The Psychology of Awareness | Jon Kabat-Zinn

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If we were to write a diagnosis for humanity on planet Earth, the prognosis would be not good because greed, hatred, and delusion are running rampant. It's time for us to actually wake up as a species.

What if the real crisis we're facing right now is not political or technological or even environmental, but it's a crisis of awareness.

A lot of the time we're perpetually distracted, and so when we do show up and we are not driven by an agenda, it's kind of contagious.

Welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, a high-performance psychologist named Michael Gervais, who head coach Mike McDonald and former head coach Pete Carroll brought in to work with the Seahawks, famous for his work with Felix Baumgartner when he jumped out of space in the Stratos Project, Olympic Olympic athletes depend on something more than just training and talent. They have to stay mentally tough. Today's guest is Jon Kabat-Zinn, molecular biologist, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and a mentor of mine whose way of living I deeply respect. His work has been fundamental in how we understand mindfulness in medicine, psychology, and everyday life.

I've come to see it as a radical act of sanity to stop and drop into this moment because this is life. This moment is it, and everything else is either over or it's yet to come.

In this conversation, we explore why mindfulness is not about escaping reality but waking up to it, and why the skills of being present, connected, and compassionate are essential for the future.

Being engaged rather than just sitting back at a distance is important. If you care about younger generations, then this is a critical moment. Again, I really do feel like Mindfulness and heartfulness has the potential to unify everybody on planet Earth.

With that, let's jump into this week's conversation with my friend Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Mindset. Mindset. Mindset.

Jon, I first just want to start, and I would imagine that you don't know how much I think about you. And so I just want to start with a thank you for how much space you've taken up in my life. And even though we don't speak often, just the gift that you've given in your presence and your interest and the way that you show up in the world has made a material difference in my life. So I just want to start with a thank you for that.

I'm speechless, but deeply moved, of course, to hear that. And then I feel that resonance that you're referring to. That is kind of one of these very mysterious, beyond time and space kind of resonances where we don't have to see each other or talk to each other for long stretches of time, but there's a certain kind of way in which I feel like our common interests and intentionality really overlap to a huge degree. I have a lot of confidence in that.

What you've taught me by being around you and what you've taught me by what you've said to me and what you've said to others in my presence and the, the writings that you've written and the deep thinking have all been material, full stop. But I want to share a story with you before we get into like how you're doing and how you're understanding the world right now. There was a moment I was at one of your retreats, and I bet you don't even remember this, John. It might have been lunch. It was noble silence, but I think you broke the silence for lunch, for this meal. And people were talking about somebody else, a world thinker. And I looked down at you and you had your head down, you were listening and feeling what was happening, and you stood up and you compassionately left the table. And I remember thinking, oh, there was a resonance. There was a, a vibe, if you will, that you did not want to be part of because it was a little bit of a complaining about this, this global thinker. I'll keep the thinker's name out of it for now. And I looked over at you just seeing if you were picking up on that vibe, because I don't like when people are talking bad about other people. I don't feel that right. And I looked over at you. And you were kind of nodding like, yeah, it's my time to leave. John, in that moment, you might have taught me more than everything else I just mentioned because you just— you were into it, you were feeling it, you were gathering, you were sense being. And then there was no purpose for you to stay in that conversation and you didn't like it. So you got up and eloquently left. And I was like, okay, I really appreciated that little subtle moment. That little subtle teaching that was profound for me.

Of course, I don't remember it at all, but I think we do that for each other. And I mean, most of us who are in relationships with other people tune to each other in that kind of a way that added benefits that we never really get to express to each other.

Yeah. So fun that I get to say that to you now.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And my wife was on the retreat at the table with us, and we talked about it after the retreat, after the 3 or 5 days. I think it was 3 days. And we talked about that moment, and she noticed too. So there's two things in this. One is you take up a lot of space, not because you are demonstrative and big and heavy in that way, but because you're— I don't know a better word right now than say energy, but I don't want to be in this woo kind of space.

Right. I hear what you're saying. The word I would use would be just present. So it's nothing special in a way, but I think what you're pointing to, and this doesn't have anything to do with me, is that anybody who is more or less fully present in any kind of situation, that presence is felt by other people. And, you know, and it's not an accident. It's a kind of result in some sense of an intention to align one's life with the fact that we're only alive in this moment. And so when you show up in this moment 100%, say in your body and in your heart and in your mind, no matter what the circumstances are with other people, by yourself, there's a certain energy that I think accretes to that, that I don't think about at all until you brought it up. But I'm trying to kind of explain what you experience for myself. And that's what I would say, that it's like a lot of the time we're perpetually distracted. And so when we do show up and we are not driven by an agenda, You know, it's kind of contagious.

It is both directions. Yeah. Yeah.

Both directions.

Yeah. Right. The last time that we spoke on the podcast was right as the Russia-Ukraine war was beginning.

Mm-hmm.

And I would love to just take you back to what you said then. Would that be okay?

Sure. Sure. That's what, 4 years ago now?

Yeah. I started with just saying, like, how are you? And you said, I'm fine. With not being fine. And then you spoke about minimizing ignorance and greed and hatred and optimizing love and compassion and non-harming. When you hear that framing and those words now, what, what still feels true to you and what has evolved in how you hold the world as it is right now? And We're in a different framing right now with a different war.

