Meditation Is Not for the Faint-Hearted

It is difficult to speak of the timeless beauty and richness of the present moment when things are moving so fast. But the faster things move, the more important it is for us to dip into or even inhabit the timeless. Otherwise, we can lose touch with dimensions of our humanity that make all the difference between happiness and misery, between wisdom and folly, between well-being and the erosive turmoil in the mind, in the body, and in the world that we will be referring to as "dis-ease." Because our discontent truly is a disease, even when it does not appear as such. Sometimes we colloquially refer to those kinds of feelings and conditions, to that "dis-ease" we feel so much of the time, as "stress." It is usually painful. It weighs on us. And it always carries a feeling of underlying dissatisfaction.

In 1979 I started a Stress Reduction Clinic. Thinking back to that era, I ask myself now, "What stress?" so much has our world changed since then, so much has the pace of life increased and the vagaries and dangers of the world come to our doorstep as never before. If looking squarely at our personal situation and circumstances and finding novel and imaginative ways to work with them in the service of health and healing was important then, it is infinitely more important and urgent now, inhabiting as we do a world that has been thrown into heightened chaos and speed in the unfolding of events, even as it has become far more interconnected and smaller.

In such an exponentially accelerating era, it is more important and urgent than ever for us to learn to inhabit the timeless and draw upon it for solace and clear seeing. That has been, from the start, the very core of the curriculum of the Stress Reduction Clinic. I am not speaking of some distant future in which, after years of striving, you would finally attain something, taste the timeless beauty of meditative awareness and all it offers, and ultimately lead a more effective and satisfying and peaceful life. I am speaking of accessing the timeless in this very moment—because it is always right under our noses, so to speak—and in so doing, to gain access to those dimensions of possibility that are presently hidden from us because we refuse to be present, because we are seduced, entrained, mesmerized, or frightened into the future and the past, carried along in the stream of events and the weather patterns of our own reactions and numbness, attending to, if not obsessing about what we often unthinkingly dub "urgent," while losing touch at the same time with what is actually important, supremely important, in fact vital for our own well-being, for our sanity, and for our very survival. We have made absorption in the future and in the past such an overriding habit that, much of the time, we have no awareness of the present moment at all. As a consequence, we may feel we have very little, if any, control over the ups and downs of our own lives and of our own minds.  

The opening sentence of the brochure in which we describe the mindfulness retreats and training programs that our institute, the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society (the CFM for short), offers for business leaders reads: "Meditation is not for the faint-hearted nor for those who routinely avoid the whispered longings of their own hearts." That sentence is very much there on purpose, with the aim of immediately discouraging from attending those who are not yet ready for the timeless, who wouldn't understand or even make enough room in their minds or hearts to give such an experience or understanding a chance.

If they came to one of our programs, chances are they would be fighting with themselves the whole time, thinking the meditation practice they would be asked to engage in was nonsense, pure torture, or a waste of time. Chances are they would be so caught up in their resisting and objecting that they might never settle into the precious and preciously brief moments we ever have to work together in such ways.

So if people do show up at these retreats, we can assume that it was either because of that sentence or in spite of that sentence. Either way, or so our strategizing went, there will be an implicit if not intrepid willingness on the part of those who do show up to explore the interior landscape of the mind and body, and the realm of what the ancient Chinese Taoists and Chan masters called non-doing, the domain of true meditation, in which it looks as though nothing or nothing much is happening or being done, but at the same time, nothing important is left undone, and as a consequence, that mysterious energy of an open, aware non-doing can manifest in the world of doing in remarkable ways.

Of course, we all mostly avoid the whispered longings of our own hearts as we are carried along in the stream of life's doings. And I am certainly not suggesting that meditation is always easy or even pleasant. It is simple, but it certainly isn't always easy. It is not easy to string even a few moments together in which to practice formally on a regular basis in a busy life, never mind remembering that mindfulness is available to us, you might say "informally," in any and every unfolding moment of our lives. But sometimes we can no longer ignore those intimations from our own hearts, and sometimes, somehow, we find ourselves pulled to show up in places we ordinarily wouldn't, mysteriously drawn to where we might have lived for a time as a child, or to the wilderness, or to a meditation retreat, or to a book or a class or to a conversation that might offer that long-ignored side of ourselves a chance to open to the sunlight, to be seen and heard and felt and known and inhabited by ourselves, by our own heart's lifelong longing to meet itself.

The adventure that the universe of mindfulness offers is one possible avenue into dimensions of your being that may have perhaps gone ignored and unattended or denied for too long. Mindfulness, as we will see, has a rich and textured capacity to influence the unfolding of our lives. By the same token, it has an equal capacity to influence the larger world within which we are seamlessly embedded, including our family, our work, the society as a whole and how we see ourselves as a people, what I am calling the body politic, and the body of the world, of all of us together on this planet. And all this can come about through your own experience of the practice of mindfulness by virtue of that very embeddedness and the reciprocal relationships between inner and outer, and between being and doing.

