February 24, 2022 • 52 mins
What has become a buzz word for corporate retreats and a way to get a discount on your health insurance is, at its core, a powerful, centuries-old Buddhist method of moving through life and dealing with the suffering that inevitably comes along with it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, Ish and this is
stuff you should know. Ish. This is full on stuff
(00:22):
you should know, Charles. Remember that point. I feel like
it was about ten eight to ten years ago where
everyone was just saying ish on the end of things
instead of saying, like, you know, finding the real word
that they were looking for, so so like an approximation
of the word or or of the thing they were describing.
(00:45):
So like I'm saying, no, not even that, like when
there's like a real word that could be used and
they would just the ish on another word. I don't
know what you're talking about. No, yeah, it was. It
was the thing it swept the nation? When was it?
Or maybe I'm thinking of the Marcarina. That's that's what
you're thinking. Okay, alright, man, that really did sweep the nature.
(01:08):
Remember that who let the dogs out? It was like
a one. Did they ever find that out? No? I
think it was a rhetorical question. It's the kind of
rhetorical question you could ask yourself, Chuck while you're meditating. Yeah,
but first thanks thanks, but I'm gonna step all over
the segway because because before we get started, Chuck, I
(01:29):
want to do if you'll allow me, another shout out
for my little niece Mela's movie, big time movie called
No Exit that's coming out as far as when this
episode drops tomorrow, so February, No matter when you hear this,
just immediately go onto Hulu subscribe if you haven't yet,
(01:50):
and check out my niece Mila in No Exit because
she is the trailer amazing. What do you think it
looks like a taut thriller? She looks fantastic from what
you can tell from a trailer. You just saved all
the bad parts for the movie. I don't think they did.
I was reading an interview with the director and he
was saying like she was. She was doing such an
(02:11):
amazing job of being terrified and freaked out and everything
that like after in between takes, like the other customers
would be like are you okay? And she'd be like, yeah,
why are you okay? And you know I'm acting right exactly.
She's like, it's acting you like John Love. Yeah, So
on Hulu No Exit February. My niece Mila just kills
(02:33):
it there you go, can't wait. Thanks again for that, chuck,
So let's get started. Thank you for not passing judgment
on that either way, Uh, your re siguing because we're
times passing judgment. It means I'm not being mindful because
a big part of mindfulness you just did not judge. Yeah,
(02:54):
So that's like, this is one of those ones, you know,
those episodes where we just start talking about the thing
without defining it. Um. This is not going to be
one of those episodes because I think it would be
kind of rough otherwise, you know. Yeah, And I guess
if you're gonna define mindfulness, you need to kind of
go back in time. I mean, I guess we could
(03:15):
hop in the way back machine. We haven't done that,
it's been a while. Let's pull the old cover off.
It's quite dusty in here, and a little bit of
mill do, Little mill do. There's some old crystals boxes.
Those are yours? Remember you had them accidentally delivered to
your house? Right, and then we went back to the
old West to celebrate you're thinking of back to the future.
(03:41):
Three ah, right, right right? I called Mary steam Virgin,
meaning if I did to play her, not date her
or anything, Oh, Dave Mary steam Burgin on her? Isn't that? Um?
I really that's a Ted Danson's old squeeze, right, it's
his current squeeze. I'm not gonna fight. Are they still together? Yeah?
(04:02):
I think so. Gosh they've been together for a while. Yeah.
Good couple. Okay, great, good stuff. So who knew we
were gonna be talking about ted dancing at the beginning
of Mine could richer gear, but ted dancing is a
big surprise. If we get in the way back machine
and go back uh in time to sort of the
(04:23):
beginning of Buddhism, you'd have to look at the language
Polly and the words sati Polly is p a l
i satis s a t i. There are a lot
of different words for mindfulness, but the one that we
kind of identify with it's kind of been used most
from Polly, which is a Middle Indo Aryan liturgical language
(04:47):
from the early branches of Buddhism. iBOT to take in
the reason that that Poully is so important is because
they say that it was the language of the Buddha
and at the very least it was the first language
that the Buddhas were which have been passed down orally, um,
we're written down in so it's like legit old school
Buddhist thinking and teachings. And one of the basic parts
(05:09):
of that is, like you said, sati, which is has
been translated to mindfulness, but it was translated by a
British colonial administrator, wasn't it. That's right, And it kind
of more accurately as translated as memory of the present,
which I think is a really kind of a cool
way to look at mindfulness. Yeah. Absolutely, it really kind
of reveals what what's what's going on, especially once you
(05:31):
kind of learned a little more about it, you're like,
that actually works about as perfectly as as can be.
But it got it got translated, um into the word mindfulness,
sati into mindfulness by a British colonial administrator in Ceylon
which is now Sri Lanka, back in the eighteen eighties.
So it was some British guy who said sati means
(05:52):
mindfulness and actually kind of gave it to us today,
although there was a long period where it had been forgotten.
But I think you don't really talk about mindfulness even
though it's changed so dramatically, especially in the last decade
or so, without kind of describing what it was originally
meant to describe, what it still describes if you're a
practicing Buddhist um and that is that like you are
(06:16):
not only like paying attention to the moment and um
like like experiencing this moment without letting your thoughts wander
to the past or the future or anything like that,
but that whatever you're experiencing in the moment, no matter
what it is, you're experiencing with equanimity, which means that
you're not passing judgment on it as good or bad
(06:38):
or anything else. It just is And it sounds easy
to describe, but if you've ever tried it, it's one
of the hardest things a human being can never set
out to do. Yeah, I mean, I think it's very
very natural for human too, ah, seek out and contemplate
and think about the things that feel good and please them,
(07:01):
and to try and stuff down and get rid of
and avoid things that either hurt literally hurt or emotionally hurt,
or things that are painful or unpleasant. And Boyle's a
that is a tough thing to overcome, my friend. Uh,
just the condition of being human makes that very difficult.
(07:21):
But yeah, and you just nailed it on the head,
not once but twice, Chuck, when you said that it's
a very human condition and part of sati. The point
of sati as far as like Buddhists are concerned, is
that it's a step that you take on the path
to enlightenment to free yourself from the cycle of like
life and death and rebirth and to become like a
truly enlightened being that's freed from all of that. And
(07:45):
so you have to free yourself from that human condition,
and a big part of that is to free yourself
from yearning from wanting. Because yearning and wanting or being
repelled by something and wanting to get away from it,
there are two sides of the same coin as far
as sati is concerned, which is um you are wishing
that something is different or was different than it actually is,
(08:07):
and then that's the basis of suffering, and suffering is
the thing that keeps you in that cycle of life
and death and rebirth. So meditating to become mindful and
non judgmental about your present experience is one step toward
relieving yourself with suffering and then freeing yourself from that
shackle being born and reborn and reborn again. Well, you
(08:29):
and my friend have just spoken about the noble truths,
in part because craving is the cause of suffering is
the second noble truth. And to cease that craving will
bring about the ceasing of that suffering, which is the
third noble truth. And basically, experiencing the moment without and
everything about the moment without judgment is sort of the
(08:53):
the goal. And you know, for modern you know, we're
gonna talk a lot about sort of the beginnings of
mindfulness and kind of how it's become um, kind of
a hip thing to do here in the United States, uh,
starting in about the nineteen seventies and on and especially today.
But we're we're kind of talking in American modern terms
(09:13):
about stress and distressing and the Buddhists have a term
for that, which is duca d u k k h
a uh. And that is, you know, again, to avoid
or destroy something that we don't like, and what we
usually don't like is something that's going to put a
stress on us, right exactly. And they're saying, like, dude,
(09:35):
this is part of the point of life. I'm reading
this really amazing book by Tick not Han right now. Um,
rereading it. Actually it's when I was when you just
kind of go back and reread very like easy slim volume.
It's called No Mud, No Lotus, and it basically says
like without suffering, you can't have happiness and vice versa.
Pretty pretty basic stuff. But like he really gets into
(09:56):
explaining how to confront suffering and understand that it's just
part of life. And that's a huge part of the
Buddhist approach to mindfulness. It's not to get away from suffering,
is to recognize it as it is and also simultaneously
not make a bigger deal out of it than it is,
because suffering is enough. It's bad enough as it is,
(10:18):
but another part of the human condition is to make
it way worse by anticipating it, worrying about it, um like,
focusing on it after it happens. There's a lot of
stuff we do to our own suffering that explodes it,
and part of mindfulness training is to is to stop
doing that as well too. You ain't kidding, uh, And
the lack of judgment is a big, big part of
(10:39):
all of this. And we're gonna talk quite a bit
here and there about John cabot Zin, who is uh,
it's like easy, far and away the sort of leader
of the modern American mindfulness movement in a lot of
different ways. And we'll get to him in more detail later.
But he says that awareness that arises through paying attention
on purpose, and that's another big part of it. It's
(11:01):
it's a very purposeful practice. Yeah, but not meditation, which
we'll get to that as well, because meditation is a
true physical practice that you in mental practice, whereas mindfulness
is more of a state of being that you're trying
to get to. But he says on purpose in the
present moment and non non judgmentally, they always have to
kind of hammer home the lack of judgment being a
(11:22):
key part right exactly. Um, And he's he's a proponent
in kind of one of the founders of what you
can refer to as secular mindfulness, which is this current
incarnation of mindfulness that's sweeping the West. It's like you said,
hip that's been kind of like removed deliberately, as we'll see,
removed from its Buddhist roots and Buddhist context to make
(11:44):
it more palatable and scientific seeming. Yeah, secular, secular stripped
of all the religion and maybe we can sell it
to Americans exactly, and then a but the yeah, Um,
The upshot of all this, though, Chuck, is that no
matter who you are, where you're coming from, if you're
talking about mindfulness, you're talking about paying attention to the
(12:05):
present moment and doing the best you can at not
judging anything that's going on in that present experience and
just taking it on its faith value and engaging in
it fully. That's mindfulness in a nutshell. Yeah. And it's
not anything that the Buddhists um had a corner on.
They just probably did it better because all different kinds
(12:26):
of religions throughout antiquity had you know, chanting or some
kind of mindfulness practice, maybe prayers or through songs or dance. Uh.
You know that that kind of thing has been around
as long as people have been practicing religion. So the
Buddhists did not invent it, but I think they got
it fairly right. So, um, let's talk a little more
(12:46):
about how we got here today, Um, historically speaking, after break,
what do you think about that? It sounds great. I'm
gonna breathe in the meantime, Hey, let me teach you
(13:21):
something I've been using that tickna Han taught me, not personally,
but through his writing in a book that was published
that I purchased with money. Smash your hand with a hammer, Yeah,
he said, try to focus on anything else chump. Uh.