I'm very touched that you're saying that. And there have been quite a number of wars that have gone on in the interim and accompanied by boundless horror. So that was 4 years ago. I would stand by what I said and multiply it by a factor of a million instantly at this particular moment in time. And I really do think where, if you're asking me for my view of things, we are actually at a kind of critical moment on planet Earth for a lot of different reasons. They speak about the sort of poly crisis of, you know, sort of polluting the entire atmosphere, global warming, of course, and despoiling of the entire ecosystem. And of course, wars create enormous damage to the ecosystem as well as to humanity. So you can't make more pollution than by exploding bombs and bomb after bomb after bomb. So I really feel like at this particular moment on planet Earth, and I think the astronauts, we can talk about that later, who recently went out around the moon, gave us a view that I think is a really positive sign and uplifting moment in a way that has importance here, that humanity has reached the point where it's really capable of destroying everything that's been built, you know, in the past, you know, sort of history and prehistory that the arc of human life and what we call questionably civilization, 'cause this has been going on forever, but with increasingly powerful weapons and now AGI, artificial general intelligence, which is a whole other element to this, including the weapons, that it's time for us to actually wake up as a species. And I say it in the frame of the name Linnaeus gave us as a species, Homo sapiens sapiens, which means literally in Latin, the species that is aware and is aware that it's aware. So mindfulness and then mindfulness again. And mindfulness also includes compassion. So they're not two separate things, as the Buddhists like to say, two wings, one bird, mindfulness and compassion. Or heartfulness. And so I think on the UN-held conference that I went to in Geneva and was the kind of keynote speaker for in mid-December called United and Present, where they really were promoting this kind of perspective of greater mindfulness and bringing it into every aspect of the UN. And there were a lot of people there from the World Health Organization. There's so many people on planet Earth who were doing their best to heal the world. And yet, if you think, well, how can the UN influence, say, what's going on in Ukraine? Obviously it can't. How can it influence what devastation that went on in Gaza? The UN could, it tried to do what it did and it got attacked for actually bringing food there and so forth. And the same thing is true for what's going on now with Iran. I mean, the UN in some sense is like, was all about not repeating a Second World War, a global war where everybody is like, you know, at risk for annihilation. And then we are the country that dropped two nuclear weapons, two atomic bombs on cities that were not military targets. So if the diagnosis, if we were to write a diagnosis for humanity on planet Earth, the prognosis would be Not good because greed, hatred, and delusion are running rampant, which is the diagnosis that the Buddha offered 2,600 years ago. And now you can see it in Silicon Valley, greed, Bitcoin, and all that kind of sort of cryptocurrency, which nobody understands, but it's like sucking the money out of the system. I don't want to go on about your question except to say that I'm perpetually optimistic that when our backs are to the wall, humanity will actually come through. And I feel this way very strongly about America, that we will actually wake up to being the species that is aware and is aware that it's aware, at least we're capable of that, and then rewrite our legal system, rewrite our planetary laws of engagement to actually maximize well-being for all and minimizing harm. And I think we're beginning to see that the body politic and the body of planet Earth are the same and that these national wars of self-interest are just festers on the body of the planet and it can't afford any more of this. We've already melted the glaciers practically. We're melting the polar ice caps. So I won't go on and on about this, but I feel like that's the moment that we're in. And so everything that we do in some sense is either colored by our recognizing it or putting our heads in the sand and just pretending that life is gonna go on just the way it always did and hopefully nothing bad will happen. But that really is being blind to the people who are suffering most. Take for example, what went on with ICE in Minneapolis or everywhere else that ICE is and what they're doing with, you know, these giant warehousing of people, you know, with no plumbing and no sanitation and, you know, imprisoning children without their parents. It's like we're living in a nightmare, frankly, and waking up, I think, to our common humanity is the only answer because it's not like whoever is doing this is not human. It's just that they're ignorant in a certain way.

I had a friend that was visiting me. Um, he's from New Zealand and we're in Los Angeles. We're just walking down kind of the boardwalk by the beach and there was a homeless person.. And this is a homeless person that I've seen around lots. And he walked by and was struck by it. And I walked by as if it was a Tuesday.

Yeah.

And he looked at me and he said, whoa, this must be a hard place to live for the compassionate. And I thought, oh my God, what? Like, It just reframed me in that moment. And I'm hearing you in the same way, which is you are awake, you are able to sense and feel and have a take on how you're feeling in this world. You wrote the diagnosis and the prognosis, and then you said, we need to wake up. Yeah.

What I would—

and then you added, but that's the treatment plan to wake up. But then I hear you say, I'm optimistic, and I go, okay, I want to understand that. But I just want to kind of float up maybe just wider for a minute, which is oftentimes in, you know, the contemplative practices and the communities that we both relish and regard, there's a passivity. There is an acceptance that waking up or seeing or being aware of the condition is the solution. But I hear a little fight in you. I hear like we need to take action and change. And I don't want to put words in your mouth. I would just like to know what emotional experiences for you as you are awake to the conditions of poor health that you're describing?

It's very emotional for me because I have grandchildren, and the world that they are growing up in is terrifying on a lot of different levels. Just take what Jonathan Haidt's research is showing us in his book, The Anxious Generation, and the fact that everybody is walking around like this and nobody thinks that they should be put in mental institutions, because if the people were walking around like this 50 years ago in downtown LA or New York City, they'd be carted away. We're so lost in our micro worlds and addicted to them that again, at a critical point here. Now, in terms of how we act, you know, well, I think we saw a lot of very strong responses. We are seeing a lot of very strong responses. You know, every time there's a No Kings Day, I mean, it's like millions and millions of people are coming out. And they're getting more and more engaged. I mean, they're not just coming out for a demonstration, going home and forgetting about it. Their lives are changed in the process. People are creating local groups and having conversations. And so a lot of that is going on. I bow to Bruce Springsteen for the song, The Streets of Minneapolis. I mean, he produced that song in his home in 3 days, I think, and put it out there. And it was like, one song can really galvanize people when it comes from the right person. And I think everybody has that potential to actually act. And of course, two people were shot acting in Minneapolis that do that. And so this is kind of the nature of the world we live in. But I feel like we do need to stand up and call a spade a spade, stand up to greed, hatred, and delusion in every way that we can. And since you mentioned the homeless person and, you know, somebody panhandling on the street. Yeah, it's a really fabulous meditation practice to see what happens in that first moment of apprehension. You see the person and very often it's a kind of shutting down, a turning away, like I pretend I didn't see. But awareness or mindfulness can actually catch you doing that.