For there is no question that we are seamlessly embedded in the web of life itself and within the web of what we might call mind, an invisible intangible essence that allows for sentience and consciousness and the potential for awareness itself to transform ignorance into wisdom and discord into reconciliation and accord. Awareness offers a safe haven in which to restore ourselves and rest in a vital and dynamic harmony, tranquility, creativity and joyfulness now, not in some far-off hoped-for future time when things are "better" or we have gotten things under control, or have "improved" ourselves. Strange as it may sound, our capacity for mindfulness allows us to taste and embody that which we most deeply desire, that which most eludes us and which is, curiously, always ever so close, a greater stability and peace of mind and all that accompanies it, in any and every moment available to us.

In microcosm, peace is no farther than this very moment. In macrocosm, peace is something almost all of us collectively aspire to in one way or another, especially if it is accompanied by justice, and recognition of one's intrinsic humanity and rights. Peace is something that we can bring about if we can actually learn to wake up a bit more as individuals and a lot more as a species; if we can learn to be fully what we actually already are; to reside in the inherent potential of what is possible for us, being human. As the adage goes, "There is no way to peace; peace is the way." It is so for the outer landscape of the world. It is so for the inner landscape of the heart. And these are, in a profound way, not really two.  

Because mindfulness, which can be thought of as an openhearted, moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness, is optimally cultivated through meditation rather than just through thinking about it, and because its most elaborate and complete articulation comes from the Buddhist tradition, in which mindfulness is often described as the heart of Buddhist meditation, I have chosen to say some things here and there about Buddhism and its relationship to the practice of mindfulness. I do this so that we might reap some understanding and some benefit from what this extraordinary tradition offers the world at this moment in history, based on its incubation on our planet over the past twenty-five hundred years.

The way I see it, Buddhism itself is not the point. You might think of the Buddha as a genius of his age, a great scientist, at least as towering a figure as Darwin or Einstein, who, as the Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace likes to put it, had no instruments other than his own mind at his disposal and who sought to look deeply into the nature of birth and death and the seeming inevitability of suffering. In order to pursue his investigations, he first had to understand, develop, refine, and learn to calibrate and stabilize the instrument he was using for this purpose, namely his own mind, in the same way that laboratory scientists today have to continually develop, refine, calibrate, and stabilize the instruments that they employ to extend their senses—whether we are talking about giant optical or radio telescopes, electron microscopes, or positron-emission tomography (PET) scanners—in the service of looking deeply into and exploring the nature of the universe and the vast array of interconnected phenomena that unfold within it, whether it be in the domain of physics and physical phenomena, chemistry, biology, psychology, or any other field of inquiry.

In taking on this challenge, the Buddha and those who followed in his footsteps took on exploring deep questions about the nature of the mind itself and about the nature of life. Their efforts at self-observation led to remarkable discoveries. They succeeded in accurately mapping a territory that is quintessentially human, having to do with aspects of the mind that we all have in common, independent of our particular thoughts, beliefs, and cultures. Both the methods they used and the fruits of those investigations are universal, and have nothing to do with any isms, ideologies, religiosities, or belief systems. These discoveries are more akin to medical and scientific understandings, frameworks that can be examined by anybody anywhere, and put to the test independently, for oneself, which is what the Buddha suggested to his followers from the very beginning.

Because I practice and teach mindfulness, I have the recurring experience that people frequently make the assumption that I am a Buddhist. When asked, I usually respond that I am not a Buddhist (although there was a period in my life when I did think of myself in that way, and trained and continue to train in and have huge respect and love for different Buddhist traditions and practices), but I am a student of Buddhist meditation, and a devoted one, not because I am devoted to Buddhism per se, but because I have found its teachings and its practices to be so profound and so universally applicable, revealing, and healing. I have found this to be the case in my own life over the past forty years, and I have found it to be the case as well in the lives of many others with whom I have had the privilege of working and practicing. And I continue to be deeply touched and inspired by those teachers and nonteachers alike—both Easterners and Westerners, who embody the wisdom and compassion inherent in these teachings and practices in their own lives.

For me, mindfulness practice is really a love affair, a love affair with what is most fundamental in life, a love affair with what is so, with what we might call truth, which for me includes beauty, the unknown, and the possible, how things actually are, all embedded here, in this very moment—for it is all already here—and at the same time, everywhere, because here can be anywhere at all. Mindfulness is also always now, because as we have already touched on, and as we will touch on many times again, for us there simply is no other time.

Here and now, everywhere and always, gives us a lot of room for working together, that is, if you are interested and willing to roll up your sleeves and do the work of the timeless, the work of non-doing, the work of awareness embodied in your own life as it is always unfolding moment by moment. It is indeed the work of no time at all, and the work of a lifetime.  

No one culture and no one art form has a monopoly on either truth or beauty, writ either large or small. But for the particular exploration we will be undertaking together in these pages and in our lives, I find it is both useful and illuminating to draw upon the work of those special people on our planet who devote themselves to the language of the mind and heart that we call poetry. Our greatest poets engage in deep interior explorations of the mind and of words and of the intimate relationship between inner and outer landscapes, just as do the greatest yogis and teachers in the meditative traditions. In fact, it is not uncommon in the meditative traditions for moments of illumination and insight to be expressed through poetry. Both yogis and poets are intrepid explorers of what is so, and articulate guardians of the possible.

Copyright © 2005 Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.