There's a bunch of different mantras you can say, and
I'm not even sure that's the right word, but um,
one that I keep using is And it's just striking
(13:44):
what taking a breath and deliberately focusing on that breath,
just breathing in once and breathing out once can do
to like just suck you right out of wherever your
mind is, um, in the past or the future. It's
it's really striking what how it can do that? But um,
his was, Um, it's a take breathing in. I noticed
(14:06):
that I'm alive and breathing out. I'm happy to be alive,
and just doing it once like immediately brings me back
into the present moment. And it's really cool. I like it.
It's all very new for me, but I think it's Uh,
it's pretty cool. Yeah, there's a lot of value there. Um.
And you know, you can like practice something like this
(14:26):
and those breathing techniques. It's not exclusive to mindfulness or meditation.
Or Buddhism. Uh. You know, that's a great technique if
you have kids. I found that, you know, with if
my daughter is having a bad time, just kind of
get her to slow down and take a couple of
good deep breaths. Always a good thing to do. Uh.
And Emily, who you know, someone who has a lot
(14:48):
of anxieties in her life as a struggling small business owner.
We will do this thing where we have hug breathing,
where I will go up to her and we will
have a good tight bear hug embrace and we'll breathe
in together and it's sort of like doubles the power
of it. Wow, that's neat, Chuck, Is that your own?
(15:09):
Did you come up with that? Yeah? I mean I'm sure.
I mean I didn't get it from anywhere, but I'm
sure I didn't invent that. It sounds like a biking
mindfulness like Hell's Angels. Sure, yeah, that's the Hell's Angels technique.
You came up. You can call it whatever you want.
It's your invention. It's a good one. Well. Yeah, there's
something about breathing together that close physically. It's it's pretty powerful.
(15:33):
So if you if you went back, Um, a few
hundred years, a couple hundred years even, and you spoke
to any Buddhists around the world and said, hey, how
often do you do mindfulness meditation? They would look at
you like they had no idea where you're talking about.
And if you said, you know, sati, they'd say, oh,
that's not for us. That's for like the monks and
the nuns up in the caves in the mountains, Like,
(15:56):
we don't do that kind of stuff where sup For Buddhists.
We care about morality and we worship local deities and
all that stuff. But that's that's kind of advance that's
more than than the average Buddhist does. And it wasn't
until I think the late nineteenth century in Burma that
that was finally kind of broken up and and meditation
and mindfulness together, we're kind of introduced for the first
(16:18):
time to like lay Buddhists, like just the normal, everyday,
average Buddhists living their life. Yeah, this is pretty cool. Like,
I know, we love it when we can kind of
pinpoint when things happen or when things change. Uh, And
this is one of them. On November five, this is
when the British Imperial army uh conquered Burma and said, King, uh,
(16:41):
we're gonna mispronounce some of these thebol maybe. I think
that's right, you're out of here. And that king was
promoting mindfulness and promoting Buddhist institutions throughout the nation. The
Brits of course, said, now we're not gonna really do that.
So it fell to the lay people to get organized,
to find new places to meet, uh, to find their
(17:02):
own you know, gathering grounds, and a lot of times
these were monasteries and it would go through monks, but
they would it basically went to them to kind of
figure it out because it wasn't I don't want to
say state sponsored, but it kind of state sponsored, yeah,
or state supported or something like that. Yeah, yeah, but
so and so rather than being like, oh, I don't
(17:23):
know who, I guess we're not Buddhists anymore, they took
it by the horns and like they did something with it.
But one of the outcroppings of that was that like
these monks who used to just go meditate out in
the like in the mountains or the hills or in
the woods, were now now had audiences of like everyday
people who were practicing Buddhists that they were teaching this
stuff too, and it was it was one of these guys,
(17:46):
Letty Sayado, who was a Buddhist monk, who said, you
know what, this isn't just for us, this is for everybody.
And closely in Letty Sayadow's footsteps came Minga and sayo
say y aw, say yea. I think that's right, and
that he that monk was the first one to actually
(18:06):
teach um mindfulness and meditation to regular people, I think
around nineteen eleven. Yeah, I mean it's cool stuff. Like
I love the idea that Letty uh say Adel kind
of put forth, which was you don't have to go
to a monastery even like we've set these up for
you and you can. You don't have to retreat to
a cave. You don't have to you don't even have
(18:28):
to go into a deep meditative state or anything like.
Just momentary bits of mindfulness are very helpful. Uh. And
that's a good way to reach regular lay people. And
I think through practice is when Sail came along and said, hey,
that all sounds great, and buddy, I'm gonna teach it right,
so the the people in what is now my me
(18:51):
and Mar are the ones who um kind of broke out,
broke mindfulness and meditation out of it's it's little slumber
sure cage or something like that, and democratized it a
little bit. But it was as far as the people
in the West are concerned, it was the Japanese and
their development of Zen Buddhism that we have to thank
(19:12):
because this is you can pretty much trace a direct
line between um, the mindfulness and the meditation and the
approach to Buddhism in the West today back to the
twentieth century Japan and specifically a guy named Dai Setsu
Ta Taro d T. Suzuki. So d T. Suzuki was
(19:34):
kind of a what's called a Buddhist modernist thinker who said, Um,
there's different things we can do with this, but this
approach is a little more rationally, a little less dogmatically,
and open it up to people like our friends and
what's soon to be me and Mar and um. Not
only that, let's let's start relating to the West a
little more. And DTI Suzuki actually kind of carried this message,
(19:57):
this idea of Zen Buddhism with him over to America
in Europe, and it just started to catch on like wildfire. Yeah.
I think it's really interesting too that it was another
active war that led to you know, that helped give
rise to someone like Suzuki, just like when the Brits
over threw Burma, when the U. S. Navy attacked Tokyo
(20:17):
Harbor in eighteen fifty three. Uh, there was you know,
basically Japan was like, you know, we gotta we gotta
start relating to the West a little bit more and
sort of modernize. And this was known as the Meiji Restoration.
And part of that was saying, hey, Shinto is going
to be our religion, our main religion, and not Buddhism,
(20:38):
which led the Buddhist to say, hey, maybe we should
modernize our religion as well, to you know, so we
don't get left by the wayside. And that gave rise
to someone like Deti Suzuki. Right. So it was from
that modernization that um, Buddhist modernism came about. And it's
basically what you would recognize as Buddhism today, like very thoughtful,
(20:58):
very um uh, interior dwelling, um, the idea that the
universe has all connected. All these were like Buddhist thoughts before,
but it was it was Buddhism allowing itself to be
influenced by Modernism and by other groups like the Romantics
and the Transcendentalists, right, so they jumped on it big time.
It was pretty It was like a confluence of perfect
(21:20):
timing as far as coming to the United States and
like the counterculture ready for this, but in a weird way.
It was like the United States, unbeknownst to the counterculture
Beats and then later the Hippies um that their predecessors,
like the Transidentalists, had had pre influenced what was coming
back to them. So it was already in a very
(21:41):
palatable form for Americans who were open to the idea
of like mind expansion and taking acid and um, you know,
and meditating and were just open to the ideas of
other cultures of becoming like more in tune with the universe.
It was they were just waiting for it, and it
came to them in the and in the briefcase I
(22:01):
guess of D. T. Suzuki um, and it just kind
of took off from there. So the idea everything we
understand about mindfulness and meditation you can trace back to
like D. T. Suzuki in those beats absolutely. And there
were three people in particular, uh, in the seventies and
sixties and seventies practicing this, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Cornfield and
(22:23):
Sharon Salzburg who were not together but they studied separately
meditation in Burma, and then the mid seventies founded the
Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, which became sort of the
center of the v Pasana meditation movement here in the
United States. And they're they're still around, they're still doing
(22:43):
their thing. So um, it was from that same group.
There was actually a time where John cabot z In,
the guy you we mentioned earlier ze I, by the way,
not z In. That would be too far on the nose.
Oh wait, what if his name was spelled z E
(23:03):
n Oh, I got boy. I was not paying to
the current experience very well, I'm sorry. That'd be like
a boxer being named boxer. Uh, yeah, it would be right.
I was for some reason, I was going more towards
the um cabernets in. Yeah. So he's known as the
(23:28):
godfather of modern mindfulness according to The Guardian at least,
which is a pretty legit newspaper. Um, and by the way,
thank you also to Olivia for helping us out with
this one. Chuck. She did, she did, um. But John
cabot Zin was among those people Jack Cornfield, great name,
(23:48):
Sharon Salzburg, and J. Joseph Goldstein. He actually taught at
their UM Insight Meditation Society, and he was a big
time practitioner of Zen Buddhism and he had he was
on like, uh, I guess, a meditation retreat and he
had a bit of insight well, I guess an epiphany
is probably what you call it. That he was meant
(24:09):
to help apply Buddhist techniques to help people who are
in pain. He had either a microbiology or molecular biology
degree and he ended up applying it to medicine and
figuring out how to join Buddhist practices and medicine to
help people in the seventies and it really started to
(24:29):
take off from there. Yeah. I mean he sort of
had the same idea as previous UH cultures, which was, hey,
if we want to UH and not sell for money,
but if we want to popularize this, we should get
a little bit away from the religion part, the sort
of hippie dippy new Agi part. And he really wanted
to start talking in concrete terms about things that everyone
(24:52):
worried about, which was stress, and like, if you want
to make your life less stressful, here's here's a way
to do it, and more on mindfulness and less on meditation,
which was still a tough sell to mainstream America and
still is today. I think, yeah, but it's gotten less
and less. I feel like if he finally overcame the
(25:14):
threshold that was you know, keeping it back in the
last like five ten years, and achieved what he was
looking for. I mean, think about mindfulness is everywhere today
and it is almost totally divorced from any kind of
religious connotations. It seems like a neuroscience tool more than
anything the way that it stated in the West, and
(25:36):
that was his goal. He he was trying to to
get it to the most people possible, Uh, study it scientifically,
and then apply it to help people. And specifically again,
he was initially looking at how it can help people
with pain. Um, and he came up with mindfulness based
stress reduction m B s R, which is still very
(25:59):
much in use today. And then there was an offshoot
to chuck mindfulness based cognitive therapy and UM, that's that
takes CBT which is a proven type of talk therapy
UM used extensively in psychology and and applies John cabot
Zin's approach to mindfulness to it, right. Yeah, And I
(26:21):
think one of the big tenants here is to interrupt
automatic thoughts and the automatic thoughts that can lead to
an automatic behavior. So the automatic thought might just be
your propensity to feel that stress and reach for a
drink immediately and not even think like, oh boy, I
need a drink because I'm stressed out and that will
(26:42):
help out. It becomes this automatic thing. And he was
all about and the practice of mindfulness is all about
disruption and disrupting that flow without judgment. Yeah, Because one
of the big things in cognitive behavioral therapy is that
you have a thought, your thought leads to a feeling,
and your feeling leads to a behavior. And oftentimes it's,
(27:02):
like you said, it's very destructive and you don't even
realize it's going on UM until your life is kind
of falling apart or it's certainly not as good as
it could be. And it doesn't even have to be
a drink. It could be a donut, It could be
yelling at at a cashier, at a um, you know,
a grocery store like all sorts of different things, and
you are totally out of control of it. The idea
(27:24):
behind this mindfulness, adding mindfulness to cognitive behavioral therapy is
that you are training yourself to detach yourself from all
thoughts and emotions so that you can evaluate them clearly,
so that none of them can jump out of nowhere
pounce on you. And the next thing you know, you've
eaten a dozen donuts and had six scotches and you
(27:45):
have no idea why. You do have the idea why,
and you probably haven't gotten to that point because you've
stopped the whole process by recognizing it the moment it
began ideally theoretically on paper. That's the purpose of you
mindfulness to help, especially with with mental health. Yeah, there's
um a journalist named Robert Wright, and he kind of
(28:07):
put it in a way that I kind of like,
which was to think of your thoughts and emotions as transient.