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Usually most people, if you gave them $100, you would not really suffer, okay? Or $10 or $5 or even $1. And then you could say, well, yeah, but they're just going to go out and buy a bottle of whiskey with it. Or there are all sorts of ways in which you can kind of— but in some sense, what we're doing in that moment is we're unwilling to apprehend the enormity or what I call the full catastrophe of the human condition. This person was a baby at one point and as cute as any other baby on the planet. And things happen. And what a society is supposed to be for in very large measure is taking care of its people. That's why we have states. That's why, you know, it's so that there's a government that can actually help people to be homed, you know, to be housed, to be taken care of, to have hospitals when they get sick or need care of some kind or other.

And schools. Why do we educate people?

Believe in, it's like the body politic is in a certain way a kind of the biology of humans in society. You know, if you think about the body as opposed to the body politic, your body has like gazillions of cells, trillions of cells. Every single one needs an adequate blood supply, right? If you don't get a blood supply even to your little toe, It's going, what's it gonna do? It's gonna necrose. And that little toe is gonna, in some sense, run your life. I mean, it can get infected, you know, it may need to be amputated. There are all sorts of things that can happen once you get that kind of initial infection. And so an adequate blood supply is necessary for every single cell and tissue in the body. Why not in the body politic too? People talk about a universal basic income or giving people enough so that they can maybe self-start. So that person panhandling on the street or in Grand Central Station or whatever, what would it take to actually recognize that's still a human being and not just somebody who's annoying me on my way to some important meeting that, you know, where the stakes are very high?

What is the body politic?

What I mean by the body politic is either the nation state, if you're talking about the United States, or the United Nations or all nations in a certain way, you know, the body The United Nations is meant to be a larger body that holds these individual nations. You could think of the nations as organ systems and the world is like the body politic and the organ systems have to all function effectively and you don't want the liver going to war with the lungs because like we, we like the way we look better or we want more oxygen than those people get because in the end, the whole thing would it fall apart. And I think that's where the waking up comes, that we need to actually recognize, as Thích Nhất Hạnh, this great Vietnamese meditation teacher, Zen practitioner, who, by the way, was molded by the horrors of the Vietnam War, which never needed to even happen, at least the US involvement, just picking up on French colonialism and then the Japanese invasion that happened before that. It was a choice. We made the choice. And it shaped Thích Nhất Hạnh's life in such a way that he devoted his entire life to actually trying to bring what I'm talking about into the world in ways that would help us to govern ourselves in a different way. And that governance is what I'm using relating to the Buddhist term dharma, which means actually the actuality of things, what science would would look at as the nature of things.

I love that you bring up Thích Nhất Hạnh. I've never had the chance to meet him. I'm imagining you did. But he has been a teacher. I mean, his writings, his meditations, his sense of how humans work in this world has been profound for me as well. One of his students has a podcast, The Way Out Is In. —is the name of the podcast.

It's so good. Is that Brother Phap Luu who is— Yeah, it is. He's an old Dharma buddy of mine. Oh, perfect.

Well, I'm going to ask for an introduction. So yeah, he is amazing. He sounds just like Thích Nhất Hạnh. Like he's really embodied a spirit.

No, he's beautiful. And you couldn't really say that to him because he would say, well, that's true for everybody. And he's right. But they embody that. And in a certain way, that's why the monastics in that tradition tradition, but particularly in that tradition, why they wear very plain robes that just cover everything. They're not fancy, although they do have fancy robes for special occasions. And the women wear headscarves. And so you don't actually see them as individuals, but they are part of some larger community or sangha of intentionality. Yeah, that's right.

Sangha meaning the— Sangha means community.

The community. Yeah. The community of people. Who love, who care, who practice, who have kind of enrolled in, so to speak, the adventure of loving what is. Right.

Okay. Let me paint a scenario. The person listening or watching is saying, okay, hold on a minute. I'm barely keeping myself together. I'm more stressed and more anxious and feeling more overwhelmed. And you want me to go into that and actually, like, get more in touch with my feelings, because as soon as I flip open my phone or TV or a glass of wine or a nice meal, or I feel like I can just escape a little bit. And wait, John, you're asking me to actually tune into that more through a process of paying attention to my feelings or my thoughts, and I'm going to feel more. And I don't know if I have that kind of compassion. I don't know. Because I want to burst out in tears or crawl in a hole on a regular basis. Paint that scenario of that person, whether you see them as a parent, a grandparent, you see them as an operator of a business, whatever, wherever. Can you speak to that experience that so many of us are having?

