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meng: hi. good morning, my friends. for those who don't knowme, my name is meng. and for those who know me,my name is still meng. surprise. i'm google's jollygood fellow. and one of the people i blamefor my jolliness is dr. jon kabat-zinn. when i was young, i read hisfirst book, this book.

and this book deepened myinterest and my understanding of meditation. and it is from this meditationthat i found inner peace and happiness, and i've beenjolly ever since. so it's jon's fault. i blame you. and jon has been a heroto me ever since. now jon has accomplished manygreat things in his life. he has a very long bio, andi'm not sure i want to go

through his whole bio. so i'll just mentionone thing. if history remembers jon foronly one thing, that will be for being the first person tosuccessfully bring meditation into mainstream medicine. and i believe his impacton humanity can only grow over time. and we're honored to have jongive a meditation class today. my friends, i give youjon kabat-zinn.

[applause] jon kabat-zinn: so what a niceturnout for this time of day, when there are all sorts ofother gala events happening, i guess, on campus. i guess the meditators,or those interested in meditation, know that sometimesmore hoopla is not necessarily where it's at. nice to see somebody witha us rowing shirt. one of the adventures that i wasin some time ago had to do

with training the us olympicrowing team in mindfulness, back in 1984 at lake casitas. and it was really quite aninteresting experience, in part because rowers competesitting down. so learning how to sitis not in some sense relevant to them. they also compete goingbackwards, which is very interesting. and if you're not in a single,then you're competing with

other minds and other bodiesin the same boat. and to get that into some kindof harmony and synchrony is non-trivial, and doesn't justhave to do with the body. when the mind and body becomeone, then the boat and the water and the wind and allthe minds become one, and something very interestinghappens. so i'm really touched thatyou've come out in the middle of the workday topartake of a-- what do you want to call this,a class or a workshop on what

could most easily be describedas much ado about almost nothing. it's not quite nothing, but it'snot so much about doing as about being, or asthe taoists would call it, it's non-doing. and there is a way in whichthat seems awfully anti-american, since we're suchgo-getters, and it's all about doing, and getting itdone, and crossing off everything on your to do list.

but if we get out of touch withwho's doing the doing, actually that canbe quite tragic. and not just from the point ofbeing so stressed out because you're always runningon a treadmill and-- have you noticed there's noend to work at google? there's no end to the workday. i mean you guys define it,because the campus is structured so that you'llnever have to go home. you can have a real life, if youwant to separate life into

that kind of a way. but it's actually, even beforethere was google, the digital revolution is actuallydelocalizing everything, so that there's no workplaceanymore, really, because you can work anywhere. there's no work weekanymore, because, i mean, there's no workday. so all the boundariesare being confused. but we're still really saddledwith a stone age mind in a

digital age world. and that stone age mind, unlessit has a certain kind-- unless it engages in a certainkind of self-education, can really wind up getting stuckin some realms of serious confusion, suffering, beinglost, and in fact maybe even-- and i just want to throw thisout as a possibility-- impeding creativity,imagination, real thoughtfulness, realbreakthrough-type leadership sensibilities, because we're notrunning on all cylinders.

or, to use even i think a bettermetaphor, and one that i like a lot, is thatwe're living in a multi-dimensional universe. and if you listen to thecosmologists, and the string physicists, and the vacuumenergy physicists, and so forth, we're living in auniverse that's not even 4-dimensional, it's more like11, or 26, or whatever it is. and we still haven't reallygrokked einstein's contribution of spacetimeas four dimensions.

so if we are not in touch withthe multiple dimensions of our own being-- and there are manyhidden dimensions to being embodied in the human lifetimefor an unbelievably short period of time-- then, in fact, we're kind ofin some way trying to get somewhere and get allthis doing done without tuning the apparatus. it would be like thephiladelphia philharmonic or some great orchestra, let'ssay san francisco symphony

orchestra, playing beethovenwithout tuning first. and no matter-- they could have the greatestmusicians with the greatest instruments in the world, andthey still tune first, to themselves and to each other. and so in a sense, i like to saymeditation, in some sense you could say it's like tuningyour instrument before you take it out on the road. and tuning it in the morning canmake a big difference in

how the whole day goes, juston a kind of mundane level, never mind all the hiddendimensions of possibility, imagination. and yet it does seem really, insome sense, outside of the common norms of our culture. and so, whether it's in thebay area or sort of less charged places like that, it'svery easy to kind of accrete a kind of feeling on the part ofother people that there's something weird about stillness,or about silence,

or about self-reflection,about non-doing. and i want to say there'snothing weird or anti-american about this at all, orun-american about this at all. it's in some sense a recognitionof sanity, and that doing and being havealways been intimately interrelated, and without somekind of deep reflection, well, where do you think scientificbreakthroughs or engineering breakthroughs come from? they all come out ofthe human mind.

and very often they comeserendipitously, in the middle of the night or in dreamsor whatever. and there have been nobel prizesthat have come just from like a dream, like a snakeeating its tail, and voila, you've got thebenzene ring and all the molecular orbitals. and there are lots of instanceslike that, that in science, it's notwhat you know. it's what you're willing to knowyou don't know, and then

to linger at that sometimes veryuncomfortable place of having banged your head, andbanged your head, and banged your head, and gone through alot of different kinds of solutions, none of whichactually lead to any kind of a solution. and all of a suddenyou just like, ok. and you don't try to forceanything anymore. and you just open. and you go, in some sense,beyond thinking.

