Melvin McLeod: How Do you define mindfulness?

Jon Kabat-Zinn: Nowadays, the word mindfulness is used in a lot of different contexts. To some degree, its deep meaning has been obscured through becoming so popular in the mainstream world. That itself is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is best if one’s understanding of mindfulness comes out of one’s attempts to cultivate it in one’s life. The way I use the word, it basically means pure awareness. That said, mindfulness is also a way of being—or put differently, a way of accessing your intrinsic genius and beauty, which Buddhists would call your true nature, or buddhanature. As a practice, mindfulness is all about accessing and embodying awareness.

The interesting thing is that all human beings are born with awareness. So, it’s not like we have to acquire anything. But we’re also born with this incredible capacity to think and emote. Often, we get so caught up in thinking and emoting that we lose touch with who’s doing all this thinking and emoting—and why. This frequently creates a good deal of suffering for ourselves and for others, as well as considerable ignorance and delusion in not recognizing how caught up we are in the thought stream.

Mindfulness is an invitation to wake up to what is unfolding in the present moment, including the experience of being embodied. It is pointing to your own miraculous nature in this only moment, located someplace between when you were born and when you’re not going to be around anymore. With every moment and every breath, we have, to a first approximation, an infinite number of opportunities to drop in on ourselves, to be where we actually are, and inhabit or take up residency in awareness itself, rather than being caught up 24-7 in being lost in thought and/or trying to get someplace else, or wanting a “special experience,” without recognizing that this very moment in which you are alive is itself extraordinarily special, even if it looks entirely ordinary. 

What is the view of human nature that forms the foundation of mindfulness or awareness practice?

That we are already perfect—in the sense of being perfectly who and what we are, including all the imperfections that come from the thinking mind. If you’re saying, “Well, he doesn’t know who I am, and he doesn’t know my history and all the ways in which I’m tortured or have done harmful, unfortunate things to myself and others,” I’d say all that’s included too. 

“Mindfulness is not one more thing you have to squeeze into your day, a task with some hoped-for outcome. It’s a love affair with the present moment.”

Awareness as a human capacity is something of a mystery. No neuroscientist can tell you how awareness or sentience arises out of trillions of synaptic connections in the brain among hundreds of billions of neurons. Nobody knows how we go from that kind of neural activity in the brain and nervous system to you and I knowing, in some profound way, that—even though we’re maybe thousands of miles apart on this Zoom call—we’re sharing in the same mental space, the boundless spaciousness of awareness itself, embodied in each of us. Everyone is capable of holding the present moment in awareness. It is an intrinsic part of the human repertoire. That said, it takes a certain degree of intentional cultivation, which we call meditation practice, to recognize the opportunity in this moment and sustain it moment by moment both on the meditation cushion and, even more importantly, in our unfolding lives.

How do we transform our understanding of awareness from an abstract mystery to something we actively cultivate and embody in our daily lives?

If you’re wrapped up in your thinking and don’t know that it is possible to inhabit the space of awareness as your “default mode” rather than being perpetually caught up in the thought stream, your access to it might feel haphazard and unreliable. That’s where a certain degree of training and regular, disciplined, intentional practice or cultivation comes in. That’s why meditation isn’t just a “good idea.” It’s the enactment of your motivation to be fully present in your life in this only moment we call now.

To live in awareness rather than defaulting to constant thinking, imagining, and emoting—that’s a practice. And it takes practice. It’s a lot like exercising a muscle. I often use the analogy of going to the gym. If you’re interested in developing your bicep, you take an appropriate weight, flex your arm so the muscle contracts, and then let it out. You do that repeatedly. 

Of course, with weightlifting you may be motivated by wanting a beautifully sculpted bicep. But with meditation practice, it’s not about striving for a particular desirable endpoint. It’s about being in and with the moment you find yourself in, which is always this one, and working with whatever arises moment by moment, including the unwanted, the unpleasant, and the difficult, as well as with the pleasant and the merely neutral.

Very often, we fall into stories of how stressful life is, how painful it is, how unsuccessful I am, or whatever our narratives are. Instead of falling into that thought domain—which, of course, we’ll do a million times—the meditation practice is an invitation to listen to the thoughts and emotions that arise, and to be the knowing itself.

That knowing is the awareness function. It’s a domain you become more intimate with the more you practice watching how your mind works. It is never quiet. It’s always running some program or other. And most of those programs, if you look carefully, are all about “I,” “me,” and “mine.”

The Buddha is famous for having said, “Nothing is to be clung to as ‘I,’ ‘me,’ or ‘mine.’” So, what do we mean when we say, “I like,” “I’m sad,” “I’m happy,” “I want,” or “I’m inadequate”? It turns out, in each case, it’s just a thought arising in the mind in the present moment, along with, usually, some kind of feelings in the body, sometimes subtle, sometimes not. But when you believe that thought, you’re immediately imprisoned by it. And when you see that you’re imprisoned by it, you’re already not imprisoned any longer because the seeing itself is liberative.