Yeah, well, there's no question that it's overwhelming. And to turn towards what you most want to run away from is kind of like, why would I possibly do that? And my short answer would be, well, how's it working for you by running away from it? Oh God. Okay. You know, this is again, to come back to the monastic community, this is why they are together. See, because you can't carry the burden of human suffering by yourself. We need a community. It turns out the community is all of humanity, but we have to reclaim that sense of community because we've othered ourselves so much that now we're nation states and We're competing, and now we're even disregarding the Europeans. They're no longer our friends. We've thrown the NATO alliance down the toilet, and it's every man, and I say that advisedly, for himself. This is not a formula for health and well-being of any kind in any realm. And I think when one's practicing mindfulness, you're actually, although you may not realize it at first, and this is why you need effective teachers, to kind of point things out to you. When you are taking your seat, let's say, in formal meditation, all by yourself in your own home, I've come to see it over the, like, 50 years that I've been practicing. It's not one more thing I have to squeeze into my day or to eat vegetables or to, you know, change my lifestyle or run more or whatever. I've come to see it as a radical act of sanity. To stop and drop into this moment because this is life. This is the only moment anybody, whether you're listening now or you're listening later, the moment of listening, this moment is it. Okay? And everything else is either over or it's yet to come. And of course, we create gigantic fictions about both what was over and what is yet to come. But very often we don't know who's actually in this moment. And we don't even, a lot of the time, inhabit the body. We're so caught up in the mind, in the head, that we lose touch with the body and has vast repercussions in terms of stress, pain, illness, and health. So MBSR, for instance, where we, you know, sort of one of the things that I'm most known for of bringing meditative practices, mindfulness-based stress reduction into hospitals and medicine is to actually help people, you know, who are falling through the cracks of the healthcare system. System with chronic illnesses of all kind tap into their potential for learning, growing, and healing across the lifespan. And in 8 weeks, very often the entire vector of their life changes. And we've documented this in multiple scientific studies and clinical studies and MRI studies and so forth. It really, what looks like nothing from the outside changes everything in no time. In just this moment. So not only is it a radical act of sanity to, and I'm using take your seat metaphorically because you can do it lying down, sitting, walking, standing on your head, hanging from your toes. I mean, the question is, can you be in this moment in your life? And it's not just a radical act of sanity, it's a radical act of love. It's a certain kind of statement that I belong I am sufficient and I am connected to everything else. And the proof is I need to take the next breath in. I'm not actually independent of this world. I am one breath away from being dead. If I don't take this breath in and then let it out, I'm gone. So an appreciation of the breath And the fact that, you know, if I have like living next to some kind of power plant that's polluting, then people who are living around there can't even breathe. You know, the practice of mindfulness is really a way to affirm that you count, that you're important, that you're at least that one cell of the body of the whole planet, and every cell counts. And you belong. And then you also are in community with all the other cells around you, many of them like-minded. You may not even know your neighbors, but you know, why not get to know your neighbors? This is the kind of thing where I think with what's going on in the country, a lot of people are beginning to actually know their neighbors and realize, no, this is really important. Local stuff is important. Being engaged rather than just sort of of sort of sitting back at a distance is important. And as I said, if you care about younger generations, if you have a kind of family investment just by being a father or mother or parent or grandparent, then this is a critical moment again. So acting is not a kind of luxury, it's an absolute necessity. That's the way I see it. That's a very existential position, so to speak. And I really do feel like mindfulness and heartfulness are one human discovery of potential that has the potential to unify everybody on planet Earth.

What does that mean to you?

Well, what it means is that we wake up to the fact that we're not only capable of destruction, destroying ourselves and each other through greed, hatred, and delusion, but we're also capable of embodying love in the present moment. And so when you practice in this way, then you realize very shortly, The real meditation is not sitting on your cushion for some period of time trying to look like calm and collected. The real meditation is moment by moment, life itself, all of life. So how you show up in your relationships, how you say goodbye, how you say hello, how you hug. And when you're not doing it out of thinking, but you're doing it out of embodied wakefulness, it's an entirely different experience. And so that in some sense changes the trajectory of the world in small but not insignificant ways. And I feel like the fact that the UN is getting into mindfulness, that wasn't happening 50 years ago. The fact that the World Health Organization is— that isn't happening. There's so many positive things that you can look to in the world that really are moving in this direction. We have to pour energy into those and call out the greed, hatred, and delusion wherever it is. It doesn't go by Republican or Democrat. Everybody's, you know, sort of like driven by self-interest. And what we need to do is redefine what it means to be a self in relationship.

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we just learned to, say, take up residency in awareness for a period of time. And every time your mind wanders, which it's going to do infinitely, there's a— the awareness function actually recognizes sooner or later that you're lost in thought or carried away by some dream. And that awareness function is always functioning. So you're already back. And as you exercise that muscle, as you know from working with all these athletic teams, you exercise the muscle by working with, not against, a certain degree of resistance. So when the mind says, well, I don't want to sit anymore. I don't want to be present anymore. Try stretching it out for one more in-breath and one more out-breath before you decide to get up. And in that way, you're actually embodying wakefulness in that moment and not falling into the lowest common denominator of your own self-soothing. And in doing that, you're actually learning, growing, healing, and transforming what might be possible for you in your life before you breathe in your last in-breath and out-breath. Does that make any sense to you, by the way, what I'm saying? It's really clear. I just want a reality check here because I'm asking a lot of us, but I feel if you ask a lot, and this was like true in MBSR, the first principle of MBSR, because we see people with, who medicine can't help anymore. I mean, that's why they sent the stress reduction often. And our principle was, if you will ask a little of these people, Give them some like rinky-dink, little, little relaxation, a little this, a little that. If you ask a little of people, the most you're gonna get is the little you ask. If you ask a lot of people, first of all, they see that you believe that they are capable of that. If you ask a lot of people, there's no telling how they're going to respond because we love to be asked and seen as people who are capable of doing more than what we think we're capable of. I know you know that from all your work with professional sports teams. I mean, you know, it's all a matter of like, how do you get optimal performance? It's by letting go of the idea that you can't.

