A very very warm welcome to today's action for happiness event on the theme of everyday mindfulness with uh a great friend of our community and and someone who's a real hero to me John katzin John it's so lovely to be with you again thank you so much for making time for us today thank you Mark it's great to be here and hello to everybody who's on this uh call together so for those of you who are new to this welcome to an Action for happiness Community gathering this is a movement of people from all around
the world living in a way that tries to create a happier and Kinder world together thank you so much to all of you who are joining again it's fantastic to see thousands of you here from all around the world and as ever we'll be supporting each other in the chat and keeping it kind and relevant as always and there's a chance for you later on to ask John some questions so Please do use the Q&A function and I'm really looking forward to this time together particularly to reconnect with you John and to hopefully remind all
of us about how we can bring your ideas on mindfulness that have changed so many lives into our own lives and into the world around us and I'm not going to suggest we do an introduction to you John because I I think everyone here will have will know something of your background I think I'm I'm tempted to Start as well as offering you a very warm welcome by remembering the title of your first book that I saw which was called Full catastrophe living and I I'm I was always really taken with that title about the
full catastrophe of our human experience I wondered if we could start start by maybe reminding ourselves what you meant by that and what it is to be human well thank you Mark and hello everybody and it's uh great to be here And uh when I was writing that book which was basically uh uh all about U mbsr mindfulness-based stress reduction and how uh somebody was unable to come to our hospital where we were offering this program before it spread around the world so you e either had to take it from us and this was before
Zoom or you know the uh Global Internet so um you could only get it if you walked into the room in the hospital uh and the book was meant to put it out there in a larger Sense in the world as in book form and and I wanted it to actually address the full cat what absorb of the Greek called the full catastrophe of The Human Condition so that if we're talking about stress we're talking about uh the the burdens and pressures and challenges including the creative possibilities on all human beings not just the bad
stuff but all of it including the awful the Intolerable the uh immoral uh and how do we hold that and work with it in such a Way as we optimize well-being and minimize harm so there's like an ethical Dimension to mindfulness that is built into that title and also the the sort of um a certain kind of um affirmation that we can take on the entirety of The Human Condition including all of its underbelly and uh and uh oppression and injustices that are baked in to our institutions not just to our own individual Behavior and
so that was where the the the title Meant to was meant to be a big umbrella term to cover all of that so that mindfulness which is really the heart of Buddhist Meditation practice uh didn't get reduced to some kind of psychological therapeutic intervention but was really bringing a multi-dimensional new approach to medicine and healing not just of individuals but of the world ultimately and and John uh I've had the pleasure of um being with you a few times with the Action for happiness community and I I've always remembered that a few things about the
very first time we met in London one was the enormous gratitude that so many people wanted to show to you because uh the the the work that you you know you've done and what you've shared has changed so many lives in really profound ways but also you said something then that has always stayed with me about mindfulness being sort of you know something that is in the Laboratory of our daily lives rather than just being a standalone practice that this is the very essence of every moment of our existence and that's really had a deep
impact on my life and I I I feel that mindfulness has become very trendy but is still seen largely as a thing you might do alongside your busy life and yet your messag has always seem to me about like life itself is our meditation practice is that right I couldn't have said it better myself and That's exactly what I do say that yes uh it's very important uh no matter what's going on in your life and no matter what the causes and the conditions are that produce uh suffering because the the agenda or the curriculum
is really about human suffering and the possibility of and I don't use this word lightly Liberation full Liberation from that suffering that does not mean the entire world will be automatically different And the sources of stress or you know sort of social injustice or anything else will just magically disappear but when you're aligning yourself with that intention in a very small but not insignificant way when you drop into the present moment in a fully embodied way the what you might call the um the the web of the entire universe the network of the entire Universal
relationality is transformed because you've shown up in Your own life uh in a way that's both awaken and also um uh loving so I've taken to actually talking about mindfulness both as a formal meditation practice and as a a way of being in the world as a radical Act of love that and a radical Act of Sanity that for instance in terms of the uh formal meditation practice let's just call it sitting okay although we're talking about lying down you could stand on your head you can be doing yoga a Million different ways to do
it walking but let's just say when you take your seat uh on a regular basis as a certain kind of interior discipline you're not doing it as one more thing you have to do in your busy day and because it's going to reduce your stress or make you feel better it's because you're taking your seat as a radical Act of sanity and love and learning how to what I call drop into the domain of being uh before you get out there and Start doing and then when you do get out there and start doing in