you go beyond thinking. it's not like you're discountingthought, but in some sense you're givingyourself over to something that's just much bigger that wenever get educated around. it never hardly isever mentioned. sometimes it might becalled intuition. sometimes it might becalled creativity. i call it awareness. when was the last time you hada course in awareness, or it

was even mentioned as importantin school, aside from, say, people yelling atyou if you were looking out the window and the teachercaught you doing it and said, pay attention, as if payingattention was some kind of military discipline,and a bad thing. so from the point of view themeditative traditions, the entire society is sufferingfrom attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,certifiable diagnosis. from the point of view of themeditative traditions, because

it's all about doingand there's no recognition of being. so in a sense, there'sno place to rest. and what this work is really allabout is saying, there is plenty of place to rest, andthere's plenty of time. it's not like, oh, you've got tosqueeze this into your busy day, because awareness isboundless and infinitely available in every moment, nomatter what you're doing. so if the doing is coming, insome sense, out of being, out

of awareness, then it's notlike, well, i have to find an hour to meditate, and ifi can find an hour then to hell with it. because that's a kind ofidealization, that's what in some traditions they call againing idea, that now i'm going to meditate to getbetter at something. i'm going to meditate so thati can be more like a samurai mind, cuts through all, discernsall problems clearly, cuts through the gordian knotof it and goes right to the

solution, breakthroughafter breakthrough. and of course, that'san idealization. non-doing really meansnon-doing. and radically speaking, itmeans giving up wanting anything else to happen in eventhe next moment, never mind at the end of the day or atthe end of a year, in terms of the bottom line, and beingwilling to just stand in how things are in this moment. now, i would like thisto be interactive and

conversational. i can talk for hoursabout this stuff-- i mean, really, i'm embarrassedto say it-- because it's so much-- well, i would say that for me,meditation is an act of love, and, as i was implying, an actof sanity, just to stop for a fraction of a second and drop. sometimes i even bringa tennis ball in, like drop into being.

you think, well, if i do that,maybe i'll lose my mind. i don't want to gointo my mind. many people i knew and grew upwith were nobel laureates. and i asked one, george wald,actually, at harvard, who won the nobel prize for colorvision, and we-- he was my yoga student,and meditations through many years. but before that he said, idon't want to get into meditation.

i spent my whole lifefine-tuning my thinking mind so that it works. what if i go into meditation,i lose my mind? i say, yes, what if yougo into meditation and find your mind? imagine. you're a big boy, george. you've already wonthe nobel prize. why are you so worried aboutlosing your mind?

we're talking about befriendingyour mind. we're talking about, in a sense,making friends with this aspect of being that is asworthy of paying attention to as the cones androds in the eye. so he got into it. and in his old age, he'dsit on the beach and bang a drum and chant. and he was really into it. it didn't make himany stupider.

so what i think might be besttoday is if we actually, rather than me just talkingendlessly about this from one angle or another and reallyhave it be kind of advertisement, that we actuallypractice a little bit, like a laboratory, and wedrop in on our own minds, in this moment. whatever reason you came, imean, everybody's busy, right? so if you walked into this roomthere's something really interesting about that.

i don't know what it is. and my guess is, on somedeep level, you don't know what it is. ok? but it's interesting. you made some kindof a choice. and each one of us willhave made that choice for different reasons. even my choice for why didi come here today.

i've got other thingsto do too. so there's something veryinteresting going on, a little bit indeterminate, and isee it as an adventure. to sort of just loop back towhat i was saying, it's an adventure in finding out whoyou actually are, and then embodying that in ways thatcould actually add dimensions, and therefore value, to yourlife, in ways that are really not conceivable. you can't think your way to whatthe outcome of this will

be and then try to get there,because the irony is, you're already here. you're here in this room. you came. but you're always here. there is no there. yes, we can formulate goals. that's one of the most amazingthings about thought and imagination, is we can projectout into the future.

and we can develop models forhow we're going to go from here to there. but if we don't know here, thenthe there is going to be colored by what we, in somesense, are unfamiliar with, and unwilling to look at. tacit assumptions, for instance,have sunk many, many boats in the world of scienceand engineering, just tacit assumptions that we haven'treally paid attention to, because--

for whatever, usuallyemotional reasons. do emotions--? do you know what i'm saying? so to be able to-- for one period of time, heretoday, as a laboratory, whether you've been meditatingfor years and you just want to see one more person comingthrough google talking about mindfulness, or whether thisis totally new to you and somehow you don't evenknow why you're

here, but you're here. it's what suzuki roshi used tocall "beginner's mind." and the beginner's mind is notsomething that you only have at the beginning. the whole point is to cultivatebeginner's mind moment by moment. one korean zen masterthat i studied with, named seung sahn-- who talked in this fantasticenglish, because he never

bothered to learn englishgrammar, syntax, or words, for that matter, so he couldcommunicate to americans in ways that just-- he just called it "don't knowmind." and he would talk about it like this, who am i? he'd do this like, who am i? that's a fundamental meditativequestion. who am i or what am i? and then he'd sit in his robes,and bald head, and

gnarled zen stick that he usedto beat his students with metaphorically. he'd say, who am i? and he'd say, don't know. and keeping that not knowing isthe best way to interface between the known and theunknown at the edge of creativity and science,or, for that matter, in family life. you think you know whoyour children are?

forget it. you'll never know whoyour children are. you think you know whoyou're sleeping with? you'll never-- or, at least, you'll have toget out of your own way an awful lot to not just see theprojections onto that person of your own mind. and then it's like it does,in some sense, denature relationships.

even if, i love you, honey, butif it's all about me, it may actually turn toxic. is it any wonder like, youknow, my wife left me. what happened? i don't know. she just left one day. oh, i see. that was the first symptom? yes, it might have been, ifyou're-- in unawareness, you

don't pay any attention to thesigns and symptoms, and all of a sudden like whammo, you'rehit with a heart attack. but it's very unlikely that thatwas the first symptom. sometimes, with sudden cardiacdeath actually, the first symptom is your last. butusually, there are all sorts of prodromal warning signs,whether it's relationships or relationship to your ownbody and health. and if you're not payingattention to them, the body or the world is going to up theante to try to get you to wake

up while you still have a chanceto come to your senses. and it's the senses,in a sense-- it's the senses that arefundamentally the only way we can know the world. and there are many more thanfive senses. and the buddhists include mind itself as a sense,because you can see without seeing. if your mind is not tuned in,you can see all sorts of things and not see them.

