Jon Kabat-Zinn – Many Doors, One Room
Shownotes
Recorded in person in Washington, D.C., where Mind & Life had gathered to celebrate the Dalai Lama's 90th birthday, this conversation finds Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, insisting that it was never about MBSR. It was about the “M.” Jon and David talk about Jon’s stress reduction clinic in 1979 and the challenge Jon gave every patient: to turn toward pain instead of away from it. They talk about the psoriasis study that put mindfulness training in a light box, how MBCT was born when three cognitive therapists came to borrow the tapes from Jon, loneliness, attention in an age built to capture it, 26,000 people on the first day of a Zoom retreat, and what Jon calls the koan for humanity: can we wake up enough? David ends the show with a short 2-minute guided meditation practice, focusing on a way of ‘putting out the welcome mat’ to our experience.
In this episode:
- The stress reduction clinic at UMass, 1979: catching people falling through the cracks of the health care system
- The pain is bare sensation; the suffering's extra
- Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine: the Buddha's teaching in one sentence
- Sitting here, not sitting there
- For MBSR: "My marketing strategy is no marketing," and the birth of MBCT
- The psoriasis study: meditation in a light therapy box
- Attention in the age of perpetual distraction
- Our analog genius: 13.8 billion years of evolution
- Many doors, one room: send your awareness a change-of-address card
- The koan for humanity, and "United and Present" at the UN
- Loneliness vs. aloneness, and MBSR as sangha
- The two-second peek: reclaiming your body
- Permission to be awkward: an improv study
- Repetition over novelty: why the guided meditations never change
- "You're at home and I'm at home": 26,000 people on the ‘mitigation’ retreat
- Glaciers as a mindfulness practice: no planet B
- David's takeaway, a 2-minute guided meditation practice