And you really need to apply yourself at your edge. Exactly. And then to make a fundamental commitment in your life to do that as often as you possibly can. And that's what Elite Sport in Plain View can teach us. There's a lot of problems with athletics, but there are a couple things that are really important to understand, is that those that are fundamentally committed to being their very best as a person and as as a teammate. Yeah, need both of those. They, they organize their life and they've got a sangha. It's not in the same tone, but they've got a team of coaches and teammates that hold the standard, that help them hold the standard of one more breath, one more rep, you know, stay in it just a little bit longer. Can you, can you have a little bit more fun on the edge? Because that's going to extend us a little bit. Can you relish in the way it feels to work hard with each and that keeps extending what we now view we are capable of. It's like a new mountaintop. Oh, look, there's another horizon. I didn't even know that was there. You get to that new one and you're like, I didn't even realize there's another whole horizon behind it. And so in elite sport, just to pull on the thread a little bit more, it's the fundamental commitment that I just want to make sure sings in what I'm saying. And then what they do is they front load their physical training their technical training, and their mental training. The world's best don't leave one of those up to chance. So they front load that training and they're trying to get to that messy edge as often as they can, cuz that's where the unlocks and the learnings and the insights take place. That's where the capacity building happens. And then they test themselves with other people that are equally as committed. Right. And now we've got this kind of stepwise approach And before you know it, we're changing the way we understand what people are capable of.

That's a beautiful metaphor for what we're talking about in the larger world is that, yeah, we are capable of that and we need each other and we can inspire each other and help each other and share practices together and have it be joyful rather than I'm only committed to this because I'm attached to some outcome. The highest performance is when you even give up being attached to the outcome. Outcome. You're so in the moment that the outcome is almost assured by the fact that you're beyond clinging and grasping, because that sucks your energy in certain ways that we often don't understand.

Yeah. In sport, and you know the term as well as anybody, but athletes call it being in the zone. Musicians call it being in the pocket. The technical science term is flow state. And, like, what percentage— when I've asked this question for, I don't know, 25 years, what percentage of time do you experience? Are you in? Yeah. And the number comes back like somewhere between 5% and 25%, somewhere in there, which begs the question, okay, the other 75% of the time, how are you operating? Where's your mind? That's right. And the greats, the greats, they go, that's it, Mike. That's like, I am working. I'm working really hard to, with my thoughts to, to get over to this like open aperture of what could be. And I'm backing myself and I'm trying to find fun in the moment and I'm working to refocus my mind in the present moment to what could become amazing. And when I'm not at my best, like it feels like I'm just tight and constricted and worried and anxious and overwhelmed and I get kind of sucked into that loop. So the best are working. Doing underneath the surface to try to guide their mind to their best abilities. And that's when I first introduced mindfulness, like, to the NFL. The wave of interest was not for enlightenment, wisdom, or deep insight. It was more optimal performance, right? And I was trying to, like, what do you do? Sneak the vegetables in with the fruit? Or what's that saying? Like, you're just trying to, you know, get a little taste into the things. I know what you mean. Yeah, that's not the saying, but you know what I'm saying? And all of a sudden people are like, whoa, when I'm more aware, when I'm with awareness— and I'd love for you to explain the nuances between when I'm more aware or versus when I'm with awareness. But when I'm with awareness, I'm able to— I'm fully present. I can navigate. I'm kind of unfolding with the unfolding moment. And, uh, I have, I have I'm like, everything is at my access.

You have infinite degrees of freedom, or at least it feels like infinite degrees of freedom. And it's not your thinking mind. Your thinking mind can't work fast enough to decide whether to faint left or faint right. You have to trust the body's intrinsic wisdom in motion. That's right. Yeah, but it is a trainable skill. So that's meditation in action.

I want to do two things. I want you to talk about awareness, and then I want you to talk about about just the super mechanical, simple way to train meditation. And then, like, super, super. And then I want to get into the curricula of life. And I want to talk about if you were the President of the United States of America, like, what would be some things you would do? And so let's kind of go in that order. Awareness, technical training, and then curricula to optionality.

Okay. The way I talk about awareness is that awareness is not something you get. And I try never to say your awareness or my awareness, because who would be arrogant enough to claim it? It's a gift that we're born with. We don't understand it. Not even— no neuroscientist understands what awareness is or how it arises or whether it even is a property that arises out of the brain. I mean, but we have what's called sentience and human awareness and other animals and maybe plants also, you know, have some degree of sensitivity to something larger, the environment, because the trees are kind of breathing in carbon dioxide, let's not forget, and breathing out the oxygen that we're breathing in, and we're breathing out the carbon dioxide. So in a certain way, we're completely interrelated. So it's not my awareness. I would say not so much trying to be with awareness even, but to just be aware, to be awake, because it is a given for us. We have it as a property, although we can't claim it as mine. But what we don't have is easy access to it. We don't have awareness when we most need it, because usually we're lost in thought and caught up in heavy-duty emotions of one kind or another. So if you just stop and see where's your mind it one moment or another. Most of the time it's lost in thought, thinking this, that, or the other thing. A lot of time in the future, a lot of time in the past. That's called worrying. But when you start to pay attention, you realize what your mind is doing. That's awareness. So the awareness can actually hold what's going on in the present moment. And then you don't inflate it with the story of me, that that's that's the full reality because you're more awareness than you are what's happening to you. And this is like, we could call it one's true nature is awareness itself in the form of you or in the form of me. So it's like phenomenal and a giant mystery. And so how do we learn to actually set that as our default mode, as the neuroscientists might say? Because default mode, when you put people into scanners and just tell them, don't do anything, just lie there in an fMRI scanner, this sort of midline region of the brain just goes crazy with activity. And when you interrogate people, well, what was going on in the scanner? They were making laundry lists of what I have to do when I get out of the scanner, or taking care of the kids or whatever. It's just thinking, thinking, thinking, and the emotion that's associated with thinking. But when they've trained in MBSR for 8 weeks even, you see an attenuation of that activity. Activity. The story of me doesn't dominate as much, and instead there's other activity in different regions of the brain. But it's more like there's simply awareness. I won't even say I'm here or I'm aware. There's simply aware-ing or awareness-sing.

