Jon Kabat-Zinn would like you to be aware of “the pull of the Scylla and Charybdis of past and future, and the dream world they offer us in place of our lives.”
The means of becoming aware is meditation, he says. And he’d also very much like you to know that he has been practicing meditation for many years and that meditation, contrary to the some of the ways it is perceived, is not “some kind of weird, airy-fairy type of thing.”
Kabat-Zinn is the founder and director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, where he pioneered the use of meditation and yoga in the treatment of patients grappling with illness, chronic pain and stress.
The clinic’s program, which was featured on “Healing and the Mind,” last winter’s popular Bill Moyers PBS series, is based on a Buddhist-type of meditation called “mindfulness.”
Unlike other types of meditation, in which practitioners concentrate on a particular word or a visual image, mindfulness begins with simply paying attention to breathing and the passing parade of sensations, feelings, images and thoughts-without reacting, judging or becoming involved with them. The aim, as with most forms of meditation, is to gain a more clear, calm state of mind.
“If you decide to try sitting down and meditating even for three minutes, just noticing your breath coming in and out as if you were a detached witness,” Kabat-Zinn says, “you’ll notice your mind (jumps around) and it usually goes into the future or into the past.
“That is shocking to people and they say, `My God, I didn’t realize my mind was so out of control.’
“Everybody’s mind is out of control! And we’re walking around like that, making corporate decisions, family decisions, international policy decisions with minds that haven’t really cultivated awareness.
“A lot of the time we don’t know what we’re doing. We’re driven by impulses, very strong emotional reactions, and it’s kind of below the surface. Sometimes we really function effectively; sometimes we don’t function effectively.”
As Kabat-Zinn likes to point out, “Our present moments are the only ones that we actually have, that we’re alive in. All the rest is a fantasy. So if you want to change the future, there’s only one time to change the future and that is the present moment.”
One of Kabat-Zinn’s first encounters with meditation came in the mid-1960s while he was studying for his Ph.D. in molecular biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While walking down a hallway, he noticed a sign advertising a talk by Philip Kapleau, the prominent American Zen master and author of “The Three Pillars of Zen.” Although he wasn’t sure what Zen was, he decided to attend the lecture.
“The talk had such a vitality and life to it that it just seemed to make sense, especially in the alienating environment I was in-grad school,” Kabat-Zinn remembers. He later went to meditation retreats led by Kapleau and has been meditating ever since.
“It’s important for people to know that it’s a daily kind of work,” says Kabat-Zinn, an intense, seemingly unflappable man. “It’s like a tuning. If you want to play the violin, you have to tune the violin. If you really want to optimize your well-being, it’s good to tune the instrument before you take it on the road. Since we take it on the road every day, it’s not a bad idea to tune it early in the morning. That’s what I like to do.”
While Kabat-Zinn had a strong interest in science early in his life, he also wanted to know more about mind and consciousness.
Working from the inside
“I was interested in the biology of consciousness and gradually I began to feel that I wanted to do it from the inside as well as the outside,” he says. “It didn’t make much sense to study consciousness and be unconscious.”
He started looking around for information about “inner work,” and found a cornucopia of sources in his own back yard.
“In the ’60s at MIT, every swami and Zen master in the world was passing through,” he says.
After completing his doctorate, Kabat-Zinn taught science for a number of years in high school and college. Sometimes he taught mindfulness and biology.
“Those were large popular science courses where you needed some kind of angle to make it more interesting and more relative,” he says. “The mind-body connection was a very powerful one.”
Gradually Kabat-Zinn says he realized that there were a lot of people doing molecular biology, but “very few who were trying to bring together science and inner cultivation of awareness and I thought this might be a good job for me.”
He was working at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center as a researcher in molecular biology and cell biology and teaching a yoga class there for anyone who wanted to attend.
He began talking to doctors about patients who did not respond to medical treatment or whose problems stemmed from lack of physical mobility and good coping strategies. He says the doctors told him that 90 percent of their patients fell into one of those categories.