your day you let that doing come out of your being that makes life itself the meditation practice and every one of us will do it differently because every one of us is uniquely different but there are certain kind of um uh uh handholds you might say or uh ways of uh locating yourself and your intentionality that can really support a lifetime of Mindfulness uh in a way that makes a difference not only to your own health and stress and well-being but makes a difference in your relationships in in the world itself because you are in
some sense uh intentionally serving as a focus of sanity and clarity as opposed to reactivity and uh self-centeredness now that's a very easy thing for me to be saying uh but I think everybody on the call Will recognize that it's just about the hardest thing in the world for us human beings to do and I would say that's why it's with worth engaging in this love affair so here we are with over a thousand of us showing up live to you know tune into this radical act with you John maybe you'd like to just help
us discover a moment of that mindfulness together now before we carry on our conversation yeah let's do that and uh so wherever you are on the planet uh and I assume that you are somewhere on the planet uh not necessarily all located in the UK uh but wherever you are take a moment and actually um recognize for yourself that you are where you are or at least you could be if you were open to showing up fully and probably if you've tuned into to this rather than all doing all the other busy things you have
to do in your day at this moment in time there's a strong reason for it so Dropping into why you tuned in in the first place and it's not really to hear from John kabit in it's to connect with something that maybe I or my name or what I've done represents for you but that something is magical and it's already in you and it's already complete and so are you so can you drop into a sense of being in your body in this moment in your beauty as a human being in the Fullness of your
humanity and the envelope of your skin Right In This Moment no matter whether you're having a bad day or a great day or whatever is going on in your life just putting out the welcome at so to speak for all of it and just dropping into non-doing for just a moment and just being with things as they are underneath thinking and all of Our ideas and opinions and emotions about what's going on in our lives and for that matter what's going on in the world at this moment it's not a turning away or escaping but
it's like tuning your instrument before you to it out on the road to uh participate in some kind of musical offering and so then silence itself becomes coextensive with Wakefulness with embodied wakefulness with awareness and that's my definition of mindfulness is it's just pure awareness so you don't have to acquire it because we're all somehow born with this superpower but accessing it's another story because sometimes we're so caught up in our thoughts and emotions and reactivity that uh we lose touch with the present moment and the domain of Being and we're just kind of running
around reacting and lost in thoughts and often turbulent uh feelings so right in this moment without making anything go away we're just underneath any turbulence we're not trying to pacify any turbulence or problematic uh challenges that we may be facing or run away from them or deny them but we're just able to hold all of that in a way that you know the ocean is Much bigger than the waves at the surface so this domain of being is the entirety of our Humanity all accessible in this really extraordinary no time that we call now the
present moment and that we might not only visit more frequently through formal meditation practice and informal meditation practice but in a very real Way inhabit come to inhabit as like what the neuroscientists might call our default mode so that rather than being on autopilot we're simply present as we go through life or remembering and reminding ourselves to be more present when we notice how unpresented we are and that's both a practice a discipline but it's also a love affair and a and a simply a way with a capital W of being and what you're trying
to attain is already yours so no need to strive or try to attain anything but rather to Simply recognize that you are already complete whole beautiful valid you belong in ways that go beyond description and in some sense as was being suggested already transform the World when you adopt that kind of perspective about yourself because the world needs as much clarity and compassion as possible and and you have that potential to be an age of healing and transformation not merely in your own life but in your world your family in your job in your community
and how you govern yourself in some Small way and maybe even bigger ways than we can imagine can lead to humanity learning how to govern itself without perpetually killing each other or threatening the environment anymore than we've already done and creating a planet that's has a fever at the moment and getting more that way so you're taking your seat in this Way is really a boundless and radical Act of Sanity love and a reflection of your own wholeness w h o l e n s and Beauty all underneath thought and story and name in form
right in this moment and then I don't need to say anything and in a way I haven't haven't said anything I've simply been pointing to aspects of experience that are already intrinsic to you and me and And all of us here and actually all beings so when you're ready you might slowly and intentionally draw in a deeper breath and then when it seems ready inviting it to just exit the body if your eyes have been closed you might uh open them back to Mark and myself here on the screen and anything else that's in front
of you and I'll just end by saying what a Privilege it is to sit together to practice together in this way uh at the moment it's like 1.4k people all dropping into being together we all could be doing other things at this particular moment in time but we've chosen to be here together that has a tremendous kind of intrinsic power to it that demonstrates one that we count no matter who the we is who the I me and Mine is and also that we're together in a certain way that is mysterious and has enormous potential
