10 minutes with Jon Kabat Zinn: I have the recording!

Jon: Any of what we have done is fair game for the soil out of which your comments, observations, sharing of experience might come.
I see people rushing to line up at the microphones! (laughter)
Sheychen raises a hand
Jon: yeh please just go
where is the hand held?
Come up here that's fine
and if it seems to high when you get up there you will have to lower it
and you will have to lower it (laughter)
and here, I will do it for ya.
whoops

S: so the question I brought to the group was one I have been pondering for some years, maybe ten or fifteen years of teaching mindfulness?
And looking at my own experience with it and sometimes I notice with my own students that they can use the mindfulness practices to suppress, and we are meant to be aware of that.
And then looking at my own experience that you can use mindfulness practices, the yoga and the breathing ...
Jon: say 'I' , in this particular case
S : Oh sorry, 'I' ...
Jon: first person!
S: I use, I notice that I use yoga and pranayama, (the breathing) and various mindfulness practices to sort of self regulate.
Jon: mm
S: if I am getting anxious or if there's a feeling of em, that there is something going on deeper, I had been unconsciously using my 'vast training' (laughs) to become comfortable again and the more I became aware of this and even, you know, in a long, say I was doing two months silent retreat a year or something like that, of course how could you possibly go that long without something coming up? and they were coming up but again my, my training 'to allow', seemed to allow them and they settled down again and so I am a bit baffled how after, (this is feeling very personal, but anyway I'll keep going), I'm a bit baffled that after ..


Jon: you're among friends
S: well I reckon so
Jon:this is a good moment to affirm what has always been in place as far as I am concerned but which didn't get articulated - that we keep utterly confidential anything that unfolds in this room. You can agree to that?
Room of people: mmm
Jon: amongst a group of therapists it is not unusual but very important to make it explicit and definitive.

S : well I think this is reflection on my training in mindfulness, and actually it was an incident that happened that shook all the, I don't know whether you could call them 'defence mechanisms'? but all the training that had built up to enable me to be calm and er i suppose that part is still there, and it battered through it and it has been a great blessing and I am now using the skills to get through the turmoil of what has come up but if I'm doing it, other people are doing it too, I reckon – to some extent – unless you have all come to mindfulness completely sorted in the first place?
(laughter)
Sheychen moves to step off the stage
Jon: don't go away!
more laughter.

Jon : Okay. (Sigh)
What do you know about this?

S: How do you mean?
Jon: Well ...
S: What do I know about the mechanisms within the mind for doing this?

Jon: I' m sorry?
S : the mechanisms in the mind and the heart?

Jon: No, no not so much the mechanisms in the mind because that would be going more into thought.
But what do you know in your bones and in your guts about how easy it is to fall into utilising the practices to shut something down or 'to suppress something' (in your words) and then what arises now that you have had this kind of concatenation of experiences, where does this leave you in this moment that you come up to share this?
What kind of space are you in at the moment around it?
Not that it need be resolved or that you have any kind of answer or even a perspective but is there anything here that has been learned from this kind of stretching that you've been experiencing?
S : mm, okay
Jon: Is that a fair question?

S: I think that's a good question. (pause)
I think I've learnt that we're not daft, you're not going to stick your hand into boiling water if it's going to hurt. So at some level I knew if I went deeper it would hurt a lot. So unconsciously I used the skills I have , so I learnt that and I think that's a human reaction,
Jon: okay
S: where I have come to is that it's been blasted through.
So what happens here, now, standing here?
The only bit of my training that seems to be really helping, is:
It doesn't matter what's happening in me, I can hold it in tenderness”,
Jon: in tender? in what? tenderness?
S: in tenderness , that is all I've got left. (sigh)
Jon: Does that feel like ... enough?
S: (thinking 'sometimes no') Actually the more I go into that, that more it feels like my real training. (almost choking a sob)
Jon: There you are (said so kindly)
S: mmm
Jon: See it's so easy to idealise 'the practice' or 'our training' or what 'should' come out of it. And we can happily zone along in that kind of 'mindfulness mindless auto pilot' for years ...
S : mmm
Jon : allowing the structure of MBCT or MBSR or 'who we think we are' and how we think we're a 'great teacher' or whatever we think the story is that we create, to actually keep us at bay from what we most actually love, and that's underneath it all.
And so, in a sense, the challenge here is to learn from everything and not assume that any of it's personal.
This is probably the most important lesson of all, is that we can personalise it into the story of 'my failure' for instance or the story of 'my blindness' or the story of 'my misuse of this or that' or ... whatever it is, ...
S : mmm
Jon: and what if we could allow ourselves or can you see a possibility of simply allowing yourself? to learn from this in a way that's in a sense impersonal?
It is just what minds do, it is just what, you know, we do when we feel defended or when looking too deeply is in some sense terrifying and we somehow instinctively move to protect ourselves. For a time.
And then that often gets 'blasted' in one way or another, either through ongoing practice or through something else happening that was unexpected and from a different direction.
Remember I said earlier in the morning, “whatever comes up is part of the curriculum”?
S : mm
Jon: Well it is not just true for these two days (chuckles)
It's actually the curriculum of life itself and the curriculum of our opportunity to interface with it in a way that whatever it is that occurs and however painful and however rending in some sense or other it is also an invitation to grow and to learn and to come to some deeper sense of possibility and attunement and integration around it.
So I hear from what you're saying and from your courage and from your standing here, that that it is ongoing for you and lot of it is uncertain.
S : mm
Jon: Along with everything else in life that is uncertain, which is everything else in life.
(laughter)
so thank you.
Is there anything else you want to say or comment on?
S : (pause) em, (smile) no.
Jon: all right.