In 1979, Kabat-Zinn persuaded the medical center to let him set up a clinic to teach meditation and yoga in an eight-week outpatient program.
Help for regular people
At the time, there were no behavioral medicine clinical programs like it in the country, though there had been some research on the physiological benefits of meditation, notably the pioneering work of Dr. Herbert Benson, of the Mind/Body Institute at Harvard University, which he described in a best-selling book, “The Relaxation Response.”
Although Kabat-Zinn was confident about the benefits of meditation, he says that, in the beginning, he had no idea if people referred to his clinic by their physicians would be willing to work so hard on themselves. But he thought that people whose problems could not be cured by medicine might respond to “something you may be able to do for yourself that nobody could do for you. If they tried everything else, maybe they’d say, `Hell, what do I have to lose?’ “
And it turned out that regular people, those who were neither dharma seekers nor New Age disciples, “took to intensive meditation training like ducks to water,” Kabat-Zinn says.
“You know the central teaching in the Buddhist tradition is that there is a way to transcend pain and suffering,” he says. “So that’s the ticket of admission. Hospitals are magnets that draw people in when they’re experiencing pain and suffering. What better place to establish some kind of vehicle for teaching people how to do the deep work of relating to their suffering in a way that has the potential for transformation and transcendence?”
Dr. Keith Berndtson, assistant professor of family medicine and preventive medicine at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, calls “Full Catastrophe Living,” Kabat-Zinn’s 1990 book about using meditation to deal with stress, pain and illness, one of his favorite popular books in the area of mind-body medicine.
“Kabat-Zinn has collected a lot of data, but he also does a very good job at bridging Eastern and Western elements,” Berndtson says. “I think his clinic is probably one of the best examples of what a meditation program can do.”
Stress connection
While the meditation techniques that Kabat-Zinn teaches have been around for centuries, there was little mainstream discussion of meditation until it was connected with stress.
“Stress is something that Americans identify with,” Kabat-Zinn says. “I think it doesn’t matter so much what door you enter as long as you’re in the room. The room is an inner sense of your own well-being and validity as a person, and if it’s pain or health or stress that brings you in and makes you open, that’s just the beginning of an ongoing adventure in growth and awareness.”
Since 1979, Kabat-Zinn’s clinic has grown, adding many more teachers and even an outpost in an inner-city neighborhood in Worcester, Mass., where mindfulness is sometimes taught in Spanish. Kabat-Zinn himself has taught meditation to scores of people, including prison inmates and Olympic athletes.
And he has just published a book, “Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life” (Hyperion), geared toward people who are curious enough about meditation to give it a try.
Part of Kabat-Zinn’s success in a culture that seems skeptical about, even antagonistic toward, meditation may be his personally reported experiences and his down-to-earth approach.
“Over the years I began to develop my own meditation practice and my concern from the beginning was that if there was anything valuable here, the idea would not be to become a Buddhist or a Hindu or a yogi or shave your head and dance around with beads, although all those things are fine. But I was looking for the essence of it that was universal and would be applicable to regular Americans without having to shave your head or do something weird.
“It’s true that the principles were articulated in the most sophisticated and deepest way in Buddhism, Taoism and yoga, but they really are universal and have to do with what it means to be fully human.”
THE KEY TO CULTIVATING MINDFULNESS
The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing. But when we start to focus in on what our own mind is up to, for instance, it is not unusual to quickly go unconscious again, to fall back into an automatic-pilot mode of unawareness. These lapses in awareness are frequently caused by an eddy of dissatisfaction with what we are seeing or feeling in that moment, out of which springs a desire for something to be different, for things to change.
You can easily observe the mind’s habit of escaping from the present moment for yourself. Just try to keep your attention focused on any object for even a short period of time. You will find that to cultivate mindfulness, you may have to remember over and over again to be awake and aware. We do this by reminding ourselves to look, to feel, to be. It’s that simple . . . checking in from moment to moment, sustaining awareness across a stretch of timeless moments, being here, now.
TRY: Asking yourself in this moment, “Am I awake?,” “Where is my mind right now?” – From “Wherever You Go, There You Are” by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