if we can learn to mobilize that potential and direct it towards healing what needs healing on this planet of ours John thank you that was a really as you say a really special experience with so many of us lots of things emerge from me that I'd love to ask you but actually I'd love first to turn to the community who've just experienced this moment and You mentioned pure awareness as part of that that um sitting together and I just wanted to invite everybody here just to maybe share something that came into their awareness uh while
sitting together and having that experience if you'd like to take a moment wherever you are in the world right now just to share a few words in the chat about what came into your awareness during that experience then maybe I could read a few of those out just to give us sense of What we went through together so I'll I'll just have a look at the chat so wholeness gratitude peace how lucky I am love connection don't react to pain uh I feel emotional settling peace that I just enough as I am slowing down um
Insight light completeness compassion softening calmness mind wandering permission to just be emotional smiles others together connection potential and so muchly cow read it okay holy cow um let's just take a moment and you know Let that sink in because as Tik nadan was very fond of saying we enter are and when we hear these kinds of expressions of uh connectivity it's like looking in the mirror and realizing that we are profoundly connected in a certain way and we can share in a certain kind of uh amazement or wonder at uh how open and expensive the
heart can be and when it's Taking care of itself in a certain way in recognizing its own Beauty and and then that's in a certain way a source of tremendous energy for transforming and healing the world because there's no point in meditating in a house that's burning down you know I mean you should get out save everybody call the fire department and then if you have a hose even if it's a small one throw some water on it but you don't sit there meditating when the House is on fire and I just say that because
I think it's worth emphasizing more and more as we evolve into it's almost 50 years since mbsr started 44 or 45 at the moment that uh again uh the meditation practice is not simply sitting but it's being it's it's it's learning how to inhabit the full dimensionality of awareness and that may turn out to be uh our species um signature challenge at the moment is whether we can inhabit the Name we gave ourselves as species Homo sapiens sapiens which I'll cut to the chase simply means the species that is aware and is aware that it's
aware namely awareness and meta awareness and imagine if we could actually grasp that and instantiate it in the way we conduct our lives or use another English word govern ourselves and uh the lawfulness of the Dharma really has a lot to do with how we govern Not only ourselves but how we we govern human activity on the planet once we are mindful of say the glaciers disappearing and we're mindful not by sitting on the cushion but by taking Satellite photographs of the glacies over the p 50 or 60 years and seeing with our very eyes
these are disappearing and also temperature measurements of the ocean and all of that kind of stuff uh so mindfulness you know has a lot of different levels to it and they all Redown to um the beauty of the human heart when it's able to put the welcome at out to itself I'd love us to explore a couple of those levels actually John so in a moment maybe let's come back to this question of sort of how inner peace can result in outer positive action for the world and for each other but but but actually I
want to start by you mentioned the history of mindfulness based stress reduction and how long That's been helping people and to me the thing that I find so important to remember there is you woke me up certainly and many of others to the sort of what I might call the Mind Body Connection in a really embodied way I my own background in a stressful corporate job was I had very chronic back pain and it's now actually 20 years this year since I learned what is you know before I'd ever heard the word mindfulness I learned
some breathing exercises to Allow me to realize that the p I was holding my back was muscle tension from stress and then actually by changing my relationship to that pain instead of pushing it away sort of turning towards it and realizing that that was feelings and thoughts that I wasn't really letting out as a sort of classic British male trying to please people and not talk about my feelings actually I went from being in chronic pain not not sleeping not being able to walk to Functioning again in a very short period of time and that
was for me as someone who'd done a you know PhD in engineering was very much a rational thinker that blew my mind right to understand that these these things you know this sort of physical reality and our embodied Emotional Self are so intertwined could you say a bit more about you know because that feels like mbsr really helped people make this connection between physical health and our whole Way of being is that right well as I said earlier you know um it really is about suffering and the potential for liberating ourselves from suffering that doesn't
mean that we will uh live forever for instance or never experience emotional pain or physical pain uh or because you know the classical formulation of mindfulness was it's about you know it's it's about how to approach life in such a way as we're ready for the Inevitability of uh old age sickness and death uh and nobody so far as as I know has escaped that sequence uh but how you approach it has everything to do with how it unfolds so you discovered that what you thought like the back pain very often you know people have
multiple surgeries and often they are not successful back surgeries uh and so when mbsr got started it was really the pain clinic in the anesthesia Department that sent us all the people That frankly they didn't know what to do with anymore because they were what in that medical parlance failures to treatment so it's like okay now we have a stress reduction Clinic we're can to dump all those people there and and maybe they can help and in fact most of the people that they sent us after eight weeks were going back to their you know