And then when we slide into the concreteness of, like, formal practice, if you will, the way I think about it is like, okay, I'm going to set my intention to focus on my inhale, then my exhale with all of my might, with all of my essence that I possibly— I am just going to work right now. And then inevitably, on the second inhale, my mind has kind of started to go somewhere. Including, this is stupid. Yeah, right. What am I doing? Whatever it is. Why should I be doing this? I have got so much to do. And then the moment that I go, oh, Oh, I'm not with my thought, or I'm with my thought, not my breath. Oh, I go, oh, that's awesome.

That's the moment of awakening. That's it. Awakening. That's awareness or awareness. And I used to—

that's right. And John, like, it was from your training. I used to go, oh, man. And I go kind of into this negative state, like, I am so not good at this thing.

But there's one more instruction that you're going to share with us right now. Is it?

Not to judge yourself. 100%. And then, so, okay, so then I recognize, oh, well, and then watch this, man, I am not good at this. Wow, I'm really judging myself. I'm not supposed to be judging myself. I know better than that. Come on, get yourself together, Mike. Like, if this is your life, so quickly down the slide trap. And then, and then I realized from you, John, I was like, wait a minute, I'm aware. I'm aware I'm in this state that I'm on this thought train. And then I started to celebrate. There I am.

Here I am. Right. And then you build a story out of that. Yeah.

Or I refocus my mind back to the breath and awareness. That's right. Yeah, that's right.

Well, that's— yeah, either one of those. That's the invitation, is to actually— the way I say it is, if like you only remember one thing I've ever said in my life, it would be, don't take personally what's not personal. And it turns out none of it's personal. So it's like, you know, we're just building the story of me constantly. But the awareness doesn't have pronouns. It's just, oh. And there's something about it that's insanely beautiful. And you already feel complete, whole. And of course you're still you. And of course you still, you know, have your name and your age and, you know, everything else. But now, like, in this moment, you're simply present and you don't have to push the river or, you know, stay stuck in some narrative or what. And then you can apprehend reality much more clearly because your thinking is not obscuring everything and your emotional reactions to everything. If we were to do this on a level of society, then we would actually be in a much better position to minimize harm, recognize harm, minimize, you know, harm to whatever degree we could and maximize wellbeing and create new laws that actually further that as opposed to laws that actually maximize, I mean, you know, sort of Citizens United is a beautiful case in point, maximize greed, hatred, and delusion and the concentration of wealth, you know, that you're given permission to just go for It.

it. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn. Earlier I mentioned LinkedIn Hiring Pro, and I wanna come back to something a little more personal. We talk a lot about the people who make extraordinary things possible, and I wanna take a moment to acknowledge some of ours. Janelle, Taylor, Alex, Emma, and our newest teammate Chelsea. Every single one of them came to us from LinkedIn, and every single one of them has raised the bar of how we operate here at Finding Mastery. Industry. Our relationship with LinkedIn, it also runs a lot deeper than just using their tools. We also work with their teams on the corporate side, helping them build the kind of high-performance culture where great people want to stay. They want to grow. I've been building businesses for over 2 decades now, and I'll tell you, the right team, that matters so much. It's the difference between grinding and flowing. So this partnership I believe in from the inside out. When you hire through a platform like LinkedIn Hiring Pro that surfaces people who are genuinely aligned with what you're building, you get a different quality of candidate, not just in skills, but in fit and values, the kind of energy someone brings to a team. So if you're thinking about your next hire, I wanna strongly encourage you to be intentional about where you look. The right person is out there and LinkedIn Hiring Pro helps you find them faster with a lot more confidence. Post your job for free at linkedin.com/hiringpro. .com/mastery. Terms and conditions apply. Again, that's linkedin.com/mastery. Finding Mastery is brought to you by AG1. Summer is right around the corner, at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. You can just feel it though. Days are longer, pace picks up, and there's this sense of momentum that comes with the season. For me, that also means more travel. It's more early mornings, more late nights, and it's just really a schedule that isn't consistent. Consistent as I'd like it to be. That's exactly when having a simple, reliable daily foundation, it matters. AG1 has been that foundation for me for over a decade now. One scoop and a glass of cold water in the morning, and I know I'm supporting my gut health, full stop, filling the nutrient gaps that are hard to cover through food alone. And what ends up happening is I'm giving my body what it needs to keep showing up, and that really matters to me. What I love about AG1 is that it doesn't ask a lot of me. It's one habit, one scoop, and it travels easily. The AG1 travel packs are something I genuinely rely on this time of the year. I throw a few in my bag before a trip and the routine stays intact wherever I am. If you haven't tried AG1 yet, or you've been planning to think about getting back into it, now's a great time to start. Visit drinkag1.com/findingmastery to get an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 free in your welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription. It's a $72 value. Again, that's drinkag1.com/findingmastery. When I ask you this question, the listener has two minds. One is, okay, this is going to help me live better. I hear both of you and you're kind of drooling over the power and the importance of being with awareness. I hope not being awareness. Yeah. Okay, good. And then there's two minds. One is, how is this going to help me perform better in life? And the other is, how is this going to help me with wisdom or insight? There is a merging between the two, but could you speak to— let's go first with the person that is like, look, I want to perform really well in life. I want to be great as a father or as a mother. I want to be a great business person. I want to be a great community member. And speak to that performance-based, which is just a tick below this conversation in my mind about mastery and even enlightenment. But just talk to the performance aspect for just a moment.

