This is How You Learn

“People are just suffering. They’re not looking for enlightenment or meditation or to become Buddhists or to give up their culture or any of that. If a doctor says, ‘I’m recommending this,’ they say matter-of-factly, ‘OK.’ Once they do the training, it’s completely up to them what path they follow, but if they connect with it (not everyone does) they may be quite willing to go to a class or take a program at a meditation center. Many people simply come back and take the course over again, or take related courses… People don’t need any more identifications than they already have. If you present the dharma as Buddhism, one half may love it… The other fifty percent may be completely turned off, feeling that some Buddhist evangelist is trying to sucker them into a belief system and on top of that, they probably want money.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn’s teacher, the late Seung Sahn (known to his students as Soen Sa Nim), pushed him into being a teacher. “I said to him, ‘Soen Sa Nim, I’m here to learn how to practice from you. I’m not interested in being a teacher; I want to be the student.’ And he said ‘If you are my student, then this is how you will learn to be a student, as you teach.’ And I said, ‘But I don’t know anything. I don’t know what to do. I wouldn’t know what to talk about.’ And he said, ‘Aawwwwww,’ as if he really deeply understood what my issue was, ‘no problem, you only talk about area you understand. Don’t talk about area you don’t understand.’”

Fernando de Torrijos, met Kabat-Zinn at the first Body & Soul conference in Boston in 1994… Over lunch, Kabat-Zinn asked him to direct the inner city program the clinic had begun two years before. The program is offered in Spanish and English and will soon be adding Portuguese to serve a growing Brazilian population…De Torrijos feels his clinic provides a missing link in health promotion for a segment of the population that is disproportionately unhealthy. Poverty makes you sick.

“Exercise, proper diet, rest. These are all excellent indicators for good basic health, but if people don’t have something that brings them to self-awareness of the importance of taking care of themselves, no matter how many presentations, lectures or brilliant talks you give to the population, they will go home to neighborhoods where they have few resources, not much support, and high stress caused by crime and other conditions. They won’t take care of themselves. If we empower them by teaching them mindfulness, people start to remember that being human is something wonderful.”

The main disease he sees is despair. One woman came into his program from a shelter for battered women. “In the intake interview, her eyes were dead. They had no shine, no brightness. Her life was completely over. I told her, ‘We can live through all kinds of abuse—physical, social and sexual. We may be living under a bridge. But as long as we breathe, there is more right with us than wrong with us. You have no clue where to go in your life and all the light is obscured by clouds of sadness. Little by little, step by step, we will clear them away and let the wisdom and compassion in your heart come to the surface.’ She replied, ‘Please tell me where I can find that.’”

The woman brought her young son to the program and put him in child care. De Torrijos noticed that he never spoke. He had been traumatized by seeing the abuse his mother suffered. At the end of the fifth week, she went to pick him up, and to her surprise, he spoke to her. “People need to believe again in the importance of life and living,” de Torrijos says, “no matter what the condition of their body or their pocketbook. As long as we breathe, everyone has something important to do.”

Larry Horwitz is another old friend, collaborator, fellow raconteur and sounding board for Jon Kabat-Zinn… Horwitz, Kabat-Zinn and others have put their heads together many times trying to figure out how to bring mindfulness into more areas of “the nitty-gritty diversity of everyday human affairs.” The Massachusetts justice system has been one area, including both judges and prisoners, both of whom, ironically, have to sit idly with no easy means of escape for long periods of time. Teaching elementary and high school students has been a new frontier in the last few years. “Teaching young people requires some adaptation, but they’re very fast learners. If I had learned this at fifteen instead of forty-five I would’ve been a lot better off.”

Horwitz says. One woman who is “a very bright, hardworking, entrepreneurial founder of a law firm” told him, “When we started the raisin-eating exercise for the second time, I saw the raisin and thought, ‘Oh God, I’m eating a raisin again!’ and just then I realized how often I have this same lack of attention when my thirteen-year-old comes to tell me something and I think, ‘Oh I’ve heard this before.’”

In Coming to Our Senses, Kabat-Zin presents explicit Buddhism in many places and talks about his own journey… if we are to heal the world, we must come to know the world better. And mindfulness is the key. It is nothing more than the practice of life itself.

But in healing the world, we cannot treat the world as an object to be fixed. “…mindfulness is not some magical elixir or cure…the answer to all life’s problems. But cultivating intimacy with how things actually are is the first step on the path of healing, whether we are talking about a person or a nation, or all nations and all beings.”

“For the most part, we dwell mostly accepting the appearance of things and create quasi-comfortable explanations for ourselves about how things are and why they are that way. But, if we listen to insistent murmurings of “disaffection” in the background of that reality, they challenge us to ask who we really are and we open a door to a more relational and interconnected reality. We awaken from a “consensus trance” and into a dimension that offers myriad ways of seeing and responding. We emerge out of flatland and into “a third spatial dimension at right angles (orthogonal) to the other two.”

When Kabat-Zinn was twelve, he spent the summer at Woods Hole, one of the world’s premier research facilities. He and his pals used to hang out in a clubhouse drinking Cokes, having big conversations and reading books like One, Two, Three … Infinity. In the closing pages of his new book, he talks about how it now appears that the universe may have eleven dimensions, but “seven of the original eleven dimensions failed to ‘unfurl’ at the moment of creation, giving us the three we know, plus time.” He talks about string theory, and how as physicists shave things finer and finer it appears that all we have and all we are is a limitless bunch of vibrating strings. There are no subjects and no objects.

One wonders what the average stressed-out person coming to terms with their morbidity and mortality might think of string theory and what it has to say about their condition. But if anyone could show them the connection, it’s Jon Kabat-Zinn. To him, talking about vibrating strings and eleven dimensions is simply another way of expressing the beauty of what is.

When our lengthy and meandering conversation concluded, I felt like a boy in that clubhouse. I mentioned to him that the way he described experience as without subject and object reminded me of the Chinese Buddhist philosophy of totality, Hua-Yen. It says that everything is found within everything else, which is the sort of thing people say on LSD. I tell him that this idea seems alluring but completely preposterous. Without blinking, he replies quite simply, “From a quantum view of things, that makes perfect sense.”

Kabat-Zinn misses the day-to-day work with people in the clinic, hearing their stories, practicing with them, gathering the data of momentary human experience. As Rod Serling used to say on the Twilight Zone, consider the following: Angie Fenwick-Gibb, who suffers from environmental illness, got her life back. She can go out again without being consumed by fear. Karen Daigle can slow down and actually stick with one thing, and now she is taking Interpersonal Mindfulness so she can stop interrupting everybody, herself included. She hopes her husband might learn mindfulness someday. Sid Hall talks about how he can notice a tree as he would have when he was a child. He can’t recommend the practice strongly enough. And Alex Walsh, the hard-driving investment advisor, to his complete surprise—and tentative delight—found himself wandering semi-aimlessly down Newbury Street in Boston’s Back Bay. He ended up in a store featuring Buddhist wares. He bought a Tibetan gong. He might have come back for something else another day, but the Buddhist store was going out of business.” ~ Barry Boyce

~ Jon Kabat-Zinn is married to Myla Zinn, the daughter of Roslyn and Howard Zinn. They have three grown children. Kabat-Zinn was born Jewish but has stated that his beliefs growing up were a fusion of science and art. Although he has been "trained in Buddhism and espouses its principles," he rejects the label of "Buddhist," preferring to "apply mindfulness within a scientific rather than a religious frame."