from myself to banish had I art impregnable, my fortress unto all heart. But since myself assault me, how have I peace except by subjugating consciousness? And since we're mutual monarch, how this be except by abdication me of me.

So very powerful evocation of how much we struggle with ourselves and don't like each other or even hate, detest parts of ourselves and try to hide them from people. And she just does that so amazingly as a poet. I mean, if those were notes, I mean, it would be a masterpiece, you know, of music. I mean, she takes totally simple little english pronouns and plays with them in a way that's, like, mind blowing. And then drops it into the impossibility at the end of like me for me, you know, I banish myself.

Now, a lot of people, we do that a lot and live lives of tremendous pain and suffering because we haven't reconciled the warfare between me and myself. And what the meditation practice is saying is, there is no war between you and yourself. The awareness can hold that me and myself and the awareness is the unifying factor. And then you see, these are just plague thoughts and emotions, and they have no actuality beyond what you've nurtured them or feed them with. They are just comings and goings that aren't the full story.

They may have some partial truth, but they're not the full story. And if you don't want to live in alienation from yourself for your entire life, then you have to, as Wordsworth said, reconcile discordant elements and make them move in one society. If we're not the thoughts and if we're not the totality of awareness, what are we? Well, we're closer to the totality of awareness embodies. We're embodied.

That's what I would say. And then beyond that, language gives out, or we don't know who we are. We are the universe's way of looking at itself in this particular corner of the universe, at least, and harking back to what we were saying about science and understanding the big Bang and more and more, our place in the universe through the amazing technologies that now can look back in time by looking out in space, all the way back to very close to the beginning of the big Bang, and understand that it's like humanity has an amazing role in the universe that we shouldn't disregard. We are geniuses. We're all geniuses.

And if we could create a society that recognizes genius and creates laws that prevent certain levels of harm caused to other members of society, then perhaps we could actually not self destruct in the next hundred years or 50 years or ten years. And that's why I do what I do, because in some sense, that me from myself to banish. It's like all of humanity is struggling with that. It's not just Emily Dickinson in the 19th century struggling with her unrequited love affair. So here's another poem, if you're okay with it, from Derek Walcott, another wonderful, incredible poet from the island of St.

Lucia who won the Nobel prize some years ago and recently deceased. And it's kind of like the opposite of the Emile Dickinson. So I like to use the two of them, sometimes in tandem. And this poem is called love after love. Do you know it?

Okay. This is called love after love.

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome and say, sit here, eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine, give bread, give back your heart to yourself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, who you have ignored for another who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters, the photographs, the desperate notes. Peel your own image from the mirror.

And this is the classic last line. Sit, feast on your life. Beautiful, beautiful celebration of life. Yeah. Awesome.

In very few words. And that's what great poets do, is they can take what's really impossible to put into words, and they somehow manage, and then it resonates. I want to give you one more just that, for fun and because of music. So this is by Rilke, the great german poet of the early 20th century, from his book of hours, which doesn't have a title.

My life is not this steeply sloping hour in which you see me hurrying my life is not this steeply sloping hour in which you see me hurrying much stands behind me I stand before it like a tree I am just one of my many mouths and at that, the one that would be still the soonest. I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because death's note wants to climb over. But in the dark interval reconciled they stay here trembling and the song goes on. Beautiful. Wow.

Rick Rubin

Magnificent. Tell me about being the mountain. There's a practice in wherever you go. There you are called the mountain meditation. And the mountain meditation is really an invitation to experience stability.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

So when you look at a mountain, gaze at a mountain or a picture of a mountain, you can actually invite the energies of the mountain into your standing where you're sitting. Even if it's a picture in your mind's eye. It doesn't have to be looking at the mountain itself and realize that, you know, there are many ways in which we're mountains too. We can sit with utter dignity, beauty, the head lofty, elevating itself right up through the neck and top of the head and the pelvis rooted to the chair or the cushion or whatever it's rooted on. And something grounding with the legs and the feet.