That’s why meditation is spoken of as a liberative practice. It’s about liberating ourselves from the prisons of our own mental creations.

Can you speak more about how you see the relationship between Buddhism and other spiritual traditions and mindfulness?

I have something of an allergy to the word spiritual for various reasons, and I never think of mindfulness as religious. The interesting thing about the Buddhist tradition is that there is no God (although there are many deities, but that is another story), making it different from God-based religions. It’s more akin to a scientific inquiry, an investigation. That’s what meditation is. You investigate the nature of your own mind directly, tapping into our capacity to take up residency, so to speak, in awareness itself.  

We are all born with this capacity for holding and recognizing experience, namely awareness itself. Over the decades, I’ve come to see awareness itself as a kind of superpower, one that everyone already possesses by virtue of being born a human being. So, meditation is not a matter of acquiring anything or having a “special” experience. Rather, it is simply recognizing that any and every experience—good, bad, or ugly, pleasant, unpleasant, or neither—is already special, and waking up to that way of seeing and being involves accessing a dimension of being that we all already have, rather than acquiring anything new that we are missing. A more reliable access usually comes from strong intentionality, coupled with disciplined practice, sitting, walking, lying down, and standing—the four classical postures in which one practices formal meditation. There’s nothing that privileges sitting per se, although often it looks that way. 

Apocryphally, the Buddha was said to have radiated a palpable sense of benevolence, peace, and luminous presence—often captured in statues of him sitting—causing people to ask “Are you a god?” to which he is said to have responded, “No. I’m awake.”

How would you explain the relationship between formal meditation practice and mindfulness in everyday life? Can mindfulness in daily life be effective without the grounding of sitting meditation?

If you are asking if meditation is just sitting practice, the answer is no, of course not. The real meditation practice is how you live your life from moment to moment. But thinking you can just practice mindfulness in everyday life without grounding it in sitting is like thinking you could play a Mozart violin concerto on a Stradivarius without practicing.

Sitting meditation—or some other combination of formal practices—and mindfulness in daily life are both necessary, at least for me. They form one seamless whole, life expressing itself moment by moment by moment. But getting my rear end on the cushion on a daily basis, now over many decades, was and is to this day an incredibly important aspect of my life, and I have come to see it, every time, as a radical act of sanity and love to take my seat in that way. 

That said, the forms the meditation practice takes invariably change over time, especially as you come to see life as the real mediation practice, and that every moment is this moment and worthy of our attention and care. For instance, as Thich Nhat Hanh used to emphasize, washing the dishes is as much a meditation as anything else, if you are present for it moment by moment. There are no moments that are not worthy of being inhabited. That’s the real practice—open-hearted, embodied wakefulness.

Now, it’s easy to say those words, but actually it’s the hardest thing in the world to cultivate even one moment of mindfulness in daily life, to even be with one in-breath, or one out-breath. That’s where discipline, coupled with the rigor of formal meditation, is really important.

It’s argued in many philosophies, religions, and psychologies that obsessive focus on ourselves is a major cause of suffering. One can make an intellectual case for this—and it’s a pretty solid case—but what actually convinces people of this truth is the direct experience of awareness that is free from narrow focus on yourself, that is open, relaxed, free of struggle, and a great relief. 

Exactly, and you don’t need to have a fancy vocabulary for talking about it. I studied with a Korean Zen master named Seung Sahn Sunim, and one of the things he was fond of saying was “Open your mouth and you’re wrong.” It’s hard to talk about awareness without falling into reifying narratives about it, then idealizing it, and striving to attain the fabricated ideal. What you’re looking for is direct, immediate experience, underneath words and concepts. Seung Sahn framed it as “don’t make anything,” meaning freighting moments of experience with concepts, evaluations, gaining ideas, liking and disliking, etc. 

I think most of us realize that our education didn’t end with our schooling. It is the adventure of a lifetime to continue learning and growing and recognizing what is deepest and best in ourselves and each other. School traditionally stresses a lot of thinking and social interactions, but K through 12 teachers are now coming to mindfulness themselves and bringing it into their classrooms. Why? Because it’s hard to get the class to pay attention, never mind sustain it over time. So, it makes a lot of sense to teach children the how of paying attention rather than just imploring them to do so. I’ve been in inner-city classrooms in some of the country’s most challenged school systems. I’ve seen kids in first grade, in kindergarten, drop into the present moment and settle into stillness. Even if half the children have an ADHD diagnosis, which I was told was the case, you could hear a pin drop—remarkable stillness, silence, nobody moving, fidgeting. Almost anybody is capable of this kind of dropping into the present moment. But it helps if you are introduced to the practice from the very beginning in a way that can take root and feels commonsensical—nothing special, and so, simultaneously extraordinarily special.