So it's not like that kind of goes back to
the no judgment thing. You can have these bad feelings
and bad emotions and bad tendencies, but if you allow,
if you allow them to just flow through you, they
become transient, they don't stick around. Uh, the same sort
(28:29):
of ideas that you you can't, um, why worry about
things that you can't control? But not in a uh
an office poster kind of way, you know what I mean.
It runs a bit deeper than that. It's not like
a Pollyanna thing. No. And as a matter of fact,
like if you want to trace it all the way
(28:50):
back to its original Buddhist roots, it's that like, we
have very little, if any control over life, and that
recognizing that will free us for um, all of our
desires and the idea that like we have to have
things and we want to hang onto it. Like it
just lets you let things flow by and you can
enjoy them and experience them as they come, rather than
(29:12):
hoping for the next one, needing the next donut um
or fearing the next loss. Uh, you just experience life
as it comes. That's kind of the point of that
of of understanding that everything is transient and impermanent, including
your own your own life, Like you're going to die
one day. There's ultimately the big like you know, like
(29:34):
bingo number. Yeah, Like that's ultimately what it's leading is
you're going to die you're you, yourself are impermanent, and
so understanding that through getting there through meditation, daily meditative
practice UM is is kind of the goal. Yeah, and
it's interesting they found that it's um even though something
like MBSR is more rooted in that sort of neuroscience
(29:58):
e thing and not uh, spirituality or religion. They found
it's sort of a chicken in the egg deal where
once you do participate m m BSR, you may become
more spiritual as a result, even though you weren't going in.
But I think the reason why is because even if
these people don't know it, even if they're at a
corporate mindfulness retreat, they're engaging in a deeply spiritual practice
(30:24):
that that it's they're kind of doing it wrong is
we'll see, but there's still it's still you know, part
of this very long established tradition that's that actually has
like legs. It's not it's not mumbo jumbo like. It
actually has a pronounced effect on on the human brain,
the human psyche, the outlook that we have on life.
And so depending on the context you're doing it, and
(30:46):
it can be very useful, it can be harmful, or
it can be totally useless in some cases too, But
it is a spiritual act, so it makes sense that
it would make you more interested in spirituality. Well, I
say we take our second break, if that's good, And
because we're stuff, you should know, we have to talk
about whether or not this works and if there have
(31:07):
been studies that tell us one way or the other.
So we'll get into that right after this. All right,
(31:35):
it's fun to sit around and talk about mindfulness and
to just sort of zen out and lose ourselves, become
one with each other through these headphones. Yeah, man, you
sound like Rory Cochrane and days are confused. The new
man what was his name? Oh Slater? Was he Slater?
(31:58):
Maybe Peter? You happy? Give me drugs, man, Yeah, it's later,
you're right, get some from your mother. Man. It's funny.
I've seen him and he's been in a bunch of
stuff since then, and it's it's always impossible to see
him as anyone other than Slater. I mean, have you
he was on CSI Miami. I think for years and
years and years you're just waiting from her whip out
(32:18):
of Dubio. Yes, and he's all clean cut and everything,
and I still can't not see it. I totally agree
with He's not fooling anybody, all right, So does this
stuff work? Could? There have been plenty of studies, of course,
and there is a lot of evidence that mindfulness programs
can help people through emotional problems, through mental problems. Uh.
(32:39):
They've done controlled trials of MBSR programs and clinical settings
and non clinical settings, and they generally found that they do.
And this is self reported stuff obviously, but they reduce
self reported anxiety depression uh and stress and increase well
being as opposed to people who got no treatment at all. Yeah,
(33:00):
so yes, it's I mean, it does seem to be effective. Um.
There's also especially with self reporting chok that seems to
be like the big one that if you if you
look at studies where they're using self reporting, like it
has the most pronounced effect um. Objective tests there does
seem to register some sort of effect like on the
objective experience of say like pain or something like that.
(33:24):
But social psychology has jumped all over this. It's like
we're going to study this, um. And there's this one
study from which I have to give a hat tip
to you mean because she turned this one up. Um.
But it was a study of white people who some
of whom received mindfulness training and a control group who
(33:45):
received sham mindfulness training, which is hilarious, and the effect
that it had on their willingness to help black people
that they saw who they saw in need, um and
not like you need like you know, homeless or something
like that. Like um, they would be they would be
subjected to a test unwittingly where they be in a
room and like a black person would come in and
(34:06):
like drop their papers, and their their willingness to help
that person pick up the papers, or if a black
person entered the room and they were on crutches, their
willingness to give up their seat. And apparently black people
tend to help black people more. White people tend to
help white people more. Spanning people tend to help hispanning
people more. They people help their in group more. But
this mindfulness group, um actually kind of cross lines way
(34:29):
more than than was expected. Right, Yeah, I mean I
think that kind of says it all. You you do
help your in group more. But the people that received
the real mindfulness training, we're definitely far and away more
willing to step outside there in group and help someone
of another race. Yeah, let's you know, there's going to
be said for that. Yeah, and I mean it was
(34:50):
significant three times more. It's really significant statistically speaking for
a study, and it seems like it was a pretty
good study. Like the fact that they had sham my
canfulness training ruled out the possibility that the group that
got mindfulness training was behaving a certain way because they
thought like that's what was going to be the result
(35:10):
of it, almost like a placebo effect. So the group
that received sham training thought they were getting mindfulness training.
They still that's what I want to know. I would
love to know what sham mindfulness right. It's like breathing,
really concentrate on all the anger, really feel it. They
or they'd let him in like uh, Lama's breathing where
(35:32):
they're like, I don't think that's right. That doesn't feel right.
They started to float away. It's really funny and shout
out to cal State San Marcos and Professor Daniel Berry
and I guess you me, yeah, sure, the trifecta. Yeah sure,
what what's cal State Sam Marcos is the mascot? Geez,
(35:54):
I'm gonna bet five dollars on the lobos. That sounds good. Okay,
let's go with that, alright, Los Lobos even, Yeah, that's
the bandless Lobo sys their magic and not coincidentally their
halftime entertainment as well. Um, but we do need to
say that, Uh, there's another school of thought, and it's
(36:17):
not a a competing school of thought. It's just to hey,
be aware that it's not always great for everyone. Uh.
They there's this one article you said about people that
experience trauma in their lives that have buried it and
it sits in their body, is unconscious trauma that mindfulness
practices and meditation practices can dredge that stuff up. And
(36:39):
so they found that when these people they're studying them
and they're doing these mindfulness practice they're experiencing like rage
and anxiety, and it's like whoa, whoa, whoa. This is
the opposite of where we're supposed to be headed here.
And I think they have figured out in a lot
of these cases it's people that are uncovering these buried traumas. Yeah,
and here's where we reach like the first initial part
(37:00):
where the West has kind of screwed this up because
it is unexpected when somebody in America goes to a
meditation retreat and tries to become more mindful, and they're
confronted with trauma where they're confronted with rage or self
hatred or something like that, and they're not expecting it.
If you went and talked to like an actual like
Buddhist monk, they'd be like, well, somebody probably should have
(37:23):
told you that that's a real possibility that you're not
This isn't all, This isn't like you know, it's like
an acid trip. It's not always like flowers and sunshine.
Sometimes it's like the darkest thing you'll ever be confronted with.
Kind of thing, same thing. The good thing about mindfulness
meditation is that you can stop immediately, but it's supposedly
in some some retreats, in some situations they're like, no,
(37:45):
you've gotta press through. You gotta press through. And people
are kind of um enticed or forced into staying in
really uncomfortable trauma experiences um way beyond their comfort zone,
and it can actually be damaging, and it's very rare
from what I can tell, for their be like like
lasting harm. But there are reports of people having to
(38:08):
go to therapy for years after having gone on basically
a bad trip at a meditation retreat for years years
of therapy. Um, so it can happen. And I guess,
like I think, Chuck, there's a two thousand nineteen study
that found like twenty of people who meditate reported experiencing
unwanted effects, right, like negative effects that they were not
(38:32):
planning for. And that's the thing that's the big problem.
There's no there's nowhere, very little warnings about this stuff.
It's all treated in a very pollyannish naive manner, as
if like you know, America and Europe got its hands
on l the the Secret the Cube from hell Raisers,
just like this is awesome. Let's figure out how to
(38:52):
be more productive using this thing. That's kind of what's
going on. Yeah, And I think another thing that can
happen is uh uh. It can lead to a spiral
of anxiety if you're not able to get to that
place that you think you should be getting to by
practicing it. So it becomes like this cycle where you
know you're thinking, like, when practicing this meditation doesn't seem
(39:13):
to be doing anything for me, why can I not
even do this right? And all of a sudden that
is building upon itself and creating anxieties because you feel
like you're supposed to reach this sort of moment of
like float floaty bliss that is I mean that's really
hard to maintain, yes, but I mean not maintained, but
like even touch even reach sure, And it's been packaged
(39:34):
like that, it's been marketed, is something that you will
just read some floaty bliss with and yeah, I can
totally see being stressed out because you don't reach it
because it hasn't been explained to you even what you're doing. Right. So, um,
there's a it's a it's a good little short read.