And so you're taking responsibility in a certain way to recognize that it's possible to drop in on a certain kind of massive, magnificent beauty that is utterly stable, unmoving. And then, as we say, the mountain just sits there. It doesn't say, well, I'm bored, I'm going to get up now. It just sits. And the sun goes across the sky.

And from moment to moment, the shadows on the mountain are different. The light on the mountain, the weather patterns around the mountain. The seasons move day and night. And through it all, the mountain just sets, being its utterly intrinsic nature. And it's not saying, oh, I don't look so good today because there's too many clouds and fog and the tourists can't see me.

We're in the midst of ice storms and snow and blizzards. The mountain sits through all of that. So when we take our seat in meditation in a similar way, we can imagine the body as a mountain of our choice. And it's that stable. It's rooted in the mantle and the crust of the earth, that stable.

And with a lofty peak that, on a clear day at least, has a panoramic perspective in 360. And as the sun goes across the sky, as day follows night and the seasons follow each other, we can sit in our meditation practice through weather patterns of all kinds in the mind, through periods that feel winterized, inner fog, low hanging ceiling and clouds. And then springtime comes if we're patient, and then summer and then fall. And there's not one moment that doesn't have its own intrinsic beauty. And you're not how the mountain looks.

The mountain has no concern for how it looks or what other people think of it. The mountain just is what it is. It's in its intrinsic nature and in its intrinsic, unique beauty. And when you meditate so that in some sense your body and the mountain that you're inviting come together, then you can actually, with every in breath, derive energy from that stability from the image itself and the felt sense of it in the arms and shoulders and hips and legs and the elevation through the back coming out of the pelvis and right up through the neck and the head.

And that's meant to launch you into the timeless present moment where you can let go of that image and all thought and not be the mountain anymore, but be the beauty that is yourself.

Rick Rubin

Beautiful. Great practice. Yeah. People find that really strengthening or motivating in a certain way because it's intuitively obvious that the mountain is beautiful and the mountain is stable. Why can't I be beautiful and stable?

Jon Kabat-Zinn

And lo and behold, you discover you can. There's a line in wherever you go. There you are talking about being able to experience the seasons in a breath. And it was just a beautiful image. It caught me.

Rick Rubin

When did you first begin speaking to people? I guess as soon as I opened my mouth, but maybe long before that, I'll never know. We're all speaking to each other all the time by virtue of our embodied presence. So when we're at home in our own skin, other people recognize it in a certain way and they want to be close to it. And they usually project onto the other person that there's something special about that person.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

And if the person is wise enough, they will recognize that as a projection and as basically wrong and remind the person that they too share all of those energetic qualities and that it doesn't take a lifetime to realize them because they're already here. What it really takes is getting out of our own way. And that's why I have guided meditations and write books and stuff like that is so that they're all glide paths, as we said, into your own experience of your own life and taking responsibility for it in such a way that it's an adventure of discovery. There's a lot of stress, pain and challenges in life, and it doesn't always work out or happen the way we want it to. And sometimes it's merely annoying and sometimes it's actually tragic.

But with this kind of equipping of ourselves, so to speak, for the challenges of the arc of a life lived fully, not only can we do it, the word doing is the wrong word. We can be it. Okay? It's not about doing. It's about being.

And there's a lot in wherever you go. There you are about the distinction between being and doing. We're doing it together.

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Jon Kabat-Zinn

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Rick Rubin

Can you guide me through a short body scan? Sure. Love to. Let's do it.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Well, experiencing the body as a whole lying here or sitting, if you're sitting there and noticing that awareness can hold the entirety of the body right in this moment, the entire universe of sensations associated with the envelope of the skin and the entirety of the body lying here or sitting here and coming to rest and awareness so that you're basically at home in awareness with things exactly as they are.

And we're going to invite into awareness the body as it is sitting here, lying here and experiencing it as a totality in its wholeness.

And the first thing you'll notice is, of course, that there's breathing going on, and we're just aware of the breath coming into the body and then peeking at the apex of the in breath and then leaving the body flowing out and then a little trough at the end of the out breath. And then what do you know, the next in breath, we're gifted with it.