you can hear all sorts ofthings and not hear. i mean, have you ever hadanybody who loves you a lot say, well, you neverlisten to me. of course, because we're justlistening to ourselves, the story of me, and where i'm goingand how great it is, or how depressing it is andhow unworthy i am. and it's like, me,me, me, i, i, i. so the heart of this wholething is to begin to examine, who am i?

because you're notwhat you think. and someone once gave mea t-shirt that said, "meditation. it's not what you think." and it's true. so one thing in medicine that'sreally important that we train the medical students ina lot now, but it's amazing how you have to even trainpeople in this, because it's not so common sensical. don't put a desk betweenyou and the patient.

don't sit back as the bigauthority and say, well, let me help you. move in. cultivate a certain kind ofappropriate distance, not instant intimacy, but at thesame time something even deeper than intimacy, which iswhat i would call recognition. oh, a human being has walkedin, usually in pain of one kind or another, frightened,doesn't know what they have. just fixing them is notadequate medicine.

so medicine, as this man wasimplying, is changing tremendously. and i'll just say, as part ofmy little advertisement for some of the dimensions in whichwe work-- because it's much bigger than healthcare and medicine. i started out doing this inmedicine, in terms of bringing mindfulness into the mainstreamof institutions. medicine and meditation sounda lot alike, don't they? they come from the sameroot meaning.

so there's something about beinghuman that we have been ignoring, and i would sayup to now, at our peril. and if we can bring being anddoing together, the doing is going to be much moremagnificent, and at the same time, perhaps much morebalanced, much less smoke and heat, and much more light, andclarity, and breakthrough. and at the same time, we cando that in a way that's not dualistic, like at the expenseof our lives or of our relationships, or our children,or, for that matter,

our health and our body, orother aspects of our mind that we feel like are interests thatwe never have time for, because we are so addictedto getting things done. all right. so how many of you are old-timemeditators, whatever that means to you? raise your hands. how many of you are brand new toit, this is the first time you've come to anything havingto do meditation and you'd

rather be wearing a mask orsomething to disguise you. ok. wonderful. and then everybody in between. how many of you used to have ameditation-- none of you are old enough, maybe, or very fewof you are old enough, i can see, to used to have ameditation in the '60s or whatever, and then fell off thewagon and wished you could get back, but every timeyou try it's too

hard and you don't. anybody like that? yes. welcome. so let's start from firstprinciples, ok? we talked about beginner'smind. let's just start fromthe beginning. we only have momentsin which to live. the future is a concept.

a very useful concept, i'mnot putting it down. the past, memory, isalso a concept. but the only time in which ourlives are unfolding is now. and now has some very, veryinteresting properties that if we learn to inhabit now more,with awareness, it's almost as if the universe becomesyour teacher. because there's no boundaryto this, there's no boundary to awareness. you can't put your finger onwhere your awareness stops.

if you want to go and right nowhave lunch with somebody in a restaurant in la, even ifthe restaurant's not open, you can open a restaurant, havedinner, lunch, dinner, whatever, with that person,right now, because of no problem. you can have a google mind andjust hold the whole world, and everything that's being searchedfor right in this moment in google. and you can go meditate onwhatever that selective span

of google searches is that'sgoing on in the main lobby. and it's only some fractionof what's really going on. even in your own mind, if youstart to pay attention to anything in your mind, it's onlysome small fraction of the universe of things thatare going on in your mind. and yet if i ask you toshow me your mind, where would you point? you'd point to the head. sorry.

mind and brain may notbe the same thing. the brain we can point to. the mind is a littlemore interesting. that's why zen masters willoften say, show me your mind, and then wait to seewhat you do. it's a little bit like takinga number on one of those old fashioned adding machines,and dividing it by zero. and you still-- cachunk,cachunk, cachunk, cachunk, cachunk, and nothingever happens.

and that can be a very powerfulway of waking people up to these other dimensions. so what we know, we have a body,relatively speaking, and we're here now. so let's see if we can tune into now, for no other reason than just for fun. just not to get anywhere, to bemore relaxed, to become a great meditator, to breakthrough some problems that you're having, whatever it is,but to just see if you can

hold this moment in awareness. you don't even have toshift your posture. just hold this momentin awareness. now, there's a lot going on,because as i said, i mean even if we limit it to five senses,if your eyes are open they're seeing. your ears you can't close,so there's hearing. your nose you can't close, sothere's some kind of sensing going on through the nose, somearoma of rug and wall.

there's whatever the sensationsare in the mouth. and there's the contact of theback with the back of the chair, and your buttwith the chair. and if you're on the floor-- so there's what's calledproprioception. let's see-- and there is,of course, one aspect of proprioception which is,interestingly enough, without any effort on our part-- thankgod, because otherwise we would have died long ago forjust like forgetting, getting

distracted. we're breathing. if breathing depended on theconscious mind, as i said, we'd all be dead already. oh, i got busy, forgot. oh, yes, i'm supposedto breathe. luckily, the nervous system,the design of the nervous system, is much too cleverto leave that to conscious control.

yes, you can fiddle with ita bit, but what's being suggested is, see if we can justdrop in on the sensations of breathing without fiddlingwith the breathing at all. it knows how to do it reallywell, much better than you. so see if you can just feelyourself breathing, without intentionally drawing an inbreath or an out breath. if it helps, and of course thebreath is in some sense constrained or formed by howwe're sitting, so if you're sitting like this, it contractsthe chest. and so

there may be a natural tendencyto sit in with a spine that's elevated and erect,in a position that embodies dignity, just so thatyou can meet this moment in its fullness with alertness,whatever that means to you. it could be lying down. it doesn't have to be sitting. it could be hanging from yourtoes from the ceiling. and let's see if we canfeel the breath. not think about the breath,but just feel the breath

moving in and out of the body,as if we were in some sense approaching a shy animal sunningitself on a tree stump in a clearing in a forest. it'slike, we want to approach gently, and just drop in. and ride the waves of the breathin the body, maybe down in your belly, where there's allsorts of stuff going on, on the in breath andthe out breath. you're not breathing deeply. you're not pushing.