It's called Mindfulness, Meditation and Trauma Proceed with Caution. I
found it on good therapy dot org. And it it
doesn't say like, don't do this even if you know
(39:56):
your trauma, don't meditate, don't try to become mindful. It
says some you know, make sure you find like a
good coach, a good guide, a good teacher who understands
how to deal with trauma and can prepare you for
it and can pull you back and be like, don't forget.
Life's actually good. You're good, and now let's try a
little more and just kind of little by little expose
yourself to it rather than like you know, ripping your
(40:18):
shirt off and standing in front of like the baseball
pitching machine. Uh. There's when it comes to physical pain,
that's a pretty interesting area as far as the studies
have been concerned, like the idea that can it out
actually help reduce physical pain or at least the subjective
experience of pain. And you know, in some studies, in
(40:39):
some cases the men people who practice meditation do report
lower subjective experience of pain or what they call pain unpleasantness.
So this might be a little bit of a mind
over matter, Like the actual pain is still there, but
I've gotten my mind too in such a place that
the unpleasantness or the anticipation of that unpleasantness isn't as
(41:03):
great as it would be if I weren't able to
practice that mindfulness. Yeah, as which ties very closely into
a Buddhist tenant of the first arrow of sufferings, which
is where everyone has to experience that. Let's say you're
bitten by an aunt. It's not a very pleasant sensation,
and everybody's going to experience it roughly the same. But
(41:23):
there's also a second arrow where you can be worried
about being bitten by an aunt and it makes the
actually makes the first arrow ten times worse, not just
twice as bad, but ten times worse. And the idea
is that if you're mindful, if you practice um sati,
you won't really experience a second arrow, just the first arrow.
And that's the best you can hope for in this life.
(41:45):
That's right, Mr Roisa, what it's from. Oh, it's just
correct up when every time I think of an arrow
hitting a human body, I only think of Monty Python
when that guy takes a arrow message to you, so
as he's dying. Uh. There was one study though, in
twenty nineteen, a review of studies actually that found the
(42:07):
NBSR can reduce severity of chronic pain or improved daily
functioning and depression about like associated with that pain, which
is you know, that's there's something to be said for that,
Like I don't think it should only be looked at
as some sort of hippie dippie thing like if you
have real physical pain, it could possibly help, yes, And yeah,
(42:30):
for sure, I mean think that that's kind of like
one of the outcomes of it being exposed to westernization
is that it's being studied and it's actually holding up
in studies and boys. It being exposed because if you
work for a big corporation, if you especially work in
Silicon Valley, chances are there are mindfulness retreats, maybe mindfulness
(42:52):
rooms in the offices where they say, hey, we know
we work you to death, and it's not fair. Why
don't we set up this little room that used to
be uh, a room for um, you know, for your
kids to come to work. But we don't let that
happen anymore. It used to be the nursery. But we'll
put you in here and you can zen out and
(43:13):
be cool. Uh. And here's one of the criticisms. As
long as you come back and you get all that
work done, we think it's a great tool for you,
right exactly. And not just corporations, but the military is
using mindfulness um. Schools, little kids are being taught mindfulness
um and to meditate uh prisons um. And there's there's
(43:34):
an enormous amount of like out just out there in
the culture. It's it's gotten really popular. I guess in
two thousand and twelve, just over four percent of Americans meditated. Uh.
Five years later it was up to four That's a
pretty big increase in just five years, and I would
propose it's probably more than that now in um so
(43:57):
it's everywhere, But it's also really kind of um lost
its way. I guess once it hit America and corporate
America in particular, mindfulness kind of got perverted, I think,
is a way you could put it. Yeah, I mean
that critique is is really valid. Like it's great that
a company might take mindfulness in the consideration is something
(44:20):
beneficial for their employees, But to ignore the root cause,
which is you're working too many hours a week and
you're overworked and you can't possibly get done what you
should get done, and that's where this anxiety is rooted. Um,
here's a mindfulness room so you can help correct all that.
Like it totally puts the onus on the employee to
sort of self adjust to what's probably way too much work,
(44:44):
instead of saying, hey, maybe people wouldn't be in this
position to begin with if they, you know, didn't have
to work sixty hours in a week. And and the
same thing goes for social movements as well, Like some
people say, hey, you know how like a lot of
us are mentally ill these days. That's because society is
screwed up. So rather than putting the onus again on
(45:05):
the individual person, just kind of suck it up and
deal with it in a mindful manner. Why don't we
focus instead on these social problems that are causing all
of these other social problems too, So what we don't
have to do that? Um? And those are really valid
criticisms of westernized your mindfulness in twenties, And there's actually
(45:28):
a term for it that a guy named Miles Neil
coined and another guy named Ronald Purser wrote a book
using that name, It's perfect Mick mindfulness. Yeah, I love
that word. And they're basically saying like, hey, you guys
have so completely detached this from ethics and morals and
religion and and kind of co opted something that had
(45:50):
its roots there that Yeah, you've you've there needs to
be a term for that. You've mixed mixed it. Yeah,
you've been lit up, you've mixed screwed it, you make
lift it? You like that? Uh? And that you know
you can't ignore the theological roots, uh and have it
(46:10):
be the same thing. And hr reps across the country say,
oh yes we can, And look what happens. We're really
screwing people up. So, um, there's a there's a like
a couple of quotes I found that I really feel
like kind of get to the heart of what happened
when mindfulness came over here and got got picked up
(46:30):
by corporate America and the military and just other surprising
groups and maybe put to not the best uses. Um.
There's a really good New York Times article from back
in two thousand fifteen that's kind of a meditation on
the idea of mindfulness or the word mindfulness and what
it what it means, by Virginia Heffernan, UM, and she
says that, Um, what commercial mindfulness may have lost from
(46:55):
the most rigorous Buddhist tenants that it replaced is the
implication that suffering cannot be escaped but must be faced.
And that's that's that mispackaging, that miss marketing that we
talked about. That the idea that if you meditate your mindful,
it's going to free you from all your problems and
make you less stressed and more productive and just happier.
And that's not necessarily the case, because we in the
(47:17):
West tend to really like to, like you said, um,
avoid all of the stuff that that really stinks and
just get as much of the stuff that we like,
and that's not what that's meant for. Yeah this, Uh,
I think it's from the same article about mindful fracking. Uh.
Could that be next putting a neuroscience halo around a
(47:39):
byeword for both uppers productivity and downers relaxation to ensure
a more compliant workforce in a more prosperous c suite.
There it is, and there's another one to um. The
Dali Lama apparently pointed out that um, even a suicide
bomber would likely have to cultivate some sort of mindfulness.
It's not it's not inherently ethical. And if it's not
(48:00):
inherently ethical, then that means that you could conceivably use
it to nefarious ends. And the way that Buddhists for
thousands of years kept it from being used to the
farest ends is by encasing it in wholesomeness like mindfulness. Specifically,
what's called right mindfulness by the Buddhists is it's a
(48:20):
wholesome approach and separating wholesome thoughts from unwholesome thoughts. And
if you just take the mindfulness practice out of that context,
you have a problem. Um, you want to read that
quote from Andrew Olensky. True mindfulness is deeply and inextricably
embedded in the notion of wholesomeness. Just as a tree
(48:41):
removed from the forest is no longer a tree but
a piece of lumber. So also the carrying attentiveness of mindfulness,
extracted from its matrix of wholesome co arising factors, denigrates
into mere attention. Yeah, that's attention. That's the best you
can hope for. Is it just denegrates into mere attention
and not something hard for you? Know? So I think
(49:02):
it's great. I think it's a I think it's wonderful
that people want this and they're seeking it out and
they're trying it. I think the people who are selling
it to everybody need to just package it more transparently
and explain the true purpose of it and stopped using
it for productivity. Agreed. Uh, if you want to know
more about mindfulness, go, um, go research it and see
(49:25):
if it's for you, and give it a shot and
go into it with right eyes, right vision. I can't remember. Uh.
And since I said I can't remember, of course, that
means it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call
this tribute to Ziggy Bombach from his son Michael. We
got a great email that and I've been conversing with
(49:46):
Michael for the past couple of weeks on this good
dude and his dad was a good dude. Hey, guys,
longtime listener. Recently lost my father and I've been going
through a great deal of grief. My dad was at
high risk for UH catching COVID, so I made sure
it was my priority to keep them safe, and since
being social wasn't an option over the past couple of years,
(50:06):
we turned to nature during the pandemic and rekindled our
love for the great outdoors UH though he never had
to rekindle his. He was born in Poland and immigrated
to the States in the sixties and was only ever
comfortable in his gardener in the woods. He was a
simple but passionate man. So we started driving out to
western North New Jersey two Stokes Forest to get spring
water and go fishing. It's a gorgeous part of the state.
(50:30):
It was about fifty minutes each way. Perfect to introduce
him to my favorite podcast, stuff you should know. Even
though I had to describe to him what a podcast was.
He was instantly enthralled, and I can still hear him
quietly asking in the car if Chuck and Josh were
going to be broadcasting today. It's just adorable. Like me.
He adored your ability to convey something complex and tough
(50:53):
information in such a sweetened conversational way. He would always
come home and tell my mom what he had learned.
Was so much isolate in the past few years. It
was warming to hear him happy about all these new
subjects that he was learning about. You gave him that
happiness and made his life that much better of the
last couple of years of his life. I can't thank
you enough for everything that you continue to do. There's
so much bad in this world right now, and people
(51:15):
are hardly operating at their best, but you continue to
do something worthwhile and worth making, something worth learning. So
thank you for making the life of Ziggy bomboch a
little brighter towards his end. And that is from Mike.
And he sent me a picture of Ziggy and I
read the obituary. I looked it up and Ziggy seemed
like a great, great guy and uh I had his
(51:36):
zin out to reading this. So I wouldn't cry. I
cried every time. That's a really amazing email. Thank you
so much that it's impossible to not past judgment on
that one. I'm going to say, I feel very proud Chuck,
that's right in this case. Great judgment and uh r
I p ziggy sound like a great guy. R I
p Ziggy And thank you Mike. I'm glad we could
(51:59):
help bring you in dead together. That's pretty amazing stuff. Uh.
If you want to be like Mike, can get in
touch with us and write us the email of the century.