And so rather than the conceit that we're breathing, recognizing that the body is breathing for sure, but we can just go along for the ride and not have to interfere or push or pull the breath in any way, but just rest in awareness of the body as a whole lying here or sitting here.

Then when you're ready, then just bringing awareness to the feet, and we'll do both feet together. And noticing that as I invite you to do it, you know how to do that. You can feel the feet.

I'm not asking you to think about the feet, but to simply feel the sensations. Or if you can't feel the sensations, then feeling the lack of sensation or numbness.

So whether it's warmth or tingling or any other sensations or lack of sensation, just holding whatever is here for you now in this moment, as we attend to the sensations in the feet.

And then when you're ready, taking a slow, deep, more intentional breath in and breathing all the way up into the lungs so that you're filling the lungs to their capacity. And then on an out breath, just letting go of the breath. And as you do that, letting go of the feet as well, and moving your attention into the lower legs and the knees and just feeling, again, whatever sensations are here from this region of the body or lack of sensation, and just holding it in awareness, feeling them, attending to them without thinking, just directly experiencing them. Of course, there may be thinking going on as well, but we're focusing on the direct tending to sensation.

And then here, too, taking a deep breath in whenever you care to, right down into the region of the lower legs and knees, and then on the out breath, letting them dissolve in your mind's eye as well as the breath. Let's go. Leaves the body. And as we move into the region of the upper legs and just feeling, again, whatever is here to be felt, the upper legs and all the way up to the hips on the outside and the groin on the inside, on the surface and deep, any and all sensations or lack of sensation.

And when you're ready here, too, on and out breath, just letting them dissolve as you move into the pelvis and the region of pelvis and hips and buttocks and genitals. And again, the only assignment is to bring awareness to this region of the body in particular, and breathe with it as you're holding it in awareness, all sorts of memories, thoughts and emotions may arise in this region or any other region of the body. Everybody's body is different. Just let whatever thoughts or emotions come, come and go when they go. But we're zeroing in on the sensations as best we can.

And then when you're ready here, too, on an out breath, letting go as the breath lets go, and coming into the whole region of the lower back and abdomen.

And here you'll feel the belly expanding on the in breaths and receding on the out breaths and just welcoming any and all sensations or lack of sensation. Again, the important thing is to simply bring vivid awareness to this region.

You're not actually doing anything. You're just being with it.

And when you're ready here, too, on an out breath, letting it dissolve in your mind's eye as the breath lets go, as the mind lets go, as you let go.

And as we move into the region of thoracic spine, the upper region of the chest, and the ribcage housing, of course, the lungs and the heart and the great vessels, and just experiencing the universe of the upper torso, of course, the ribcage will be expanding with each in breath and receding a bit with each out breath. Seeing if you can detect the shoulder blades floating on the back of the rib cage, seeing if you can detect the collarbones in the front that go back to the shoulder blades and form the whole mechanism for movement of the arms.

If you like, you can even see if you can detect your heart beating in your chest.

And whether you can or can't, you're simply at home right here with this region of the body in all its wonder and beauty, including the chest wall and the breasts, the spaces between the ribs.

And when you're ready here, too, taking a slow, deep, intentional breath in and filling up the lungs, filling up the lungs right up to the apices of the lungs, behind the collarbones, and all the way back to the shoulder blades and cradling the breath at the very apex of it for a moment and then just letting it wash out, maintaining a seamless continuity in the awareness moment by moment by moment.

And now we can move into the hands just as we did with the feet. We'll do them both together. And you might marvel at the fact that we can actually hold both feet or both hands in awareness at the same time. When you think about, it's pretty amazing.

And feeling the sensations in the tips of the fingers and thumbs and in the backs of the fingers and thumbs and all around, and then feeling the sensations in the backs of the hands and the palms of the hands, and maybe if you're very, very quiet, even picking up on the pulsations and the radial arteries in the wrists and just breathing with the entirety of your hands.