doctors and saying this program in 8 weeks did more for me than you did for me and eight Years and the reason for it is because we mobilize their own interior resources for learning something about themselves and their stress and their pain and their back and their minds and their Lifestyles and then from that learning you you you why do we ever go to school or learn anything it's to grow right we grow that's kind of a mystery like what does it even mean to grow it's not like we're growing taller once we're adults but
we grow Potentially wiser or more Savvy about our narratives that are too small about ourselves and how we make a lot of trouble for ourselves with you know various ways and then out of that growing there comes a certain kind of uh coming to terms with the actuality of things like I'm not going to try to make my back pain go away but I'm going to just put the welcome that out to what it actually is in my experience and I call that healing that's my working Definition of healing coming to terms with things as
they are but as soon as you do that you're engaged with the actuality of how things are and then they change because the only constant in life is change uh and this is like ancient Buddhist wisdom and even earlier than Buddhism and as a result of that change this transformation then you have a realization that you're much bigger than your story of me and how much my back is Killing me or all of that and then all of a sudden you know you've come full circle and there's more learning more growing more healing and that
becomes your default mode your way of living and it doesn't mean you won't die and it doesn't mean you won't have very serious health problems or pain or anything else but it means you will it does mean that you'll have potentially infinite way of holding it that attenuates the suffering or liberates the suffering and um and Gives access to a sense of well-being and gratitude that's beyond liking and disliking and that I would call wisdom and and what mbsr showed is like anybody can do that everybody can do that you don't have to be a
monastic in some Monastery on a Mountaintop in Asia that anybody can take these ancient practices um and and instantiate them in their lives in ways that show just often the kinds of benefits that you were reporting from your own Experience John I've always loved that phrase you said about the welcome mat but you've just helped me see it in a in a new way which is remembering that in my case that chronic pain was made worse by the fear of the pain and the implications and in fact to welcome that in some ways is is
an acceptance that that helps get rid of some of the fear and allow things to be and actually allows us to then move on and the first thing I would ask you if we were working Together in that kind of way is uh how does the fear Express itself in your body right in this moment okay so that's a kind of uh that's uh subtracting the head from the equation and we're asking to directly perceive how the fear is operating where in is it in the body and then you're outside of the domain of cognition
and that's a kind of other perspective that you can bring to it and all of a sudden you have new degrees of freedom for being wise relationship to It and then you basically uncouple the sensory the emotional and the uh and the what's called nopor for physical domains of pain you and you uncouple them and all of a sudden the suffering drops the sensation may change but not completely disappear but over time the body begins to learn how to navigate that universe and uh come to terms with the actuality of things and they're continually changing
so that's like That's the love affair and your body and the world will teach you everything you need to know if you're open to listening so so let's shift from that level of the body to the level of the world and where I want to start with this is this really powerful idea of acceptance that we've just talked about for our own sort of lived reality feels sometimes at odds with as you described the really kind of on fire situation we find in the world around us we look at The climate challenge we look at
War we look at suffering and actually acceptance somehow feels like it's not enough like acceptance somehow needs to link back to actions so I wonder if you could say a bit about how cultivating this inner piece can allow us not just to wish for outer peace but but to to actually live in an act in way that help call out the things that are wrong and actually become a a sort of force for compassionate living as well As just inner wisdom well my grandson was wearing a t-shirt the other day with a quote from Angela
Davis which took uh that U that classical uh aspiration of uh let me learn to change the things that I can't change in my life not change the things that I cannot change and know the difference and she said uh let me learn to change the things that I cannot accept in the world and and and not accept the things that I can That have to be uh accepted and know the difference so I think that's turning everything on its head and saying no there are aspects of the world that uh are sources of deep
suffering and they've been at play for as long as there's been history at least so at least 15,000 years or something like that and which is not very long when you think about Generations so you could think of humanity in an evolutionary way as just learning how to Grow into its full capacities uh and and hopefully learn not to kill each other uh and you know youal Noah Harari has you know in his work and his books are sort of really explaining the uh amazing Advent of humanity and how it has transformed the Earth but
also since and he's a very uh you know committed meditator how uh the our potential for awareness has uh the capacity to actually transform the story so if we Just pay a lot of attention to uh the things we tell ourselves about uh the way reality is we can wind end up believing them and you know there's this kind of cliche don't believe everything you think my My Philosophy is really don't believe anything you think because thinking isn't all that cracked up there you or at least test it a lot because a lot of our