you're not pulling. and if you'd like to concentratemore, focus on the abdomen or wherever thesensations are most vivid, i invite you to close youreyes if you care to. it's not at all necessary. and just ride, surf, on thefeeling, the sensations, of the breath moving in and outof your body, moment by moment, by moment. and let everything else goingon in the mind, in the room,

the sounds, everything,just be in the wings. you're not suppressinganything. you're just featuring the breathcenter stage in the field of awareness, as is yourlife depended on it, of course, which it really does, inmore ways than one, in more ways than you can even think. now, whether you've beenmeditating for years, or this is really your first exposure towhat you might call formal meditation instruction, itdoesn't take long before you

realize that, having just givenyourself this very, very simple assignment to feel thebreath moving in and out of the body, and resting in thatawareness, attending to the sensations, that the mind kindof has a life of its own. and it won't just stay on thebelly, or the nostrils, or wherever you're followingthe breath. and it'll start commenting onyour experience, that maybe you're already wishing youhadn't come, and are looking for a graceful way to gettowards the exit while our

eyes are closed. or that this is stupid andboring, and how could this tap into anything useful? or, the mind may just kind ofdrift off into reverie, or thinking about how much you'vegot to get done by the end of the day, and going throughyour to do list and maybe getting more anxious. or feeling so happy you're herethat you don't want to go back to work, and thinkingyou'll take the

rest of the day off. whatever it is, you've losttouch with the breath. that's for sure. so it's important that youknow, whether you've been meditating for 50 years or more,or this is your first experience of it, that this isjust the way the mind is. it's normal. there's nothing wrongwith you. and it's not like, oh, you'llmake a bad meditator because

your mind is unruly. that's the nature of the mind. it's just like thepacific ocean. it waves, depending on theatmospheric conditions. but even when it's at its mosttumultuous, if you learn to drop down 20 or 30 feet underthe water, there's just gentle calmness, undulation,stillness, and it's always present. and it's the samewith the mind.

the surface of the mind can bevery agitated, embroiled in thought and emotion,but awareness itself is like the depths. and although we've never beenexposed to this in any systematic way, you can learn,by just coming back to the breath over and over andover again, that it's not about the breath. it's about the awareness. that includes knowing thatyour mind wandered in the

first place, and what itgot embroiled with. so the added instruction at thispoint would be any time you notice that your mind is nolonger in your breath, let your awareness take noteof what's on your mind. sooner or later it will, andyou'll have a little mini realization. oh my god, i'm supposedto be on the breath. i thought that was so simpleto do, and i've been off someplace for whoknows how long.

not a problem. guess what? it's still now. so in this moment, just-- your body's still breathing. can you reconnect with featuringthe breath center stage in the fieldof awareness? it's not about the breath. and the breath is simply askillful means for befriending

this deep capacity of theheart and mind that is sometimes called awarenessing. i sometimes call awarenessingtoo, in distinction to thinking. it's just bigger than thinking,because it can hold thought, as well. so if the mind wanders, youknow what's on your mind. you bring it back. if it wanders 10,000 times, youknow what's on your mind

10,000 times. and without judging, condemning,forcing, blaming, just come back to thismoment, this breath. each breath, a new beginning. each out breath, a completeletting go. and voila, here you are again,right here, and no agenda. just this moment. just this breath. just this sitting here.

outside of time, if you will. ensconced in the now. timeless. in awareness. so this sounds simple,and it is. but it's not easy. this is a very, very challengingdiscipline, actually, because the mind isso unruly and so conditioned to fall into liking anddisliking, and wanting to be

entertained, and so highlyconditioned, that to just get really basic and befriend anyaspect of experience and sustain that attending with acertain kind of tenderness, as a radical act of love andkindness, just towards yourself, simply to stop and tobe, requires a certain kind of motivation to befriend yourexperience in this way, the moments that you do have whileyou're alive, wherever you are, whatever is up for you. and silence, this kind ofsilence that's pregnant with

awareness itself, with what youmight call pure awareness, is available 24/7. whether you're in front of yourcomputer or not, whether you're at home or here, whereveryou are, it's part of the repertoire, and a veryfundamental part of the repertoire of being human. silence. and i apologize for talkingso much about silence. ultimately, the more youpractice the less there is any

need for talk or thought. and the meditation practicewinds up doing you much more than you are doing themeditation practice. and the world, and everybody,and everything, becomes your teacher, and not in anygrandiose new age bullshit kind of way. just obvious, basic. so let's play in the fewremaining moments that we'll stay with this guidedmeditation, keeping in mind

that my voice is merely meant tobe like pointing out places to look or to feel or to see,and so if you don't find it helpful, than just findingyour own way to be in relationship to thepresent moment. but remembering that i'm nottrying to give you any experience, certainly notrelaxation or a sense of well-being or anything. it's not about that. it's simply reminding you, andin a sense, hopefully also,

although you can't say it inenglish, re-bodying you to rest, to learn, to remember howto rest in awareness, an awareness that can hold anythingand everything in this only moment we ever havefor knowing, for learning, for loving, for working,for seeing beneath the surface of things. so let's play with expanding thefield of awareness around the breath, wherever we'vebeen featuring the breath sensations, until it includes asense of the body as a whole

sitting here breathing. and if you've sort of slumped orcollapsed in your posture, at this point why don't yousee if you can reestablish yourself in a posture thatembodies dignity, to your full dignity and wakefulness toyou, whatever that means. not in any kind of idealizedway, we're not talking west point or military academy, we'resimply talking about letting awareness fill the body,and find, if you will, an optimal way to be inthis moment, sitting.