And if you like, at some point, taking a final breath right into the hands and then breathing out from the hands and letting them go as the breath lets go. And as we move into the forearms and wrists again, and the elbows and the upper arms, the deltoid muscles, the biceps, just feeling the entirety of the rest of your arms and armpits.

Any sensations? All sensations. No sensations. The key invitation is to simply be present in awareness without doing anything, just apprehending what's here to be felt, sensed, known, resting in awareness in this particular region of the body.

And again, whenever you're ready, taking a slower, deeper, more intentional breath in, directing it right to that region of the arms and shoulders, upper arms, armpits, and when you're ready here too, letting go as we now move into the region of the neck and overlapping with the shoulders again and not just the neck but the throat and not just the throat but the larynx and holding the whole of this region in awareness and maybe marveling at what the larynx can do in concert with the lungs and the tongue and the mouth and just holding the entirety of the neck and shoulders in awareness, feeling whatever is here to be felt when you're ready, just like with every other region of the body, letting it go as the breath lets go and as we move now into the head and face and just feeling the entirety of your head and face, holding it in awareness, letting go of any thoughts you might have about it and how it appears, just allowing it to be as it is from the inside in its own intrinsic and profound beauty, experiencing the sensations in the lower jaw and the chin and the lips and the teeth and the gums and the tongue and the upper lips again and the nostrils and the feeling of the air moving in and out of the nostrils and the whole of the nose, the cheeks, the eyes and eyelids and eyebrows and the wonder of the eyes behind the eyelids if your eyes are closed, the marvel of that sense, the miracle of it and letting the awareness spread out to include the forehead and the temples and the ears and the whole domain of sound, the whole sensorium of sound. Hearing what's here to be heard, feeling what's here to be felt and allowing awareness to now include the entirety of the vault of the head and the cranium, the back of the head, and just reminding yourself that underneath that cranium, underneath the vault of the cranium lies the most complex arrangement of matter in the known universe, the human brain, which is extended out into the entirety of the body through the senses and many other pathways.

And so holding the entirety of the head and face in awareness with a certain kind of profound wonder and honoring and recognizing not only its intrinsic beauty and wonder, but the intrinsic beauty and wonder of you and your ability to hold it in awareness outside of time in this timeless present moment we call now. And then when you're ready, once again on an out breath, just letting the entirety of your face and head dissolve in your mind's eye, just letting it completely dissolve as you flow into an awareness that can include the body sitting or lying here right now, but that is also boundless.

And simply resting here, completely at home with really no place to go, no better place to be in this moment than right here.

Nothing to do to fill up this moment because it's already complete and full as it is, and no special agenda that needs to be fulfilled or accomplishment to be had, nothing to attain beyond this moment, because this is it, your whole life right here in this moment.

The body, the breath, all of the sensoria and awareness itself fully embodied.

And so when you're ready, you might experiment with opening your eyes, if your eyes have been closed, and maybe very, very slowly and gently introducing a certain kind of movement, maybe in the toes or the fingers, and then gradually increasing the moving, maybe massaging your face or with your hands or moving your hands together. But to simply just recognize that in a way that guided meditation is over. But the awareness, the awareness goes out just like the ringing of a bell. You know, there's the initial kiss of the bells or the clacker in the bell, but then the sound goes on just the way Rilke said the song goes on. Beautiful.

So life goes on, and it is wondrous. And it needs you to be fully present to complete the universe. And in some sense also, I would say, to complete your karmic assignment, whatever it is.

Rick Rubin

Beautiful. So thank you. There you have a slight essay. Felt so good. Well, thanks for the invitation.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

I mean, again, it's like it can be short, it can be long, it can be elaborate and poetic, or it can be much less that way. But the important thing is that we realize that it's available twenty four seven.

The doors are everywhere. The doors of awareness or of wakefulness, because there's so much intimacy in this. I mean, it's really an invitation of intimacy with yourself, intimacy with the present moment. But because we're doing this together and there's a certain kind of intimacy that arises just in our being together in this way.