thoughts are highly socially conditioned and so when it comes to transforming the world we really have to Listen to voices that are very different from our own uh because we are highly conditioned by whatever our histor IAL history what the the color of our skin where what the the sort of country we happen to be born into uh levels of privilege in society all of that kind of stuff has to be part of the curriculum of mindfulness in order for us to not wind up becoming caricatures of um of mindfulness and and where there's no
wisdom and there's actually an awful lot Of uh implicit and explicit uh exploitation and suffering that's not being recognized as people talk about how important it is to be self-aware so this is a this is a big challenge for us as humanity and as I said I feel like that's a challenge for us as a species at the moment is can we make it over the next whatever period of time 10 years 20 years 50 years to a place where we live our way into the species name and we begin to recognize That everybody's life
is equal to everybody else's and everybody if you take the analogy of uh the human body where the trillions and trillions of cells in the human body every single cell needs an adequate blood supply or you're going to have disease of one kind or another so in the same way if Humanity we if we are all individually cells of the onebody politic of the human species then uh it stands to reason that everybody has to have an Adequate blood supply in order to be able to live effectively so whether that's a sort of um you
know minimal basic income or whatever it is that we have to eradicate poverty we have to eradicate uh you know we have to uh eradicate uh sort of institutional injustices because they are sources of harm and suffering and and they privilege some and and benefit some at the expense of others and it's amazing how the privilege very often are Completely blind to the um privilege of privilege so to speak because that's the world that the waters that you swim in just like the fish are blind to you know water potentially so uh we need each
other to help us wake up I mean I I I mean just in our families we know that you know uh luckily the people who love us are our best you know sort of um uh exponents for showing us what we don't know and so people who don't look like us people who Live in different places in the world who have experienced different forces of Oppression or Injustice uh we need to listen to those voices so that we do actually thread that needle and heal the planet uh before the forces of classically greed hatred and
delusion and separation and othering destroy it John without wanting to go into a sort of current affairs discussion I know as just one example of the the sort of you know many human suffering Instances around our world I saw that you posted something on Twitter X the other day around Gaza and the the awful suffering that's happening there and the Dharma community's response to that and and I don't want to necessarily go into the politics of that question but what I think many of us would really benefit from hearing with all of your wisdom is
how do you as a mindful practitioner and a a compassion promoting human being responds to what what's going on you Know in a situation like Gaza right now how do you balance that sort of your own practice the short answer would be the short answer and thank you for asking the question the short answer would be any way I can and any way that I can will be inadequate I mean um and I want to recognize that everything has is set in motion by causes and conditions so what happened on October 7th was absolutely horrifying
and you know just Like mass murder on a scale that had not been seen ever in Israel you know up to that point but it didn't come out of a vacuum and in fact Israeli you know intelligence was saying that something like this is going to happen but there was a certain I think degree of unbelievability to it no that could never happen we're too strong and the walls are too high and the barbwire is too And all of a sudden the unthinkable happened it's almost like so there are these hostages that are now in
Gaza a lot of people died I mean just horrifyingly and it was almost like the way I see it is this is the result of like a historical causes and conditions that are at least 100 years old and it have to do with you know um how the world relates to Judaism uh and how Europe related to Judaism in the 19th and early 20th centuries and and um and the nonrecognition of the Palestinian people who are occupying the land of Palestine and how you know things unfolded with the balford Declaration and everything else so not
to go into it in any great detail but there are intrinsic contradictions uh in uh the that area of the Middle East and in Israel that got Papered over by the UN by the US by the UK and by England let's say and um and we're seeing the we're seeing the results of that a hundred years later and if anybody wants to pursue it uh khi wrote a very professor at Columbia University wrote a very beautiful and Illuminating book called The 100-year War of Palestine so all of these things come out of again causes and
conditions and so from the point of view of uh October 7th I saw it as a kind of Horrifying uh Coan that uh that the causes and conditions in the form of Hamas uh threw out to Israel okay this is the world is not the way you thought it was and you are not as safe as you thought it was now what and I think Netanyahu and the is people who are in charge of Israel at the moment I think they really blew it by murdering you know so many thousands of babies and women and
children and destroying schools and everything else Understanding the rationale that there might be tunnels underneath and terrorists hiding in schools and hospitals and everything but was that the wisest solution is to kill people to the level where everybody around the world is in some kind of moral compromise and Hazard because we see it on social media and on television every single day babies little bodies wrapped up or amputated and everything else and we're drinking this in and what what Kind of power do we have to influence it all so that's why we're seeing all these