We are willing to read it. Uh. You can send
it to us at stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio.
(52:21):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, Ish and this is
stuff you should know. Ish. This is full on stuff
(00:22):
you should know, Charles. Remember that point. I feel like
it was about ten eight to ten years ago where
everyone was just saying ish on the end of things
instead of saying, like, you know, finding the real word
that they were looking for, so so like an approximation
of the word or or of the thing they were describing.
(00:45):
So like I'm saying, no, not even that, like when
there's like a real word that could be used and
they would just the ish on another word. I don't
know what you're talking about. No, yeah, it was. It
was the thing it swept the nation? When was it?
Or maybe I'm thinking of the Marcarina. That's that's what
you're thinking. Okay, alright, man, that really did sweep the nature.
(01:08):
Remember that who let the dogs out? It was like
a one. Did they ever find that out? No? I
think it was a rhetorical question. It's the kind of
rhetorical question you could ask yourself, Chuck while you're meditating. Yeah,
but first thanks thanks, but I'm gonna step all over
the segway because because before we get started, Chuck, I
(01:29):
want to do if you'll allow me, another shout out
for my little niece Mela's movie, big time movie called
No Exit that's coming out as far as when this
episode drops tomorrow, so February, No matter when you hear this,
just immediately go onto Hulu subscribe if you haven't yet,
(01:50):
and check out my niece Mila in No Exit because
she is the trailer amazing. What do you think it
looks like a taut thriller? She looks fantastic from what
you can tell from a trailer. You just saved all
the bad parts for the movie. I don't think they did.
I was reading an interview with the director and he
was saying like she was. She was doing such an
(02:11):
amazing job of being terrified and freaked out and everything
that like after in between takes, like the other customers
would be like are you okay? And she'd be like, yeah,
why are you okay? And you know I'm acting right exactly.
She's like, it's acting you like John Love. Yeah, So
on Hulu No Exit February. My niece Mila just kills
(02:33):
it there you go, can't wait. Thanks again for that, chuck,
So let's get started. Thank you for not passing judgment
on that either way, Uh, your re siguing because we're
times passing judgment. It means I'm not being mindful because
a big part of mindfulness you just did not judge. Yeah,
(02:54):
So that's like, this is one of those ones, you know,
those episodes where we just start talking about the thing
without defining it. Um. This is not going to be
one of those episodes because I think it would be
kind of rough otherwise, you know. Yeah, And I guess
if you're gonna define mindfulness, you need to kind of
go back in time. I mean, I guess we could
(03:15):
hop in the way back machine. We haven't done that,
it's been a while. Let's pull the old cover off.
It's quite dusty in here, and a little bit of
mill do, Little mill do. There's some old crystals boxes.
Those are yours? Remember you had them accidentally delivered to
your house? Right, and then we went back to the
old West to celebrate you're thinking of back to the future.
(03:41):
Three ah, right, right right? I called Mary steam Virgin,
meaning if I did to play her, not date her
or anything, Oh, Dave Mary steam Burgin on her? Isn't that? Um?
I really that's a Ted Danson's old squeeze, right, it's
his current squeeze. I'm not gonna fight. Are they still together? Yeah?
(04:02):
I think so. Gosh they've been together for a while. Yeah.
Good couple. Okay, great, good stuff. So who knew we
were gonna be talking about ted dancing at the beginning
of Mine could richer gear, but ted dancing is a
big surprise. If we get in the way back machine
and go back uh in time to sort of the
(04:23):
beginning of Buddhism, you'd have to look at the language
Polly and the words sati Polly is p a l
i satis s a t i. There are a lot
of different words for mindfulness, but the one that we
kind of identify with it's kind of been used most
from Polly, which is a Middle Indo Aryan liturgical language
(04:47):
from the early branches of Buddhism. iBOT to take in
the reason that that Poully is so important is because
they say that it was the language of the Buddha
and at the very least it was the first language
that the Buddhas were which have been passed down orally, um,
we're written down in so it's like legit old school
Buddhist thinking and teachings. And one of the basic parts
(05:09):
of that is, like you said, sati, which is has
been translated to mindfulness, but it was translated by a
British colonial administrator, wasn't it. That's right, And it kind
of more accurately as translated as memory of the present,
which I think is a really kind of a cool
way to look at mindfulness. Yeah. Absolutely, it really kind
of reveals what what's what's going on, especially once you
(05:31):
kind of learned a little more about it, you're like,
that actually works about as perfectly as as can be.
But it got it got translated, um into the word mindfulness,
sati into mindfulness by a British colonial administrator in Ceylon
which is now Sri Lanka, back in the eighteen eighties.
So it was some British guy who said sati means
(05:52):
mindfulness and actually kind of gave it to us today,
although there was a long period where it had been forgotten.
But I think you don't really talk about mindfulness even
though it's changed so dramatically, especially in the last decade
or so, without kind of describing what it was originally
meant to describe, what it still describes if you're a
practicing Buddhist um and that is that like you are
(06:16):
not only like paying attention to the moment and um
like like experiencing this moment without letting your thoughts wander
to the past or the future or anything like that,
but that whatever you're experiencing in the moment, no matter
what it is, you're experiencing with equanimity, which means that
you're not passing judgment on it as good or bad
(06:38):
or anything else. It just is And it sounds easy
to describe, but if you've ever tried it, it's one
of the hardest things a human being can never set
out to do. Yeah, I mean, I think it's very
very natural for human too, ah, seek out and contemplate
and think about the things that feel good and please them,
(07:01):
and to try and stuff down and get rid of
and avoid things that either hurt literally hurt or emotionally hurt,
or things that are painful or unpleasant. And Boyle's a
that is a tough thing to overcome, my friend. Uh,
just the condition of being human makes that very difficult.
(07:21):
But yeah, and you just nailed it on the head,
not once but twice, Chuck, when you said that it's
a very human condition and part of sati. The point
of sati as far as like Buddhists are concerned, is
that it's a step that you take on the path
to enlightenment to free yourself from the cycle of like
life and death and rebirth and to become like a
truly enlightened being that's freed from all of that. And
(07:45):
so you have to free yourself from that human condition,
and a big part of that is to free yourself
from yearning from wanting. Because yearning and wanting or being
repelled by something and wanting to get away from it,
there are two sides of the same coin as far
as sati is concerned, which is um you are wishing
that something is different or was different than it actually is,
(08:07):
and then that's the basis of suffering, and suffering is
the thing that keeps you in that cycle of life
and death and rebirth. So meditating to become mindful and
non judgmental about your present experience is one step toward
relieving yourself with suffering and then freeing yourself from that
shackle being born and reborn and reborn again. Well, you
(08:29):
and my friend have just spoken about the noble truths,
in part because craving is the cause of suffering is
the second noble truth. And to cease that craving will
bring about the ceasing of that suffering, which is the
third noble truth. And basically, experiencing the moment without and
everything about the moment without judgment is sort of the
(08:53):
the goal. And you know, for modern you know, we're
gonna talk a lot about sort of the beginnings of
mindfulness and kind of how it's become um, kind of
a hip thing to do here in the United States, uh,
starting in about the nineteen seventies and on and especially today.
But we're we're kind of talking in American modern terms
(09:13):
about stress and distressing and the Buddhists have a term
for that, which is duca d u k k h
a uh. And that is, you know, again, to avoid
or destroy something that we don't like, and what we
usually don't like is something that's going to put a
stress on us, right exactly. And they're saying, like, dude,
(09:35):
this is part of the point of life. I'm reading
this really amazing book by Tick not Han right now. Um,
rereading it. Actually it's when I was when you just
kind of go back and reread very like easy slim volume.
It's called No Mud, No Lotus, and it basically says
like without suffering, you can't have happiness and vice versa.
Pretty pretty basic stuff. But like he really gets into
(09:56):
explaining how to confront suffering and understand that it's just
part of life. And that's a huge part of the
Buddhist approach to mindfulness. It's not to get away from suffering,
is to recognize it as it is and also simultaneously
not make a bigger deal out of it than it is,
because suffering is enough. It's bad enough as it is,
(10:18):
but another part of the human condition is to make
it way worse by anticipating it, worrying about it, um like,
focusing on it after it happens. There's a lot of
stuff we do to our own suffering that explodes it,
and part of mindfulness training is to is to stop
doing that as well too. You ain't kidding, uh, And
the lack of judgment is a big, big part of
(10:39):
all of this. And we're gonna talk quite a bit
here and there about John cabot Zin, who is uh,
it's like easy, far and away the sort of leader
of the modern American mindfulness movement in a lot of
different ways. And we'll get to him in more detail later.
But he says that awareness that arises through paying attention
on purpose, and that's another big part of it. It's
(11:01):
it's a very purposeful practice. Yeah, but not meditation, which
we'll get to that as well, because meditation is a
true physical practice that you in mental practice, whereas mindfulness
is more of a state of being that you're trying
to get to. But he says on purpose in the
present moment and non non judgmentally, they always have to
kind of hammer home the lack of judgment being a
(11:22):
key part right exactly. Um, And he's he's a proponent
in kind of one of the founders of what you
can refer to as secular mindfulness, which is this current
incarnation of mindfulness that's sweeping the West. It's like you said,
hip that's been kind of like removed deliberately, as we'll see,
removed from its Buddhist roots and Buddhist context to make
(11:44):
it more palatable and scientific seeming. Yeah, secular, secular stripped
of all the religion and maybe we can sell it
to Americans exactly, and then a but the yeah, Um,
The upshot of all this, though, Chuck, is that no
matter who you are, where you're coming from, if you're
talking about mindfulness, you're talking about paying attention to the
(12:05):
present moment and doing the best you can at not
judging anything that's going on in that present experience and
just taking it on its faith value and engaging in
it fully. That's mindfulness in a nutshell. Yeah. And it's
not anything that the Buddhists um had a corner on.
They just probably did it better because all different kinds
(12:26):
of religions throughout antiquity had you know, chanting or some
kind of mindfulness practice, maybe prayers or through songs or dance. Uh.
You know that that kind of thing has been around
as long as people have been practicing religion. So the
Buddhists did not invent it, but I think they got
it fairly right. So, um, let's talk a little more
(12:46):
about how we got here today, Um, historically speaking, after break,
what do you think about that? It sounds great. I'm
gonna breathe in the meantime, Hey, let me teach you
(13:21):
something I've been using that tickna Han taught me, not personally,
but through his writing in a book that was published
that I purchased with money. Smash your hand with a hammer, Yeah,
he said, try to focus on anything else chump. Uh.