Well, what we're talking about is a way of being in relationship with experience. And there are ways of being that seem more driven than other ways of being that are in some sense prescriptions for suffering often. Than other ways of being. And that when you are simply present, then you can catch those impulses to go in one direction or another and realize maybe that's not where I need to go. And then you maybe can just be a little bit longer. And then it's what's so amazing, almost miraculous, is that sooner or later, you will have a kind of realization of where you belong, what you need in this moment, what you need to do. And when the doing comes out of this domain of being, it's an entirely different doing, much healthier, much more robust, and really undeflectable so that you have a kind of motivation that is enduring, so to speak, and goes across, you know, since I'm in my 9th decade, I can, you know, sort of speak that it really does go across the decades in a way that is quite extraordinary. And then you don't need to build a story around that. Other people are going to project, as they always do, onto everybody else who they are, what they've done, how great they are in some cases, how horrible they are in other cases. But it's really important never to believe anybody else's projections or even your own story of who I am, but more just stay in the present moment and let the results speak for themselves. Then you are love. You don't have to be loving. You just love. You are present. You are caring. You are concerned. Everybody will be who they are, which will be unique and uniquely different, and yet will take some kind of real inspiration from the community of people who are engaging in this way rather than engaging in endless othering and trying to concentrate their own well-being at the expense of everybody else. That's my kind of orientation, but I understand that other people might think I'm absolutely out of my mind.

I love the unreasonable ones.

The Army Corps of Engineers has a wonderful saying, is the difficult we do today, the impossible takes a little longer. And what we're talking about is the impossible. Possible. But the stakes are incredibly high for humanity. We either wake up or we're going to destroy ourselves sooner or later. Or make life so miserable. I mean, if you were working in a gold mine in South Africa, or if you're working in a gold mine in Brazil or any other, I mean, there's documented evidence and artistry around what many, many millions of people on Earth are are their lives alike, and nobody in their right mind would want that. And they are desperate, and they do it because that's their only way to survive. We need to restructure the nature of work so that, yeah, I mean, and we're extracting everything from the earth, you know, all the rare earths that we need all of a sudden to build the technology and stuff like that. But our rare earth is in some sense being extracted and destroyed in the process, driven by endless factors that could be modulated with wisdom and compassion in ways that, yeah, we could still build stuff and at scale, but without all the harm that we're creating for people. Why not? If we can conceive it, why can't we do that?

So if you had a position of power in the United States and you could institute an inspired curricula? And there's a listener right now that says, John, tell me, I'm in it. You know, tell me what to do when I wake up. Tell me, like, give me some milestones throughout my day for this curricula to be, you know, the fertile ground for living an amazing life where I can be a contributor to the whole in a meaningful way. How would you guide that curricula? And I don't know if you're going to base it on MBSR or something else.

I mean, I would say Trust yourself. Ask yourself what you most love. Spend some time hanging out with yourself in a way that is really brave. Go places where you don't want to go. If you read Michael Pollan's latest book, A World Appears, the last chapter where Roshi Joan Halifax of the, you know, Upaya Zen Center, this is the last chapter in the whole book on understanding consciousness. And he goes to this Zen center, Upaya Zen Center, and the Roshi there Joan Halifax has him go up, not sit in the monastery with all the other meditators, but to go up into a cave in the mountains for a couple of days by himself and just live with his own mind. And, you know, when we apprehend the nature of our own mind and we learn to actually befriend ourselves in this way, then human beings are capable of incredible creativity and compassion and a deep kind of respect for our relationship to the earth, to nature, and that we're a part of, and then to our incredible precocity as a species where we can go around the moon and do stuff like that. And we need to do this in a way that, again, lets every single human and probably also environmental, you know, sort of ecosystem have an adequate blood supply to be able to flourish because otherwise we have necrosis on on planet Earth.

Are you familiar with the long body? No. Yeah. So it's the First Peoples idea that we came to learn up in the Northwest. And the idea is that we're all connected. This tribe, small or large, is all connected. Absolutely. And we are one body. And if one of us or some of us are hurting, the body is hurting. So we need to take care of each and it is a way that we introduce that to teaming and being great teammates. Like, look, we're all in this thing together. So, and if one of us is hurting, it's not up to that person just to fix themselves. You know, like we need to surround, to your language about blood flow, provide love, provide attention, you know, put out a hand, whatever it might take. Exactly. And yeah, and it was a really warm and very powerful way to think about the cutthroat nature sometimes of professional sport.