so that the breath flows mostfreely and most unimpeded. so that the mind has a qualityof lightness to it, and a light touch. and seeing if you can feel yourskin breathing, perhaps, because of course it does. and if you can't, just imaginingthat you can feel your skin breathing or just feelyour skin, the envelope of the body. and all of the sensations withinthe body, however they

are, just let them be what theyare, held in awareness. the breath of course is a partof that, so the awareness can be very narrowly columnated,where the attention is very, very one-pointed, or it canbe much broader, like a wide-angle lens, 360. and let's actually allow theawareness to also include sounds, since the ears,as we said, were open. and they're happening in thismoment as well, so we're not excluding anything.

body sitting, breathing,and hearing. and the awareness can justalready hold it. you don't need to knowhow to do it. it already knows how to do it. it does it all the time. but we're not awareof awareness. so this is new, perhaps. and then why stop here? let's allow the field ofawareness to include any

thoughts or feelings that itmight be flitting through the field of the mind, whichyou might think of as like the sky. you know, vast, and, insome sense, boundless. so thoughts come, they go. they're usually associated withemotions of one kind or another, pleasant, unpleasant,neutral. intense, mild, moderate. and just let your awarenesstake in the whole thing,

without pursuing anything,without rejecting anything, what you might call resting ina choice-less awareness. now, not focusing on any object,but just allowing whatever objects of attentionarise to be seen, felt, and known in their arising,in their passing away, moment by moment. so it could be justthe breath. or it could be just this vastpanoply, and you can decide where you want to focus yourattention, on the objects, or

on an objectless awareness, achoiceless open spaciousness, that you could think of asawareness without objects. pure, and filling the body,surrounding the body, filling the heart. calming, if you will, theagitations of the mind simply by this tenderness in theattending moment by moment, by moment, by moment, by moment. without any judging of yourexperience whatsoever, no condemning, no pursuing,no pushing away,

no liking, no disliking. of course, that's a fantasy. you'll have all sorts oflikes and dislikes. but just allow your awarenessto know the liking and disliking, without judgingeven that. resting in an awareness ofawareness itself, moment by moment, as we sit herebreathing, fully awake. if you get lost, you can alwayscome back to the belly and to the breath.

and remember it's not aboutthe belly or the breath. it's about the awareness thatis, in some sense, re-invited to the table by focusingon the object. but it's actually always here. you're just not used to takingup residence in awareness, because we are so in our heads,so carried away by the thought stream, and byemotions that we find difficult to deal with, and thatreinforce the sense of me, my problems, mylife, my ambition.

the story of me, and where i'mgoing, which is just a story. it's just more thought. how about letting your awarenessbe part of who you are, maybe a much bigger partthan the stories you tell that are intrinsically limited,limiting, and inaccurate. i'd like to invite you, if youreyes are closed, to allow your eyes to open whilemaintaining the same quality of awareness. so nothing is any different,it's just that now if your

eyes were closed, there'salso sights. but you can maintain the sameawarenessing even as you turn your head or shift yourbody or stretch. and just to kind of formalizethe close of the formal practice, guided practice, i'lljust rings some bells. we should just-- you won't hear the bells, whatyou'll hear is [chime]. nobody hears bells. what you hear is sound--

[chime] and the spaces between them,and the silence inside and underneath sound. so although the formalmeditation practice, in some sense, comes to an end, and hasto, the real meditation practice never comesto an end. it's your life. it's no more at an end than,say, your breathing. we've finished meditating,stop breathing.

no. breath will go on. sensations will go on. seeing, hearing, smelling,tasting, touching, proprioception, knowing,thinking. and so the real meditationpractice is your life, and how you carry yourselfin each moment. now that's, oh, great. then i don't have to meditate.

i'll just go out and domindfulness in daily living, and it will be great. you get to the door withoutforgetting. you get carried away andentrained into whatever is next on your to do list. sothere's something very beautiful about the combinationof formal meditation practice, even ifit's for 30 seconds or 5 minutes every day, but the factthat you will anchor it, that you will at least tune alittle bit before you play the

great symphony, and thensee what happens. and i'm sure you will find, andmany of you can probably talk about-- and i'm going tonow converse about that, because the outer counterpartof meditation, especially-- how many of you sit in meetingsduring the day? do you meet with other people atgoogle, or has the computer done away with that, onlyvirtual meetings? well do you sometimes findyourself in meetings and just like wondering what the hellthis meeting is about?

they go on and on sometimes,even at google. and it's like, you don't get tothe point, or everybody's got to shoot their mouth offabout their own favorite thing, and be an obstacle togetting anything done. does that happen here? so imagine if people tunedbefore they walked into a meeting, or took-- i often give ceos or departmentchairs, whatever, i give them a set ofthese bells.

and i say, hey, listen. why don't you take the first 5minutes of a 30 minute meeting or an hour meetingand just [chime] ring the bells. no meditation instruction, theinstruction is just sit and watch your mind, andbe aware of the people around the table. five minutes of that, [chime] then have your meetingand see what happens.

it may turn out to be a totallydifferent meeting, because people will be there. most people, they'rein the meeting, but they're not there. they're text messaging underthe table, or googling, or whatever the hellyou people do. but you're not fully present, ifyou're [inaudible], what's the point in having a meeting? the meeting is about meeting, sothat something can happen.

but for that, youhave to show up. turns out showing upis non-trivial. it's the hardest thing inthe world, to show up. even in your body, mostof the time we're like, not in our bodies. there's this wonderful line injames joyce's dubliners-- it's a book of short stories-- that starts out, mr.duffy lived a short distance from his body.