There's a bunch of different mantras you can say, and
I'm not even sure that's the right word, but um,
one that I keep using is And it's just striking
(13:44):
what taking a breath and deliberately focusing on that breath,
just breathing in once and breathing out once can do
to like just suck you right out of wherever your
mind is, um, in the past or the future. It's
it's really striking what how it can do that? But um,
his was, Um, it's a take breathing in. I noticed
(14:06):
that I'm alive and breathing out. I'm happy to be alive,
and just doing it once like immediately brings me back
into the present moment. And it's really cool. I like it.
It's all very new for me, but I think it's Uh,
it's pretty cool. Yeah, there's a lot of value there. Um.
And you know, you can like practice something like this
(14:26):
and those breathing techniques. It's not exclusive to mindfulness or meditation.
Or Buddhism. Uh. You know, that's a great technique if
you have kids. I found that, you know, with if
my daughter is having a bad time, just kind of
get her to slow down and take a couple of
good deep breaths. Always a good thing to do. Uh.
And Emily, who you know, someone who has a lot
(14:48):
of anxieties in her life as a struggling small business owner.
We will do this thing where we have hug breathing,
where I will go up to her and we will
have a good tight bear hug embrace and we'll breathe
in together and it's sort of like doubles the power
of it. Wow, that's neat, Chuck, Is that your own?
(15:09):
Did you come up with that? Yeah? I mean I'm sure.
I mean I didn't get it from anywhere, but I'm
sure I didn't invent that. It sounds like a biking
mindfulness like Hell's Angels. Sure, yeah, that's the Hell's Angels technique.
You came up. You can call it whatever you want.
It's your invention. It's a good one. Well. Yeah, there's
something about breathing together that close physically. It's it's pretty powerful.
(15:33):
So if you if you went back, Um, a few
hundred years, a couple hundred years even, and you spoke
to any Buddhists around the world and said, hey, how
often do you do mindfulness meditation? They would look at
you like they had no idea where you're talking about.
And if you said, you know, sati, they'd say, oh,
that's not for us. That's for like the monks and
the nuns up in the caves in the mountains, Like,
(15:56):
we don't do that kind of stuff where sup For Buddhists.
We care about morality and we worship local deities and
all that stuff. But that's that's kind of advance that's
more than than the average Buddhist does. And it wasn't
until I think the late nineteenth century in Burma that
that was finally kind of broken up and and meditation
and mindfulness together, we're kind of introduced for the first
(16:18):
time to like lay Buddhists, like just the normal, everyday,
average Buddhists living their life. Yeah, this is pretty cool. Like,
I know, we love it when we can kind of
pinpoint when things happen or when things change. Uh, And
this is one of them. On November five, this is
when the British Imperial army uh conquered Burma and said, King, uh,
(16:41):
we're gonna mispronounce some of these thebol maybe. I think
that's right, you're out of here. And that king was
promoting mindfulness and promoting Buddhist institutions throughout the nation. The
Brits of course, said, now we're not gonna really do that.
So it fell to the lay people to get organized,
to find new places to meet, uh, to find their
(17:02):
own you know, gathering grounds, and a lot of times
these were monasteries and it would go through monks, but
they would it basically went to them to kind of
figure it out because it wasn't I don't want to
say state sponsored, but it kind of state sponsored, yeah,
or state supported or something like that. Yeah, yeah, but
so and so rather than being like, oh, I don't
(17:23):
know who, I guess we're not Buddhists anymore, they took
it by the horns and like they did something with it.
But one of the outcroppings of that was that like
these monks who used to just go meditate out in
the like in the mountains or the hills or in
the woods, were now now had audiences of like everyday
people who were practicing Buddhists that they were teaching this
stuff too, and it was it was one of these guys,
(17:46):
Letty Sayado, who was a Buddhist monk, who said, you
know what, this isn't just for us, this is for everybody.
And closely in Letty Sayadow's footsteps came Minga and sayo
say y aw, say yea. I think that's right, and
that he that monk was the first one to actually
(18:06):
teach um mindfulness and meditation to regular people, I think
around nineteen eleven. Yeah, I mean it's cool stuff. Like
I love the idea that Letty uh say Adel kind
of put forth, which was you don't have to go
to a monastery even like we've set these up for
you and you can. You don't have to retreat to
a cave. You don't have to you don't even have
(18:28):
to go into a deep meditative state or anything like.
Just momentary bits of mindfulness are very helpful. Uh. And
that's a good way to reach regular lay people. And
I think through practice is when Sail came along and said, hey,
that all sounds great, and buddy, I'm gonna teach it right,
so the the people in what is now my me
(18:51):
and Mar are the ones who um kind of broke out,
broke mindfulness and meditation out of it's it's little slumber
sure cage or something like that, and democratized it a
little bit. But it was as far as the people
in the West are concerned, it was the Japanese and
their development of Zen Buddhism that we have to thank
(19:12):
because this is you can pretty much trace a direct
line between um, the mindfulness and the meditation and the
approach to Buddhism in the West today back to the
twentieth century Japan and specifically a guy named Dai Setsu
Ta Taro d T. Suzuki. So d T. Suzuki was
(19:34):
kind of a what's called a Buddhist modernist thinker who said, Um,
there's different things we can do with this, but this
approach is a little more rationally, a little less dogmatically,
and open it up to people like our friends and
what's soon to be me and Mar and um. Not
only that, let's let's start relating to the West a
little more. And DTI Suzuki actually kind of carried this message,
(19:57):
this idea of Zen Buddhism with him over to America
in Europe, and it just started to catch on like wildfire. Yeah.
I think it's really interesting too that it was another
active war that led to you know, that helped give
rise to someone like Suzuki, just like when the Brits
over threw Burma, when the U. S. Navy attacked Tokyo
(20:17):
Harbor in eighteen fifty three. Uh, there was you know,
basically Japan was like, you know, we gotta we gotta
start relating to the West a little bit more and
sort of modernize. And this was known as the Meiji Restoration.
And part of that was saying, hey, Shinto is going
to be our religion, our main religion, and not Buddhism,
(20:38):
which led the Buddhist to say, hey, maybe we should
modernize our religion as well, to you know, so we
don't get left by the wayside. And that gave rise
to someone like Deti Suzuki. Right. So it was from
that modernization that um, Buddhist modernism came about. And it's
basically what you would recognize as Buddhism today, like very thoughtful,
(20:58):
very um uh, interior dwelling, um, the idea that the
universe has all connected. All these were like Buddhist thoughts before,
but it was it was Buddhism allowing itself to be
influenced by Modernism and by other groups like the Romantics
and the Transcendentalists, right, so they jumped on it big time.
It was pretty It was like a confluence of perfect
(21:20):
timing as far as coming to the United States and
like the counterculture ready for this, but in a weird way.
It was like the United States, unbeknownst to the counterculture
Beats and then later the Hippies um that their predecessors,
like the Transidentalists, had had pre influenced what was coming
back to them. So it was already in a very
(21:41):
palatable form for Americans who were open to the idea
of like mind expansion and taking acid and um, you know,
and meditating and were just open to the ideas of
other cultures of becoming like more in tune with the universe.
It was they were just waiting for it, and it
came to them in the and in the briefcase I
(22:01):
guess of D. T. Suzuki um, and it just kind
of took off from there. So the idea everything we
understand about mindfulness and meditation you can trace back to
like D. T. Suzuki in those beats absolutely. And there
were three people in particular, uh, in the seventies and
sixties and seventies practicing this, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Cornfield and
(22:23):
Sharon Salzburg who were not together but they studied separately
meditation in Burma, and then the mid seventies founded the
Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, which became sort of the
center of the v Pasana meditation movement here in the
United States. And they're they're still around, they're still doing
(22:43):
their thing. So um, it was from that same group.
There was actually a time where John cabot z In,
the guy you we mentioned earlier ze I, by the way,
not z In. That would be too far on the nose.
Oh wait, what if his name was spelled z E
(23:03):
n Oh, I got boy. I was not paying to
the current experience very well, I'm sorry. That'd be like
a boxer being named boxer. Uh, yeah, it would be right.
I was for some reason, I was going more towards
the um cabernets in. Yeah. So he's known as the
(23:28):
godfather of modern mindfulness according to The Guardian at least,
which is a pretty legit newspaper. Um, and by the way,
thank you also to Olivia for helping us out with
this one. Chuck. She did, she did, um. But John
cabot Zin was among those people Jack Cornfield, great name,
(23:48):
Sharon Salzburg, and J. Joseph Goldstein. He actually taught at
their UM Insight Meditation Society, and he was a big
time practitioner of Zen Buddhism and he had he was
on like, uh, I guess, a meditation retreat and he
had a bit of insight well, I guess an epiphany
is probably what you call it. That he was meant
(24:09):
to help apply Buddhist techniques to help people who are
in pain. He had either a microbiology or molecular biology
degree and he ended up applying it to medicine and
figuring out how to join Buddhist practices and medicine to
help people in the seventies and it really started to
(24:29):
take off from there. Yeah. I mean he sort of
had the same idea as previous UH cultures, which was, hey,
if we want to UH and not sell for money,
but if we want to popularize this, we should get
a little bit away from the religion part, the sort
of hippie dippy new Agi part. And he really wanted
to start talking in concrete terms about things that everyone
(24:52):
worried about, which was stress, and like, if you want
to make your life less stressful, here's here's a way
to do it, and more on mindfulness and less on meditation,
which was still a tough sell to mainstream America and
still is today. I think, yeah, but it's gotten less
and less. I feel like if he finally overcame the
(25:14):
threshold that was you know, keeping it back in the
last like five ten years, and achieved what he was
looking for. I mean, think about mindfulness is everywhere today
and it is almost totally divorced from any kind of
religious connotations. It seems like a neuroscience tool more than
anything the way that it stated in the West, and
(25:36):
that was his goal. He he was trying to to
get it to the most people possible, Uh, study it scientifically,
and then apply it to help people. And specifically again,
he was initially looking at how it can help people
with pain. Um, and he came up with mindfulness based
stress reduction m B s R, which is still very
(25:59):
much in use today. And then there was an offshoot
to chuck mindfulness based cognitive therapy and UM, that's that
takes CBT which is a proven type of talk therapy
UM used extensively in psychology and and applies John cabot
Zin's approach to mindfulness to it, right. Yeah, And I
(26:21):
think one of the big tenants here is to interrupt
automatic thoughts and the automatic thoughts that can lead to
an automatic behavior. So the automatic thought might just be
your propensity to feel that stress and reach for a
drink immediately and not even think like, oh boy, I
need a drink because I'm stressed out and that will
(26:42):
help out. It becomes this automatic thing. And he was
all about and the practice of mindfulness is all about
disruption and disrupting that flow without judgment. Yeah, Because one
of the big things in cognitive behavioral therapy is that
you have a thought, your thought leads to a feeling,
and your feeling leads to a behavior. And oftentimes it's,
(27:02):
like you said, it's very destructive and you don't even
realize it's going on UM until your life is kind
of falling apart or it's certainly not as good as
it could be. And it doesn't even have to be
a drink. It could be a donut, It could be
yelling at at a cashier, at a um, you know,
a grocery store like all sorts of different things, and
you are totally out of control of it. The idea
(27:24):
behind this mindfulness, adding mindfulness to cognitive behavioral therapy is
that you are training yourself to detach yourself from all
thoughts and emotions so that you can evaluate them clearly,
so that none of them can jump out of nowhere
pounce on you. And the next thing you know, you've
eaten a dozen donuts and had six scotches and you
(27:45):
have no idea why. You do have the idea why,
and you probably haven't gotten to that point because you've
stopped the whole process by recognizing it the moment it
began ideally theoretically on paper. That's the purpose of you
mindfulness to help, especially with with mental health. Yeah, there's
um a journalist named Robert Wright, and he kind of
(28:07):
put it in a way that I kind of like,
which was to think of your thoughts and emotions as transient.