And so— Well, indigenous people have lived in harmony with the planet for thousands and thousands of years. And since the Industrial Revolution, just a couple hundred years ago, we're despoiling it to the point where, you know, we're destroying it, including all the indigenous habitats that are left, two of which are at least, or three or four of which are the lungs of planet Earth. So this is like we're committing suicide on on a planetary scale. But, you know, the native peoples around the world knew how to live in harmony with nature for thousands and thousands of years. I'm not saying it was all peaches and cream, but there is something about our destroying what's left of their worlds that is really criminal. And we have a lot to learn from their relationship to the earth as their mother or grandmother and the animals and the plants. And we're in our infancies as a species. And maybe this is kind of like the test. And, you know, they say, well, why aren't we getting signals from other planets? You know, elsewhere in the universe, we see all these exoplanets now everywhere. Why have we been looking for like 60 or 70 or 80 years for signals from outer space, intelligent life? And one theory is that it's very hard to get beyond the place where we're at now. Now without destroying ourselves. And so maybe we're not getting any signals from other planets because in almost all cases, they reach a certain level of technological sophistication, then they destroy each other. They destroy themselves. Oh God. Oh God. I'm not joking. I mean, you know, serious people talk about this. And so this is kind of like, it's our final exam, so to speak, or even this is a pregnancy. And the question is, is there going to be a live birth? About it. Okay.

With your 9 decades of investing in the quality of the human experience, the quality of life, full planet life and full human life, what do you want the next generation to know? And what do you want the parents of the next generation to do?

I think that we are the result of 13.8 13.8 billion years of evolution and analog evolution. It's all been analog. And now we're moving into a digital universe with AI and then AGI. And what I would want them to know is don't give up on the 13.8 billion years of evolution that have resulted in you. It's not too shabby. It's got its own dimensions of intelligence. That no machine intelligence is ever going to surpass. And that we need to have a certain kind of faith in that and the kind of recognition that you are beautiful, that you are, your potential is infinite, that you belong, that you are okay as you are, and that you are loved by a loving community that has your back. And if we all did that for each other, then I feel that's what I want for, you know, the, the next generation. But we need elders, we need adults, we need teachers who actually teach that curriculum rather than just filling people's heads with how to code and things like that. I'm not knocking the digital world. It's here to stay and it's going like gangbusters. But I do feel like this is the big challenge for planet Earth is to find a way to accommodate the digital with the analog so that our own intrinsic genius isn't destroyed in the process. Yuval Noah Harari talks a lot about this in his latest book, Nexus, and he is a very, very serious and committed meditator. And I think that the meditation, mindfulness, what we've been talking about, the learning how to set awareness as our default mode, so to speak, and compassion as our default mode, it really is a possibility that can be enacted and embodied at an individual level, at a societal level, at a global level, and that we can create new laws and new ways of governing ourselves that outlaw certain degrees of greed, hatred, and amassing of wealth and minerals and everything else, and maximize wellbeing, happiness, a sense of belonging, and a sense of wonder. On the planet that we live in. You know, when the astronauts go out there and they look back, we are, we can't even say hanging because it's so unbelievably mind-blowing, but we simply are in the vastness of a universe that is incomprehensibly big and does have structure on multiple levels, including, you know, sort of chains of galaxies and stuff like that. But basically the Earth is just hanging here at a certain distance from the sun. We've got this beautiful moon going around there, which we absolutely need in order to have, like, you know, life on Earth function the way it does in terms of the tides and everything else. And we need to recognize the beauty of that, the wonder of that, and that that planet has produced to us and that we are sentient beings, that we are capable of compassion, we are capable of caring for each other and for this planet. And that that's kind of like a fundamentally— I don't want to use the word religious because it has so many negative connotations, but it's a fundamentally religious feeling in the sense that it connects— the word The word religion really means, religio means to link together, to bind. And what we're doing is we're learning how to see how the world is linked together and we apprehend that in a way that includes our own beauty and our own genius. That's why the Native people will say, you know, often, may you walk in beauty. You know, of course, we do walk in beauty, but we have to realize that we're walking in beauty and that everybody is walking on the same mother.

Mm, John, I could spend a lot more time with you, and I'm looking forward to the next time we get to see each other in person. I want to take a second here to tell you about a morning routine that I've been using for years. For me, it's a great way to switch on my mind, to ready myself to take on the day. So before I check my phone, my emails, market updates, or text threads, I choose how to start my every morning. That's always in my control. That's always in your control too. This is the same morning mindset routine that some of the world's top performers across sport, business, and the arts are using. And the best part, it only takes about 90 seconds to do. So just head over to findingmastery.com/morning to download the audio guide for free. Again, head to findingmastery.com/morning to get your morning mindset routine.

Thanks for the conversation. I hope some of it's made at least a little bit of sense. I mean, you are—

no, you are a force of clarity and of conviction and of hope and of a future that is compelling that we need to work toward. And you're a breath of love and freshness that we can renew again and again and again and again. And we just got to keep doing that to make contact with reality again and again and again and again. And thank you for being in my life in the way that you have. And thank you for making a difference in this community as well. They know you, even if they haven't met you or know your name. They know you through how I show up in the world.

So again, thank you, John. Thank you. I'm very, very touched to be in conversation with you, Michael. More to come. All best.

Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by Dr. Lisa Miller, clinical psychologist, professor at Columbia University and bestselling author of The Awakened Brain. In this conversation, Dr. Miller explores a surprising idea that spirituality doesn't necessarily mean religion, but rather an innate human capacity for connection, meaning, and purpose, one that may play an important role in protecting against anxiety, depression, and the growing mental health struggles facing young people today. So join us Wednesday, June 10th at 9:00 AM Pacific only on Find Finding Mastery. All right, thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community, and if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com/newsletter to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors, and we take our recommendations seriously, and the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love and endorse every product you hear on the show. If you want to check out any of our sponsors, or offers you heard about in this episode, you can find those deals at findingmastery.com/sponsors. And remember, no one does it alone. The door here at Finding Mastery is always open to those looking to explore the edges and the reaches of their potential so that they can help others do the same. So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend, and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, As a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your healthcare providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring. Come on.