Mindfulness

Mindfulness – Liberation from Delusion

Posted on by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.

Watch and read our exclusive interview with Jon-Kabat-Zinn

So that’s what mindfulness is and it doesn’t involve doing.  It is a form of meditation practice and it’s often spoken of as the heart of Buddhist meditation.  And the Buddha himself, you know, spoke about it as the sort of most fundamental path for the cultivation of liberation.  For the cultivation of freedom.  For the cultivation of freedom from pain and delusion and greed and hatred.  So these are all elements of life that actually, when we’re unaware of them, drive us.  And we can get highly conditioned so that we don’t even know that we’re being driven by greed, hatred and so forth, delusion, because we’re so deluded, it doesn’t actually penetrate.  So mindfulness in that sense is, requires a certain kind of discipline because most of the time, we’re practicing its opposite.  We have to practice cultivating mindfulness because, say if you’re practicing cultivating irritability or anger or sadness or disgrunteledness or whatever it is, the more you practice, the better you get at it.  So after a while, you may be thought of by other people who probably won’t tell you this, that it’s not so much fun to be around you because you’re, you know, sort of not at peace and people feel it because people are not insensitive.  We’re incredibly sensitive barometers to other people’s unspoken emotions and thoughts.  So, that’s why I say it’s as if your life depended on it.  It’s a non-doing.  It’s not like you have to do any work.  But it does require remembering to come back to the present moment over and over.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.

JON KABAT-ZINN, PH.D., is founding Executive Director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is also the founding director of its renowned Stress Reduction Clinic and Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He teaches mindfulness and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in various venues around the world.  He received his Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT in 1971 in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate, Salvador Luria. He is the author of numerous scientific papers on the clinical applications of mindfulness in medicine and health care, and of a number of books for the lay public:  Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness (Delta, 1991); Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life (Hyperion, 1994); Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness (Hyperion, 2005); and Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness (Hyperion, 2007).  He is also co-author, with his wife Myla, of Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting (Hyperion, 1997); and with Williams, Teasdale, and Segal, of The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness (Guilford, 2007).  Overall, his books have been translated into over 30 languages.