uprisings on college campuses because it's morally hazardous to actually you know sort of just stand there and observe it without saying anything and so this is part of the curriculum think of what I said earlier about Humanity learning how to um live its way into the name we gave ourselves as a species and if we're really aware of these different levels Then how to heal and govern the Middle East and every place else in the world that's contentious including Ukraine Russia and everything else where we're just killing ourselves because they are us you know we're
all human beings and that's I think the karmic assignment of humanity at the moment is to either wake up and uh recognize our commonality and find ways to govern ourselves which is a root meaning of the word Dharma so that we uh Optimize well-being and minimize as much as possible harming even though we recognize that we're all capable of tremendous harm I don't know if that makes any sense to you makes a lot of sense saying it off the top of my head and sorry I was going to say what what's really strikes me listening
to with that kind of mindful lens on is your ability to hold an incredibly complex and nuanced and multi-dimensional theme in a in a Way that recognizes the full catastrophe of our situation and our humanity and our shared you know we are in some ways our own enemies and and there our response is not a helpful one and I I wish more of the conversation in the media and in social media was along the lines of what you've just shared which is kind of looking at this with a with a wise heartfelt view but but
I I also want to be conscious of our time together now and and actually invite the Audience to use the Q&A function to put their questions that they'd like to ask and in a moment I'll come to to those but just to sort of bridge from what we just talked about which of course brings up some really difficult emotions certainly I'm feeling that for me personally could you say a bit more about the kind of common Humanity the sense of Oneness that we would love to recognize more and actually in some ways could be a
solution to the conflict we Have in our world well I think you know I I think we all as human beings recognize the humanity of others um and governments and countries basically are aimed at instantiating certain kind of boundary conditions so that we optimize you know uh our ability to live together on this planet but then there are are the classical elements of greed hatred and delusion that have actually the greed part is like hey why Don't we just grab your land you know why should it be your land uh I have more guns I'll
take it uh that's been going on for a very long time and I think that's the kind of thing that we need to actually uh take a look at as a species as humanity and say no we going have to Outlaw certain things like you know ability to grab each other's land or to make those kinds of claims and and then to uh you know threaten Humanity with you know uh Armageddon nuclear Weapons and and stuff like that so I feel like we we really need to um inquire together about you know whether it's Ukraine
and Russia it's like what is our common self-interest and how much has it been being driven by leaders who are not in touch with uh maybe um healing their own countries but utilizing um the their geopolitical power for their for the gain of a small number of people I think China has Tremendous potential here in this regard uh especially if it you know in terms of Taiwan I mean the same threat is there or Taiwan you know that um was there for Russia and uh Ukraine okay and there's a lot of geopolitical posturing around that
uh but if China could get in touch with its own ancient Dara Roots which I think it is more and more and more there's no telling what would happen if one country perhaps China actually got in touch with its deep wisdom Dimension I mindfulness may be like 50 years old in the west but it's thousands of years old in China their Dharma history is second to none on the planet and how it's um manifested in terms of Art and all sorts of various kinds of Institutions poetry and and you know so I think there is
tremendous potential on the planet in every on every continent for us to actually come to our senses which was the title of a book that I wrote about this Come to our senses wake up as human beings and again I'm not saying this is going to be easy it's going to take a lot of collective inquiry and also rewriting injustices that are thousands of years old but coming to a place where we learn to live in harmony uh with the universe because we're only you know we're the only planet we know of where there is
uh life uh in the form of us and Consciousness so sensient and actually I Mean there's a book that a physicist wrote recently called the dawning of a mindful universe and I think that that's actually a prescription for one possible outcome on this planet which would be a happy one the other possible outcomes you know if we're talking about you know I don't even want to go there in terms of the level of violence that we're capable of but this is I think where the personal and the global re relink again John which I'm reminded
of this idea That the people who do the most unloving things are the people most in need of love and the people who do the least wise things in in many ways are the people least in touch with their inner wisdom and therefore I I feel it's so important that we can help people in positions of power and influence particularly to develop this way of mindful living I or get or get them out of there and get other people into positions of power because I don't think You're going to be you know transforming Putin or
Donald Trump or anybody else anytime soon no but I was with um someone I think you know Chris Ruan who I Chis in the UK who has been trying to encourage parliamentarians to to do mindfulness and I I believe that that can be really transformative but let's bring it back to the personal as we turn to the questions from the community here so Dave's asked or just said hi John I use your guided meditations to help me Most mornings I feel great afterwards but find it really hard to bring mindfulness into my day after that