so let's have a conversationabout what your experience was. and i just want to say that ifyou read business books, leadership books, like petersenge at the society for organizational learning, andthink about organizations and how they have-- like they'reorganisms, and they learn, and they grow, and they have headsand tails, and they can orient and move, in time and space,and beyond time and space-- that that's the outercounterpart of quiet

it's like when you get 30 peoplein a room around the table, and they do this kind oftuning, then the dialogue is very, very different from ifyou think you're going to be in discussion. discussion, for instance, like,oh, we'll get together and we'll discuss this problemor this issue-- discussion, i would just remindyou, comes from the same root as concussion, andpercussion, and succussion. it's all about shakingviolently apart.

that's the root meaning ofdiscussion, is to shake violently apart,maybe something will sort itself out. but what about dialogue, whereeverybody is really tuning, and not like totally in theirego, but a kind of inquiry. what is this? what is our job? what is the purposeof this meeting? what could we do togetherthat we can't do alone?

and maybe if i don't knoweverything, or i take my big pet, whatever favorite thing itis, and for a moment just bring don't know to it, so it'snot like, yes, i've got to come out of this meetingwith an agreement from everybody that i'm the greatestperson in the world. my idea is the best idea. out of that, what happens whenminds do this together, you get some kind of propertyemerging that's bigger than any of the individual mindsin the room, and [snap]

something. that's beginning to become moreand more recognized in business and in all sorts oforganizations, because the old models are just liketyrannosauruses and brontosauruses swishing aroundand banging each other's tails and dying. so anybody want to comment onyour experience of this, or anything that you experience? let's keep it not like-- let'snot go into speculation about

meditation and its valuein the world. but more like, what did youexperience during the guided meditation, first personexperience. audience: so, dr. kabat-zinn,i have been a practicing mindful meditator foralmost 10 years. and by practicing, i mean, istruggled with the same thing, and continue to struggle withthe same thing, which is, i fall asleep, all the time, andit happened to me here. jon kabat-zinn: anybodyelse fall

asleep during the session? raise your hands up high. there's nothing embarrassingabout it. i mean, basically we're all moreor less asleep anyway, even if you're here. it's the same thingas in school. the bodies show up butthat doesn't-- and yes, so as soon as we getcalm and still, we go, plop. first of all, how many of youwould say that you're

sleep-deprived, just on thepurely monday level. of course we're sleepdeprived. google doesn't expectyou to be sleeping. that's for the next lifetime. so what are the practical thingsthat you might do? so i get very basicaround sleep. sleep is an occupationalhazard of meditating. and in the hospital,we don't ask people to meditate sitting.

we get them down on thefloor, doing what's called a body scan. so you get more and morerelaxed, the first thing you do is go, plop. so you hear a tremendous amountof snoring in the room. we do this with sometimes200 people on our day-long retreat. and people take offense. i'm trying to meditate here,and i've got a snorer over

here and a snorer over there. it's an occupational hazardof meditating. meditation is all aboutfalling awake. but the first thing peopledo is fall asleep. what can we do? well, to one degree it's likei would ask you about your motivation? how motivated are you toactually be awake? if you are, have you ever beendriving down the highway late

at night and falling asleep? i mean, sometimes when it'sreally bad, i've had to slap myself across the face. why? because i could crashinto a tree. i mean, it's like, oh,you're so violent. well, under the circumstancesit's better to slap myself every once in a while, or turnon some great rock and roll and open up all the windows,to stay awake.

in other words, whateveris necessary. so one thing you could do-- do you do this early in themorning, as a rule? audience: i've triedeverything. i've tried earlyin the morning. jon kabat-zinn: haveyou tried a cold shower before you meditate? i'm not joking. audience: no.

i have not tried that. jon kabat-zinn: ok. try a cold shower. see, if this is reallyimportant, if this is really about life or death and sanity,and i believe it is, then do whatever the hellit takes to wake up. and then be gentle withyourself when you fall asleep anyway. because part of you knows you'refalling asleep, so

another thing to do is, whileyou're falling asleep-- and this i wouldn't recommenddriving-- but while you're falling asleep,bring awareness to the feeling of falling asleep. and ask yourself, ismy awareness of falling asleep asleep? and look at it, feel it,see for yourself. and you may find part ofyou is still awake. and instead of strugglingor battling

with i'm falling asleep-- how many of you have had theexperience of one moment you were just asleep, andthe next moment you were completely awake? we've all had that experience. it's a repertoire of differentkinds of things. so motivation has a greatdeal to do with it. and then also, do you blameyourself for falling asleep. are you frustrated by it?

do you think you'rea bad meditator? audience: yes. you're not a bad meditator. everybody falls asleep. i mean, if you go and read abook about the san francisco zen center in the old days,called crooked cucumber, there's a very interestinglittle chapter in there where they invited all these great zenmasters from japan to come to inaugurate some temple at thesan francisco zen center.

and there were like six orseven of them there, with suzuki roshi, every singleone of them was nodding off on the cushion. they're not supposedto do that. they're like samuraimeditators. that's why the young peopleare supposed to study with them, and they're [snoring]. so as long as you're thinkingthere's some kind of ideal here, where like if i was reallymeditating i'd never

fall asleep. nonsense. maybe they were jet-lagged. maybe they were old. maybe they were dead. who knows? but you're not, so [snap] what can you do? so in a sense, by askingyourself the question and

being spacious and bringing asense of humor to it, falling asleep is not even a problem. the part of you that knowsyou're falling asleep isn't, and that's the part thatwe're interested in. and it's by moment by moment,so it's not, oh my god, now i've fallen asleep. as soon as you wakeup, that's it. you're here. it's another moment.