So it's not like that kind of goes back to
the no judgment thing. You can have these bad feelings
and bad emotions and bad tendencies, but if you allow,
if you allow them to just flow through you, they
become transient, they don't stick around. Uh, the same sort
(28:29):
of ideas that you you can't, um, why worry about
things that you can't control? But not in a uh
an office poster kind of way, you know what I mean.
It runs a bit deeper than that. It's not like
a Pollyanna thing. No. And as a matter of fact,
like if you want to trace it all the way
(28:50):
back to its original Buddhist roots, it's that like, we
have very little, if any control over life, and that
recognizing that will free us for um, all of our
desires and the idea that like we have to have
things and we want to hang onto it. Like it
just lets you let things flow by and you can
enjoy them and experience them as they come, rather than
(29:12):
hoping for the next one, needing the next donut um
or fearing the next loss. Uh, you just experience life
as it comes. That's kind of the point of that
of of understanding that everything is transient and impermanent, including
your own your own life, Like you're going to die
one day. There's ultimately the big like you know, like
(29:34):
bingo number. Yeah, Like that's ultimately what it's leading is
you're going to die you're you, yourself are impermanent, and
so understanding that through getting there through meditation, daily meditative
practice UM is is kind of the goal. Yeah, and
it's interesting they found that it's um even though something
like MBSR is more rooted in that sort of neuroscience
(29:58):
e thing and not uh, spirituality or religion. They found
it's sort of a chicken in the egg deal where
once you do participate m m BSR, you may become
more spiritual as a result, even though you weren't going in.
But I think the reason why is because even if
these people don't know it, even if they're at a
corporate mindfulness retreat, they're engaging in a deeply spiritual practice
(30:24):
that that it's they're kind of doing it wrong is
we'll see, but there's still it's still you know, part
of this very long established tradition that's that actually has
like legs. It's not it's not mumbo jumbo like. It
actually has a pronounced effect on on the human brain,
the human psyche, the outlook that we have on life.
And so depending on the context you're doing it, and
(30:46):
it can be very useful, it can be harmful, or
it can be totally useless in some cases too, But
it is a spiritual act, so it makes sense that
it would make you more interested in spirituality. Well, I
say we take our second break, if that's good, And
because we're stuff, you should know, we have to talk
about whether or not this works and if there have
(31:07):
been studies that tell us one way or the other.
So we'll get into that right after this. All right,
(31:35):
it's fun to sit around and talk about mindfulness and
to just sort of zen out and lose ourselves, become
one with each other through these headphones. Yeah, man, you
sound like Rory Cochrane and days are confused. The new
man what was his name? Oh Slater? Was he Slater?
(31:58):
Maybe Peter? You happy? Give me drugs, man, Yeah, it's later,
you're right, get some from your mother. Man. It's funny.
I've seen him and he's been in a bunch of
stuff since then, and it's it's always impossible to see
him as anyone other than Slater. I mean, have you
he was on CSI Miami. I think for years and
years and years you're just waiting from her whip out
(32:18):
of Dubio. Yes, and he's all clean cut and everything,
and I still can't not see it. I totally agree
with He's not fooling anybody, all right, So does this
stuff work? Could? There have been plenty of studies, of course,
and there is a lot of evidence that mindfulness programs
can help people through emotional problems, through mental problems. Uh.
(32:39):
They've done controlled trials of MBSR programs and clinical settings
and non clinical settings, and they generally found that they do.
And this is self reported stuff obviously, but they reduce
self reported anxiety depression uh and stress and increase well
being as opposed to people who got no treatment at all. Yeah,
(33:00):
so yes, it's I mean, it does seem to be effective. Um.
There's also especially with self reporting chok that seems to
be like the big one that if you if you
look at studies where they're using self reporting, like it
has the most pronounced effect um. Objective tests there does
seem to register some sort of effect like on the
objective experience of say like pain or something like that.
(33:24):
But social psychology has jumped all over this. It's like
we're going to study this, um. And there's this one
study from which I have to give a hat tip
to you mean because she turned this one up. Um.
But it was a study of white people who some
of whom received mindfulness training and a control group who
(33:45):
received sham mindfulness training, which is hilarious, and the effect
that it had on their willingness to help black people
that they saw who they saw in need, um and
not like you need like you know, homeless or something
like that. Like um, they would be they would be
subjected to a test unwittingly where they be in a
room and like a black person would come in and
(34:06):
like drop their papers, and their their willingness to help
that person pick up the papers, or if a black
person entered the room and they were on crutches, their
willingness to give up their seat. And apparently black people
tend to help black people more. White people tend to
help white people more. Spanning people tend to help hispanning
people more. They people help their in group more. But
this mindfulness group, um actually kind of cross lines way
(34:29):
more than than was expected. Right, Yeah, I mean I
think that kind of says it all. You you do
help your in group more. But the people that received
the real mindfulness training, we're definitely far and away more
willing to step outside there in group and help someone
of another race. Yeah, let's you know, there's going to
be said for that. Yeah, and I mean it was
(34:50):
significant three times more. It's really significant statistically speaking for
a study, and it seems like it was a pretty
good study. Like the fact that they had sham my
canfulness training ruled out the possibility that the group that
got mindfulness training was behaving a certain way because they
thought like that's what was going to be the result
(35:10):
of it, almost like a placebo effect. So the group
that received sham training thought they were getting mindfulness training.
They still that's what I want to know. I would
love to know what sham mindfulness right. It's like breathing,
really concentrate on all the anger, really feel it. They
or they'd let him in like uh, Lama's breathing where
(35:32):
they're like, I don't think that's right. That doesn't feel right.
They started to float away. It's really funny and shout
out to cal State San Marcos and Professor Daniel Berry
and I guess you me, yeah, sure, the trifecta. Yeah sure,
what what's cal State Sam Marcos is the mascot? Geez,
(35:54):
I'm gonna bet five dollars on the lobos. That sounds good. Okay,
let's go with that, alright, Los Lobos even, Yeah, that's
the bandless Lobo sys their magic and not coincidentally their
halftime entertainment as well. Um, but we do need to
say that, Uh, there's another school of thought, and it's
(36:17):
not a a competing school of thought. It's just to hey,
be aware that it's not always great for everyone. Uh.
They there's this one article you said about people that
experience trauma in their lives that have buried it and
it sits in their body, is unconscious trauma that mindfulness
practices and meditation practices can dredge that stuff up. And
(36:39):
so they found that when these people they're studying them
and they're doing these mindfulness practice they're experiencing like rage
and anxiety, and it's like whoa, whoa, whoa. This is
the opposite of where we're supposed to be headed here.
And I think they have figured out in a lot
of these cases it's people that are uncovering these buried traumas. Yeah,
and here's where we reach like the first initial part
(37:00):
where the West has kind of screwed this up because
it is unexpected when somebody in America goes to a
meditation retreat and tries to become more mindful, and they're
confronted with trauma where they're confronted with rage or self
hatred or something like that, and they're not expecting it.
If you went and talked to like an actual like
Buddhist monk, they'd be like, well, somebody probably should have
(37:23):
told you that that's a real possibility that you're not
This isn't all, This isn't like you know, it's like
an acid trip. It's not always like flowers and sunshine.
Sometimes it's like the darkest thing you'll ever be confronted with.
Kind of thing, same thing. The good thing about mindfulness
meditation is that you can stop immediately, but it's supposedly
in some some retreats, in some situations they're like, no,
(37:45):
you've gotta press through. You gotta press through. And people
are kind of um enticed or forced into staying in
really uncomfortable trauma experiences um way beyond their comfort zone,
and it can actually be damaging, and it's very rare
from what I can tell, for their be like like
lasting harm. But there are reports of people having to
(38:08):
go to therapy for years after having gone on basically
a bad trip at a meditation retreat for years years
of therapy. Um, so it can happen. And I guess,
like I think, Chuck, there's a two thousand nineteen study
that found like twenty of people who meditate reported experiencing
unwanted effects, right, like negative effects that they were not
(38:32):
planning for. And that's the thing that's the big problem.
There's no there's nowhere, very little warnings about this stuff.
It's all treated in a very pollyannish naive manner, as
if like you know, America and Europe got its hands
on l the the Secret the Cube from hell Raisers,
just like this is awesome. Let's figure out how to
(38:52):
be more productive using this thing. That's kind of what's
going on. Yeah, And I think another thing that can
happen is uh uh. It can lead to a spiral
of anxiety if you're not able to get to that
place that you think you should be getting to by
practicing it. So it becomes like this cycle where you
know you're thinking, like, when practicing this meditation doesn't seem
(39:13):
to be doing anything for me, why can I not
even do this right? And all of a sudden that
is building upon itself and creating anxieties because you feel
like you're supposed to reach this sort of moment of
like float floaty bliss that is I mean that's really
hard to maintain, yes, but I mean not maintained, but
like even touch even reach sure, And it's been packaged
(39:34):
like that, it's been marketed, is something that you will
just read some floaty bliss with and yeah, I can
totally see being stressed out because you don't reach it
because it hasn't been explained to you even what you're doing. Right. So, um,
there's a it's a it's a good little short read.