especially when I'm having a busy day at work what's the best way to become more mindful outside of the actual meditation practice take the moments when you're having a hard time at work to one by one and recognize that you're having a hard time at work that's awareness and once you're in Awareness then I'm having a hard time at Work just becomes a thought or a story and you can change that story instantly by holding it in awareness and you can even ask the question is my awareness having a hard time and therefore you're really
recruiting a hidden dimension of your own humanity and you can play with it like a yoga exercise you can sort of move in move out play with it and explore like say you're having a hard time with a colleague or a boss or you know whatever It is uh how could you do something like orthogonal like beyond what you usually think of as like uh you know reacting or resp resp Bing that would actually uh maybe at least maintain your own Integrity even if it doesn't change the situation and that's a form of meditation that's
meditation in action and then see what happens in the next moment new opportunity thank you um Alice asks do you have any tips specifically for those Of us with ADHD or similar sort of fast multi-tab brains as she calls it I think from a certain perspective not to you know at all diminish an a diagnosis like that uh the entire planet has uh entire Humanity has ADHD big time so I think the prescription is the same as best you can see if you can inhabit this moment and then ask yourself in this moment is my
awareness of my anxiety anxious and you may find that there's All sorts of anxious thoughts in there about the future or the next moment or whatever but but your awareness in this moment of the anxiety is not anxious and you can feel where the anxiety is in your body just as we discussed a little bit earlier where's how is it expressing in my body and then let it be and breathe with it and don't take it personally so there's a certain way in which uh it's helpful to try to see how often we take things
personally and Build stories around my anxiety or this or that and then let it be more like a weather pattern like it's it's an it's anxious sing the way it's raining and it's not you and you don't need to worry about it in quite the same way and see how that works over a period of a a few months but I think it's an actually a very powerful meditation practice to actually embrace it put the welcome at out for as was said earlier and investigate whether you are your anxiety Or that's another story you're telling
yourself that's somewhat limiting thank you so helpful um tensins asked a question which I think brings us back to the overarching theme of today's event John about everyday mindfulness um he ask what advice do you have for individuals struggling to establish a consistent mindfulness practice how do we make this every day I guess get your ass on the cushion every single day whether you feel like it or Not and say that you know uh playfully but I'm also not kidding if you really have the energy to ask that question then you have the energy to
do it uh somebody in there wanted to ask that question because they want some kind of a enthusiastic answer from me that will make sense to you I would say trust where the question came from that you're asking me trust that listen to it and then let that guide how you conduct Yourself from the moment you wake up and realize you're awake I've been advocating more and more for people say well it's hard for me to get out of bed and then go to the meditation cushion and sit or a chair or whatever I'm sitting
on I said don't bother getting out of bed this is something I wouldn't have said when I was younger but as I get older it's like just meditate in bed get into the corpse pose and die to the Past die to the Future and wake up in The present moment and you can do it by feeling your the sensations in your toes and in your feet and in your ankles and heels or the sensations in your hands and then play with like can I feel my left foot and my left hand and awareness of the
sensations okay I feel now can I shift to awareness of my right foot and my right hand and you can do you can make this stuff up but there are all different doors and the same room and that room is awareness in this present Moment and so I like to say when you wake up in the morning check and see whether it's really true and then finish the job before you get out of bed it shouldn't take that long either it doesn't mean you have to sit for half an you have to practice for half
an hour you know like one in breath and one out breath if that's all you have but I would say you know longer stretches of clock time are really powerful for deep healing but you'll reminded me of Something you went said when we were together in London which has always stuck with me when I have a a shower in the morning you said you know when you're in the shower in the morning just just make sure you know you're there in the shower and you haven't brought all your colleagues from the meeting you're going to
which I wasc lovely image that may be that may be one of the signature things I'm most known for is the shower um Carol has asked an interesting Question about grief she said after her husband died suddenly and unexpectedly she found mindfulness really helped navigate the depths of of grief but uh and that's actually transformed the pain into a cherished memory but grief is not something we talk about openly in our culture so how can we encourage people to use mindfulness as part of the grieving process uh by having grief be more of a uh
in the culture um you know explicitly By sharing our grief by by holding it um it's it's it's you know part of the human Condition it's horrible is absolutely horrible uh loss the the the law of impermanence at work uh the unexpected happening the unimaginable happening and this is why you know I teach mindfulness I mean if I found something more powerful more self-compassionate more embracing than mindfulness I would be actually Advocating that but I haven't in the entirety of my life so when there we are experiencing the grief of of loss uh especially especially