yes? audience: i'd just liketo add to that. my wife's a pediatrician, andshe studies sleep deprivation among all sorts ofyoung people. so when we got married and iwas meditating and falling sideways, she fixed it. she said get your eighthours' sleep. there may be a conflict withyour work, but it's also a critical element of yourlongevity, your sanity, your

health, so-- jon kabat-zinn: thank you. audience: lack of sleep, ithink, is a big issue. jon kabat-zinn: althoughyou'll also find-- i've certainly foundover the years. i've been meditatingnow since i was-- i got into it when i was 22. and i'm 63, so i guessthat's 41 years. it seems like 41 seconds.

but when you really devoteyourself to meditation the kinds of ways that i'msuggesting, and then every once in a while you periodicallygo off on retreat, and say maybe do thisfor 10 days, 18 hours a day, and in places likespirit rock-- i mean, there's no better placein the world to do that than in the bay area, whereyou can really cultivate mindfulness in this kind oflaboratory where you're simplifying life, and you leaveyour computer and your

cell phones at home. that itself is very hard todo, but you nest it in a certain way. i've found over the years idon't need this as much sleep as i used to need. now part of that is justgetting older. but part of it is that there's akind of rest that happens in wakefulness that you don'tget even in sleep. and now of course--

i don't have time totalk about it. when i was here last i gave aslide talk with some evidence from neuroscience about what'sgoing on in our patients and other people whenthey meditate. but it's activating regions ofthe brain that ordinarily just aren't ever trained. and there's a phenomenon now,for the past 10 or 12 years, in neuroscience calledneuroplasticity, which is demonstrating that the old dogmathat your brain just

loses neurons from about thetime you're two and it's just downhill from then,that's not true. we're making functional neuronsin very important aspects of the nervous systemright up until the day we die. and they're driven by a kindof repetitive attending. physical activity is ahuge part of that. so it's not just meditationon the cushion. i mean, running couldbe meditation. swimming could be meditation.

cooking can be. there's nothing thatisn't meditative. making love, i mean, ithelps to be there. [laughter] jon kabat-zinn: i'm makinga joke of it, but i'm deadly serious. so this is the kind of thingwhere life itself can actually inform you. and then yes, over time, you'llfind how to fall awake.

you will find it. it will find you, so to speak. but the more we bring baggageto it, the better. and if you do need to sleep,for god's sake, sleep. don't meditate. where'd the microphonemigrate to? thank you for that. we've only got a fewmore minutes. i didn't maybe time thisquite right, but

at least until 12:00. but i do want to give you anopportunity to talk about your experience or ask questions. and if you want to stay past12:00, i'm not going anywhere, i don't think. meng: for half an hour. jon kabat-zinn: forhalf an hour. audience: i find that when i'mmeditating, i'm so excited that i'm actually meditatingthat i can't stop thinking

about the fact thati'm meditating. jon kabat-zinn: oh, yes. that's a big one. i'm glad you brought that up. audience: and all the goodthings it's doing for me. jon kabat-zinn: yes, theinternal commentator about how great it is to meditate. wow, i'm meditating and my mindisn't wandering at all. i'm on the breath, down breath,in breath, out breath.

wow, this is great. aren't i great? i'm meditating away. and really there's nomeditating at all. it's just commentary. it's just more thinking, butnow the content of the thinking is meditating. now, who knew that? you don't know, right?

so, you see the powerin not knowing? yes, some part of you knowsthat there's all this commentary going on, and you canlaugh at it, and it ain't what it's really about. but yes, of course, that's theway we live our lives, is we're always commentingon how we're doing. we're continually taking thetemperature and the wind changes, and how am idoing, and what do people think of me?

i was in finland not long ago,teaching, last year. and every culture hasits own stereotypes. and i don't want to fall intogeneralizations and stereotypes, but a lot of thefinns told me that their biggest insecurity is, whatdo you think of me? they're a very shy culture. and they always wonder whatdo you think of me, but they never ask. se everybody is worriedabout what

everybody else is thinking. feynman one of the greatestscientists on the planet wrote a book called, what do you carewhat other people think? but he could have calledit, what do you care what you think? it's the same kindof thinking. our opinions about ourselvesactually get in the way of being ourselves. so that's perfect.

this is like you're meditatingon awareness of the commentary about meditating. at a certain point, you'llget tired of it. and it's like touchinga soap bubble. what awareness does isit's liberating. not like if you go to a cave intibet an study with these great tibetan masters. it's liberating just byvirtue of the seeing. touching a thought withawareness is like touching a

soap bubble with your finger. it self-liberates. it goes poof, because it's seenand known for what it is. so it's not like you have toshut off the commentary. this is the deepestmisunderstanding about meditation, is that meditation'sabout making your mind blank, shuttingoff your thinking. all you'll get if you try toshut off your thinking, whether it's commentary onmeditating or anything else,

is a headache. and then you'll start to say--the little thoughts will secrete themselves, and yourmind says, i can't do this. i can't meditate. i'm no good at it. everybody else is good at it,but i'm not good at it. that's bullshit. it's just-- well, i won'tcall it bullshit. that sounds a little judgmentaland i'm talking

about [unintelligible]. what it is just thinking. it's thinking. and if you do awarenessing, youwill see the thoughts with much greater clarity, andthey will have less of a stranglehold on you. so that's just part of thecurriculum, the commentary on how your meditationpractice is going. ultimately, it is never aboutthe meditation practice.

that's not the problem. the problem is the i that'sclaiming to be meditating. so i'll just throw that out. that's a provocativestatement. i don't expect you tonecessarily get it, but to keep asking yourself,who's meditating? who is this? and you might say your name,your age, all of your credentials, your cv, allsorts of things can come

online in that momentas who you are. none of them are reallywho you are. they're all just accretionsso to speak. they may be aspects of who youthink you are, but you're much bigger than that. usually we think we're so smallthat we have to build ourselves up with cvs, story,how great i am. but what if you were infinitelybigger than what you think you are?