It's called Mindfulness, Meditation and Trauma Proceed with Caution. I
found it on good therapy dot org. And it it
doesn't say like, don't do this even if you know
(39:56):
your trauma, don't meditate, don't try to become mindful. It
says some you know, make sure you find like a
good coach, a good guide, a good teacher who understands
how to deal with trauma and can prepare you for
it and can pull you back and be like, don't forget.
Life's actually good. You're good, and now let's try a
little more and just kind of little by little expose
yourself to it rather than like you know, ripping your
(40:18):
shirt off and standing in front of like the baseball
pitching machine. Uh. There's when it comes to physical pain,
that's a pretty interesting area as far as the studies
have been concerned, like the idea that can it out
actually help reduce physical pain or at least the subjective
experience of pain. And you know, in some studies, in
(40:39):
some cases the men people who practice meditation do report
lower subjective experience of pain or what they call pain unpleasantness.
So this might be a little bit of a mind
over matter, Like the actual pain is still there, but
I've gotten my mind too in such a place that
the unpleasantness or the anticipation of that unpleasantness isn't as
(41:03):
great as it would be if I weren't able to
practice that mindfulness. Yeah, as which ties very closely into
a Buddhist tenant of the first arrow of sufferings, which
is where everyone has to experience that. Let's say you're
bitten by an aunt. It's not a very pleasant sensation,
and everybody's going to experience it roughly the same. But
(41:23):
there's also a second arrow where you can be worried
about being bitten by an aunt and it makes the
actually makes the first arrow ten times worse, not just
twice as bad, but ten times worse. And the idea
is that if you're mindful, if you practice um sati,
you won't really experience a second arrow, just the first arrow.
And that's the best you can hope for in this life.
(41:45):
That's right, Mr Roisa, what it's from. Oh, it's just
correct up when every time I think of an arrow
hitting a human body, I only think of Monty Python
when that guy takes a arrow message to you, so
as he's dying. Uh. There was one study though, in
twenty nineteen, a review of studies actually that found the
(42:07):
NBSR can reduce severity of chronic pain or improved daily
functioning and depression about like associated with that pain, which
is you know, that's there's something to be said for that,
Like I don't think it should only be looked at
as some sort of hippie dippie thing like if you
have real physical pain, it could possibly help, yes, And yeah,
(42:30):
for sure, I mean think that that's kind of like
one of the outcomes of it being exposed to westernization
is that it's being studied and it's actually holding up
in studies and boys. It being exposed because if you
work for a big corporation, if you especially work in
Silicon Valley, chances are there are mindfulness retreats, maybe mindfulness
(42:52):
rooms in the offices where they say, hey, we know
we work you to death, and it's not fair. Why
don't we set up this little room that used to
be uh, a room for um, you know, for your
kids to come to work. But we don't let that
happen anymore. It used to be the nursery. But we'll
put you in here and you can zen out and
(43:13):
be cool. Uh. And here's one of the criticisms. As
long as you come back and you get all that
work done, we think it's a great tool for you,
right exactly. And not just corporations, but the military is
using mindfulness um. Schools, little kids are being taught mindfulness
um and to meditate uh prisons um. And there's there's
(43:34):
an enormous amount of like out just out there in
the culture. It's it's gotten really popular. I guess in
two thousand and twelve, just over four percent of Americans meditated. Uh.
Five years later it was up to four That's a
pretty big increase in just five years, and I would
propose it's probably more than that now in um so
(43:57):
it's everywhere, But it's also really kind of um lost
its way. I guess once it hit America and corporate
America in particular, mindfulness kind of got perverted, I think,
is a way you could put it. Yeah, I mean
that critique is is really valid. Like it's great that
a company might take mindfulness in the consideration is something
(44:20):
beneficial for their employees, But to ignore the root cause,
which is you're working too many hours a week and
you're overworked and you can't possibly get done what you
should get done, and that's where this anxiety is rooted. Um,
here's a mindfulness room so you can help correct all that.
Like it totally puts the onus on the employee to
sort of self adjust to what's probably way too much work,
(44:44):
instead of saying, hey, maybe people wouldn't be in this
position to begin with if they, you know, didn't have
to work sixty hours in a week. And and the
same thing goes for social movements as well, Like some
people say, hey, you know how like a lot of
us are mentally ill these days. That's because society is
screwed up. So rather than putting the onus again on
(45:05):
the individual person, just kind of suck it up and
deal with it in a mindful manner. Why don't we
focus instead on these social problems that are causing all
of these other social problems too, So what we don't
have to do that? Um? And those are really valid
criticisms of westernized your mindfulness in twenties, And there's actually
(45:28):
a term for it that a guy named Miles Neil
coined and another guy named Ronald Purser wrote a book
using that name, It's perfect Mick mindfulness. Yeah, I love
that word. And they're basically saying like, hey, you guys
have so completely detached this from ethics and morals and
religion and and kind of co opted something that had
(45:50):
its roots there that Yeah, you've you've there needs to
be a term for that. You've mixed mixed it. Yeah,
you've been lit up, you've mixed screwed it, you make
lift it? You like that? Uh? And that you know
you can't ignore the theological roots, uh and have it
(46:10):
be the same thing. And hr reps across the country say,
oh yes we can, And look what happens. We're really
screwing people up. So, um, there's a there's a like
a couple of quotes I found that I really feel
like kind of get to the heart of what happened
when mindfulness came over here and got got picked up
(46:30):
by corporate America and the military and just other surprising
groups and maybe put to not the best uses. Um.
There's a really good New York Times article from back
in two thousand fifteen that's kind of a meditation on
the idea of mindfulness or the word mindfulness and what
it what it means, by Virginia Heffernan, UM, and she
says that, Um, what commercial mindfulness may have lost from
(46:55):
the most rigorous Buddhist tenants that it replaced is the
implication that suffering cannot be escaped but must be faced.
And that's that's that mispackaging, that miss marketing that we
talked about. That the idea that if you meditate your mindful,
it's going to free you from all your problems and
make you less stressed and more productive and just happier.
And that's not necessarily the case, because we in the
(47:17):
West tend to really like to, like you said, um,
avoid all of the stuff that that really stinks and
just get as much of the stuff that we like,
and that's not what that's meant for. Yeah this, Uh,
I think it's from the same article about mindful fracking. Uh.
Could that be next putting a neuroscience halo around a
(47:39):
byeword for both uppers productivity and downers relaxation to ensure
a more compliant workforce in a more prosperous c suite.
There it is, and there's another one to um. The
Dali Lama apparently pointed out that um, even a suicide
bomber would likely have to cultivate some sort of mindfulness.
It's not it's not inherently ethical. And if it's not
(48:00):
inherently ethical, then that means that you could conceivably use
it to nefarious ends. And the way that Buddhists for
thousands of years kept it from being used to the
farest ends is by encasing it in wholesomeness like mindfulness. Specifically,
what's called right mindfulness by the Buddhists is it's a
(48:20):
wholesome approach and separating wholesome thoughts from unwholesome thoughts. And
if you just take the mindfulness practice out of that context,
you have a problem. Um, you want to read that
quote from Andrew Olensky. True mindfulness is deeply and inextricably
embedded in the notion of wholesomeness. Just as a tree
(48:41):
removed from the forest is no longer a tree but
a piece of lumber. So also the carrying attentiveness of mindfulness,
extracted from its matrix of wholesome co arising factors, denigrates
into mere attention. Yeah, that's attention. That's the best you
can hope for. Is it just denegrates into mere attention
and not something hard for you? Know? So I think
(49:02):
it's great. I think it's a I think it's wonderful
that people want this and they're seeking it out and
they're trying it. I think the people who are selling
it to everybody need to just package it more transparently
and explain the true purpose of it and stopped using
it for productivity. Agreed. Uh, if you want to know
more about mindfulness, go, um, go research it and see
(49:25):
if it's for you, and give it a shot and
go into it with right eyes, right vision. I can't remember. Uh.
And since I said I can't remember, of course, that
means it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call
this tribute to Ziggy Bombach from his son Michael. We
got a great email that and I've been conversing with
(49:46):
Michael for the past couple of weeks on this good
dude and his dad was a good dude. Hey, guys,
longtime listener. Recently lost my father and I've been going
through a great deal of grief. My dad was at
high risk for UH catching COVID, so I made sure
it was my priority to keep them safe, and since
being social wasn't an option over the past couple of years,
(50:06):
we turned to nature during the pandemic and rekindled our
love for the great outdoors UH though he never had
to rekindle his. He was born in Poland and immigrated
to the States in the sixties and was only ever
comfortable in his gardener in the woods. He was a
simple but passionate man. So we started driving out to
western North New Jersey two Stokes Forest to get spring
water and go fishing. It's a gorgeous part of the state.
(50:30):
It was about fifty minutes each way. Perfect to introduce
him to my favorite podcast, stuff you should know. Even
though I had to describe to him what a podcast was.
He was instantly enthralled, and I can still hear him
quietly asking in the car if Chuck and Josh were
going to be broadcasting today. It's just adorable. Like me.
He adored your ability to convey something complex and tough
(50:53):
information in such a sweetened conversational way. He would always
come home and tell my mom what he had learned.
Was so much isolate in the past few years. It
was warming to hear him happy about all these new
subjects that he was learning about. You gave him that
happiness and made his life that much better of the
last couple of years of his life. I can't thank
you enough for everything that you continue to do. There's
so much bad in this world right now, and people
(51:15):
are hardly operating at their best, but you continue to
do something worthwhile and worth making, something worth learning. So
thank you for making the life of Ziggy bomboch a
little brighter towards his end. And that is from Mike.
And he sent me a picture of Ziggy and I
read the obituary. I looked it up and Ziggy seemed
like a great, great guy and uh I had his
(51:36):
zin out to reading this. So I wouldn't cry. I
cried every time. That's a really amazing email. Thank you
so much that it's impossible to not past judgment on
that one. I'm going to say, I feel very proud Chuck,
that's right in this case. Great judgment and uh r
I p ziggy sound like a great guy. R I
p Ziggy And thank you Mike. I'm glad we could
(51:59):
help bring you in dead together. That's pretty amazing stuff. Uh.
If you want to be like Mike, can get in
touch with us and write us the email of the century.
We are willing to read it. Uh. You can send
it to us at stuff Podcasts at iHeart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio.
(52:21):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
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