Tripping Out with a Legend: Jon Kabat-Zinn on Pain vs. Suffering, Rethinking Your Anxiety, and the Buddha's Teaching in a Single Sentence
10% Happier with Dan Harris
10% Media, LLC
4.6 • 12.9K Ratings
🗓️ 5 April 2023
⏱️ 48 minutes
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Summary
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A beautifully weird conversation with the creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. is Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he founded its world-renown Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Clinic in 1979, and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society (CFM), in 1995. He is the author of many books including Full Catastrophe Living and Wherever You Go, There You Are.
His latest book, Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief, illustrates a range of evidence-based mindfulness meditation practices for those suffering with the challenges of chronic pain.
In this episode we talk about:
- The origins of MBSR and its relation to pain relief
- Pain vs. Suffering
- The accessibility of awareness
- The limitation of mindfulness meditation as a self-improvement practice
- The quote, "open your mouth and you're wrong"
- Jon Kabat-Zinn's definition of of healing
Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jon-kabat-zinn-580
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. |
| 0:20.8 | Okay, well, kids, this was one of those very humbling interviews where I went in with a whole |
| 0:27.5 | plan and then had to throw the whole plan out the window said, |
| 0:32.7 | defenestration was required because my interview, we John Kabatzin is a magically unpredictable dude. |
| 0:40.1 | Deliberately or not, he delivered for me a great Buddhist teaching on abandoning my expectations, |
| 0:46.4 | which is a lesson I need to learn over and over again. I went in wanting to talk to John about |
| 0:50.8 | his new book about managing pain with meditation and mindfulness. And we did talk about that a little |
| 0:57.8 | but then he ended up tripping out in some fascinating and beautiful ways about everything from |
| 1:01.8 | rethinking anxiety to the future of the species to the Buddha's teachings in one sentence. |
| 1:08.3 | And more, we talked about meditation as a love affair, how to achieve equanimity and the invitation |
| 1:14.8 | to die now. For those of you who don't know, John Kabatzin, PhD is professor of medicine |
| 1:21.8 | emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Back in the 1970s, he came up with |
| 1:27.0 | something called mindfulness-based stress reduction or MBSR, which is a secular way of teaching |
| 1:34.2 | Buddhist meditation. John may have some quibbles with that description, but it's basically true. |
| 1:39.2 | MBSR is massively useful and impactful in many, many ways. It allowed for millions of skeptical |
| 1:45.4 | non-buddists to meditate and gain the benefits of the practice. It also gave scientists a secular, |
| 1:51.3 | replicable protocol, an eight-week program for teaching meditation. That secular, replicable |
| 1:57.2 | protocol allowed scientists to research meditation in a systematic way. And they came up with all this |
| 2:03.4 | fascinating information about what the practice does to our physiology and psychology. And without |
| 2:09.4 | all of that research, many of us, myself included, might never have started meditating. So much of |
| 2:14.4 | the credit for my own practice and maybe yours can be traced back to John Kabatzin. |
| 2:20.4 | John has written many books, including full catastrophe living wherever you go, there you are, |
... |
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