And I just want to bow to it and acknowledge it.

Rick Rubin

It's still working its way through me.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Well, it's a little bit like a tuning fork in a way. You know, there's the initial knock or hit to set it vibrating. But those vibrations in a certain way they, because we're not tuning forks, we're extremely complex arrangements of gazillions, of atoms and molecules. Those reverberations never stop. And every in breath magically, somehow invites them to renew themselves.

And I think Rilke was right. The song goes on nothing changed and. Now everything is different.

That's beautifully said. Nothing's changed and everything's different. And it's not some special airy fairy weirdo kind of thing that's for sort of leftover hippies from a different generation or anything like that. And that's what, in a certain way, the mainstreaming of mindfulness has demonstrated that if you're human, it's really helpful to wake up and there's a kind of score to it. But it's an unwritten score that we have to write the score.

We're constantly participating in writing, co creating the score of our own place or places in the world, and how we're going to navigate and modulate those interfaces. And I would say the world is starving for that. It's absolutely starving for us to show up completely and to take care of what needs taken care of inwardly and outwardly. What are your thoughts on prayer? Because of the way I was brought up, I'm not that kind of familiar with that whole domain of things.

Although I did run a couple of cycles of Mbsr back in the old days for the Catholic Church, for the Worcester diocese of the Catholic Church in Worcester. And they were really into prayer. And what they found by coming and practicing these meditations that were from a very different tradition, they were saying it's the same thing, that everything is a prayer, every breath is a prayer. So in that sense, as long as it's not so me centered and it's imploring for a special intervention from the divine for my own betterment, even if it is, that's just a kind of expression of sorrow and suffering. But when one's taking the stance for the betterment of the world or for the recognizing of the intrinsic beauty of the world for the sake of all beings, so to speak, then everything becomes a prayer and everything becomes a meditation.

And every artistic expression, I would say, is a kind of. I hope this doesn't sound really inflated, but a certain kind of sacred offering. I think that's true. It's not meant to be evaluated compared to other sacred offerings. No.

But to stand on its own as a kind of instance of recognizing the enormity of the mystery. Yes. And that we're a non insignificant, insignificant part of it. Yes. Is science sophisticated enough to understand spirituality?

I think it's getting there. I don't know whether spirituality is the right word. For various reasons. I stay away from using that word myself most of the time, not entirely successfully. And the last chapter of wherever you go, there you are is called is mindfulness spiritual?

And I sort of say some things there because I get asked that question a lot by journalists, or did. But my definition of spirituality is what makes us human. So it becomes like a zen. What does make us human? Well, at a certain point, silence is the only really responsible response or an offering like what you've made, your art, what you've constructed, what's come through you.

And of course, you don't have to be or think of yourself as an artist to have things come through you, because we're all portals in a certain way. And things do come through us when we don't obstruct the portal from free flowing. So this was where I think the creativity comes in and that it's intrinsic, a part of our humanity as awareness. But if it's hidden, if it's kind of hidden in plain sight, but not accessible, then it takes teachers or mentors or friends who care to nurture that in others as well as in oneself. And I'm just intuiting because I know virtually nothing about it.

But I'm guessing that that's one major element of how you have been functioning in the world of music for many, many decades. How is the nature of reality different than what we perceive? We have no idea because we're limited by what we can perceive and think. But one thing we can intuit is that the nature of reality is a lot more mysterious than a philosophy, so to speak, Horatio. So this is the human adventure at its best, is to navigate those waters and expand our repertoire beyond the known without being shackled by what we know.

Sometimes I like to say, you know, instead of waiting until you die, die now. Die now to the personal pronouns, die now to your big ego trip and story of myself and how horrible, or how great or wondrous. And by dying now, wake up to the beauty of this moment and realizing how much bigger you are than your story.

Rick Rubin

Tender routes.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Temporal rows, temporal rows, temporal relative, temporal.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

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Episode Chapters

1: Introduction

2: Mindfulness in Modern Times

3: Evolution of Thought

4: Integration into Healthcare

5: The Creative Process

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