sudden loss and we're seeing it played out as I was saying on our television screens and our news feeds every day like thousands and thousands of people experiencing that in their families in Gaza then and in what happened in Israel and in what's going on in Ukraine it's like a certain kind of Recognizing that this is the human condition that we are not immune to suffering but that we can really put out the welcome at for that suffering and investigate it and learn from it in a certain way how to heal ourselves and I would
say be a force for sanity and healing in the world and in small is beautiful so it doesn't have to be some big thing that has to do with Gaza or Ukraine it just has to do with who still left in your world that merits recognition and love and what I loved about that question was how that that use of mindfulness had allowed grief to also bring a sense of gratitude and celebration as well which I think is something that it opens up in in a way for us that that broader perspective of being able
to in some ways the welcome that allows us to discover the the the the depth and the richness but you can't Push that either I think it's also important to respect that when you know it's that grief has a certain kind of time signature and in the early stages of grief you know like in the uh Greek choruses you just pull your hair out out and scream and rant and yell and that's also part of being human is like and have it be completely unacceptable uh and so to be kind to oneself and not sort
of impose some kind of prescription about how you have to do Grief but let the grief do you in a certain way and if you're cultivating mindfulness then grief becomes a profound teacher about our common humanity and our vulnerability uh and the the beauty of our relationships and their Evanescence and I think actually so much of what you said today John is a reminder of how precious life is that this one moment that we ever have right now and and the uniqueness of our Experience and our connection to each other is a really precious thing
then somehow mindful living is a celebration of that heartful loving way of living do you feel that that kind of sense of life being precious absolutely and that's why this moment is the only moment it's precious and it's the only one we have everything else is story future or past and we can build the stories however we want them but the most important thing is To uh all those stories are about I the story of me okay and we need to inquire who that me is because in a certain way we are so much bigger
than our stories and that's where awareness comes in uh try to find the center or the periphery or the circumference of your own awareness you won't find it uh and so that's big that's actually as big as the universe because it's the only property that we have that's similar to the universe namely you know There's no Center to the universe as it's understood by astrophysicists and cosmologists and there's no there's no periphery there's no end to it and awareness is like that and we're born I don't even want to say with it it is us
in a certain way it's our core signature feature and yet we're not that um comfortable with it or uh intimate with it and we can develop that kind of intimacy and that's what meditation is both in daily life and in formal Meditation practice until there's no separation between formal meditation practice and US speaking together like this and then as soon as we go off Zoom the meditation continues forever as long as the breath continues at least John we're out of time but I'd love to invite you to just join us for 30 seconds in something
we do at the end of our act of happiness Gathering as we call the checkout and what we're going to first of all do Wherever you are in the world just take a moment to to breathe and reconnect with that sense of awareness and notice what's going on for you right now and bring to mind something you appreciate about this time we've spent together with John perhaps an idea that's really resonated or an intention that you want to set yourself having spent this time together and finally let's take that sense of appreciation and the wisdom
That we've heard from John together today and actually send this out into the world really cultivate a sense of well-wishing and love and compassion especially for those in the world that really need this right now where people are dealing with really difficult situations and suffering so our hearts are with them and we're sending out a sense of uh yeah wishing them well wherever they are in the world John we're enormously grateful to You it's been a real joy to spend this time with you is there a final thought you'd like to leave us with as
we part today h well I just feel honored to be part of this conversation uh and just a deep out to all of you who are on this call and um let's remember um or let's uh see if we can explore what I was suggesting when I was calling mind fulness A Love Affair uh with life and with the world and with the uh our Possibilities uh for um living life as if it really really mattered in the only moment we ever have so it's a big adventure there may be plenty of wrong ways to
do it but there's no one right way to do it and so as long as you uh trust in your own deep intentionality and Beauty uh that motivation is just perfect and then every moment becomes your teacher everything that arises becomes your teacher uh the world actually life itself becomes your Mindfulness teacher and then we also reflect that back like members to each other so uh I I love that I absolutely love that and I feel Mark I want to just say tremendously honored to be invited back into your community your s we might call
it and uh to just say that um I feel like this is a force that has the potential to transform the world and and the stakes are so high that every one of us needs to in some way or other show up on our full Humanity uh I like To say quoting Buckminster Fuller that uh this is a all hands on deck moment on spaceship earth and um and every one of us counts so all best wishes to all of you and we'll keep practicing together I'll see you on the cushion we will keep together
thank you everyone for being here and John thanks again it's been a real pleasure being together and we will we will see you in mindful living and on the cushion thank You all bye-bye [Music]