walt whitman said that--"i'm large. i contain multitudes."-- in leaves of grass. this is really big. it's about understanding whatit means to be really human. and of course, we don'tknow what it means to be really human. but the understanding comesfrom intimacy, from cultivating intimacy, orwhat the tibetans call

familiarization. in fact, the word in tibetanfor meditation is anybody else? so thank you for that. meng: one last question? it's the last question. i'll let meng exercisecontrol. audience: i just wanted to sayi think there's something really funny about thosewhiteboards being

up during this talk. jut giant salaries, nodeal, and all that stuff all over it. jon kabat-zinn: jon kabat-zinn:oh, yes. you were reading them. i didn't read them. it's hard not to notice. yes, well, the world ismultidimensional and complex. and so did they trigger alot of thoughts for you?

audience: i feel like somehowmeditation is the opposite of money. jon kabat-zinn: oh. well, be careful, because themind is now creating opposites and maybe obstacles, whereas,in a complex universe, that may just be another opinionor another thought. seen one way, yes, it'sus against them, and they are no good. but seen another way, we're allpart of the same thing,

and you wouldn't be here ifsomeone wasn't thinking about money, and i wouldn't either. not that i'm getting paid,but that's not the point. i mean, i had to pay for gas. it's all interconnected, so it'svery useful to look at our own likes and dislikes, asi was suggesting, whatever they are, whether they'reprincipled or not. and that's not to say weshouldn't have principles. if nothing, it's a totallyethical way of being.

if it's not ethical, itisn't mindfulness. but that requires a certaindeep contemplation to understand what ethicalbehavior is, because sometimes-- and i see philip lombardo iscoming to talk about the banality of evil. i mean even in his own stanfordprison experiment, he got so pulled intothe experiment-- i don't know if you know aboutthis, but you should go and

hear his talks-- back in the '60s that hislaboratory technician had to tell him to stop the experimentafter six days, instead of the three weeks thatit was supposed to be happening, because these staffand students, who were divided up into prison guards andprisoners, the guards were abusing the prisoners. these were all just stanfordstudents, but they got into that mentality, and they wouldhave killed people.

they were creating huge harm,unbelievable abuse. you think it's justat abu ghraib? i mean, the guards at abughraib, they're just like stanford students. they're just 18, 19, 20 yearold americans who don't get why they're there. and yes, so see, as a rule, itend to stay away from the word evil, and i preferignorance. so when we're ignoring certainaspects of our own experience,

and how easy it is for anybody,even ethical people, to get entrained into asituation where they will do seriously immoral things. that's important to be aware of,because it's not like, oh, just them, those peopleout there who don't have moral fiber. that could be you, if thecircumstances were different, unless you've really developedan unwavering sense of stability in your own authority,even if everybody

else is saying thatyou're wrong. that's a really hard thing todo in a place like nazi germany, or in a place likeburma, or in a place like rwanda, or anything else whereyour family could be wiped out, or may have already beenwiped out, by you just like looking the wrong way orbelonging to the wrong tribe. so this has profoundimplications not just for economics, and running abusiness like google, but for a place like iraq, where--

war. you walk into a culture. you have no understandingof that culture. and then you're going to makethe world safe for democracy. and we wonder why america isnot more liked, since we're obviously the good guysin the world. what's the matter with us? we're like chickens withour heads cut off. we're idiotic.

we're not making use of thefull repertoire of our capacities. so this mindfulness, it's notjust about having a good experience, lowering your bloodpressure, improving your t cell count, or anythinglike that. there's a full spectrum of true authenticity in the world. and i might say, and i'llleave it at this, asking yourself on a deep level whatis your work in the world?

i know google hired you todo something, but still. really why they hired you isbecause of who you are. and they need you to be you, inorder to know how you can fit into the larger pictureand contribute in the imaginative ways that arereally unthinkable. that's what they want. they want the unthinkablethat is actually doable. so how do you get there? often it's not justby thinking.

it's by trusting in certainaspects of yourself that we just don't get educatedaround. that's what this can develop. and now as i understand, andi'll leave it at that, there's an mbsr program,mindfulness-based stress reduction-- just what meng wastalking about, with full catastrophe living-- here at google. and there are going to be moreprograms in the google

university around emotionalintelligence, and mindfulness, and business, and leadership,and je ne sais quoi, but that's a very kind ofinteresting work environment, where many people among theleadership really feel like this kind of nurturance is notsecond order fluff to keep its workforce happy, but, in fact,absolutely fundamental to the core principles ofthe business. so i want to thank youfor your attention. and just leave expressing thethought that if anything that

i said, even one word, or evennot any words, but just what was pointed to underneath thewords, rings true to you in some way or disturbs you insome way, trust that. and see if you can pour a littlebit more attention into it and over time wonder,perhaps, whether there's not something inside you-- it hasnothing to do with me. it has nothing to do withmeditation or buddhism or anything like that. but whether there's notsomething here--

i won't say there-- that really is importantto attend to. and then attend to it withtremendous kindness and self-compassion. i don't think that you can-- it's impossible to go wrong ifyou take that kind of attitude towards it. this is not attainingsome ideal. this is recognizing who youare already are, and the

beauty that's already you. so i'll leave witha little poem. would that be ok? one of my favorite poems, byderek walcott, who is a nobel laureate in literature, fromthe island of saint lucia, afro-caribbean heritage. he writes very, very long poems,most of which i have never read. but this is a very short poem,so try to drink it in in the

same way as you were drinking inthe breath, and the sounds in the room. the time will come when, withelation, you will greet yourself arriving at your owndoor, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other'swelcome and say, sit here. eat. you will love again the strangerwho was yourself. give wine. give bread.

give back your heart toyourself, to the stranger who has loved you all yourlife, who you have ignored for another. take down the love lettersfrom the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperatenotes, peel your own image from the mirror. sit. feast on your life. thank you, folks.