How do we approach meditation as a moment by moment experience of life, rather than as a task or goal to achieve?

Mindfulness is not one more thing you have to squeeze into your day, a task with some hoped-for outcome. As I’ve been suggesting, it’s a love affair with the present moment, which is the only moment we’re ever actually alive in, no matter how old or young we are. 

“The real dharma is beyond words and concepts. It is not indoctrination into some philosophy. It’s a way of living inside experience.”

Taking one’s seat as a love affair with life in this only moment, however it is, is not only the intention—it is also the result. And that’s where the phrase “nondual practice” comes in. A fundamental misunderstanding is that when you’re meditating, you’re trying to get somewhere else. For example, if you have an annoying pain in your knee, you’re trying to ignore it or get rid of it. But the invitation is to experience this moment with things exactly as they are, and then just be at home to whatever degree you can, including with the discomfort and the sense of struggling. You can always ask yourself, and investigate in the present moment, “Is the awareness of the sense of struggling itself caught in the struggling?”; “Is the awareness of the pain or anxiety in pain or anxious?” You can check that out directly in any and every moment, and realize something extremely important about the nature of awareness itself and its relationship to experience. Awareness can be seen as a hidden-in-plain-sight dimension, orthogonal to everyday experience, but infinitely accessible and inhabitable in any and every moment, affording a new angle for seeing reality as it is, and liberating unnecessary selfing and suffering. 

What advice would you give to someone who might claim they’re “bad” at meditating?

People often think meditation should feel a certain way. So, if you’re meditating, and your butt hurts, your shoulders are tense, and everything feels wrong, you might think, “This isn’t what I’m supposed to be feeling.” But those judgmental thoughts are just that—thoughts moving through your mind, not the full truth of the present moment. That is exactly what you’re supposed to be feeling in this moment, because that is what is being experienced. As soon as you realize this, you can choose to put out the welcome mat for things exactly as they are, including all the inner narratives in your mind, the liking and the disliking, the wanting and the pushing away, and recognize that awareness itself doesn’t have a problem with any of that. 

You are not trying to attain some perfect state. Rather, you are simply recognizing that the condition right now, when held in awareness, is just what it is. I won’t call it perfect because then people will misunderstand what I’m saying, but it’s perfect in the sense that in this moment, your life is just like this, perfectly what it is.

When you hold that in awareness, you don’t need to worry about the next moment. It will take care of itself. Then meditation doesn’t have to stop when you get off the cushion, because the breath keeps going, and life keeps going too, until it doesn’t. So, every moment becomes the true meditation practice.

We all have awareness. We all are awareness in a certain way, but we almost never actually realize it. As soon as you’re aware, you’re inhabiting a dimension that was hidden from you a moment before, and as I just said, that gives you new degrees of freedom with which to relate appropriately to the good, the bad, and the ugly, the full catastrophe of the human condition.

Is there a choice between focusing on the specific concrete benefits of mindfulness practice and taking the more profound nondual view you just offered us? I want to suggest that, in fact, there’s no such conflict. For things to be practical and benefit our lives, they ultimately must be based on profound truths. And vice versa—if truths are profound, they must have clear benefits in our lives.

That’s the power of the dharma—it’s a wake-up call that’s remarkably commonsensical. The world is, in some sense, starving for this liberative wisdom. When we drift into us-ing and them-ing and all of the kinds of dualisms that we are plagued with, we are ignoring or actively disregarding the common thread of humanity and of life itself on planet Earth, and we create very unfortunate consequences, including wars and global warming.

You said the world is starving for this. What is the “this”?

It is mindfulness, heartfulness, compassion, kindness, embodied in such a way that it informs how we govern ourselves in our own lives, how we govern ourselves as societies, how we govern ourselves as a species. 

The real dharma is beyond words and concepts. It is not indoctrination into some philosophy. It’s a way of living inside experience. The fact is, most of us need to have it pointed out to us that we’re embodied. We’re so in our heads that we believe everything we think and feel. And that is a source of enormous misery, suffering, delusion, and violence. 

When you begin to see that awareness is at least as powerful as cognition, then you can restore balance, at least in your own life and relationships, and perhaps in some small but not insignificant way, in the larger world. You might begin to recognize the beauty and the miracle of being alive, and the potential for living life as if it really mattered in the larger world of belonging, where everyone else is recognized as fully embodied and equally belonging too.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Jon Kabat-Zinn is professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School where he founded the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society and introduced the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course in 1979. He is the author of Full Catastrophe Living and Wherever You Go, There You Are.

Melvin McLeod

Melvin McLeod is the editor-in-chief of Lion’s Roar.