“The problem. A feeling of having reached a plateau, where my meditation and mindfulness practice is OK, I’m glad I can be more mindful and will continue to practice it intermittently, but it’s not a Big Deal, it doesn’t directly motivate me to want to put in a lot of time…”

I can totally relate to this, having spent the past fifteen years or so practicing meditation intermittently, whenever the spirit moves me, so to speak (which could mean every day, or a couple of times a week, or a few times a month). While I know there might be benefits to doing some sort of formal sitting practice everyday, when it comes down to it I’m just not motivated to take more time away from the many other things that bring me joy and satisfaction. As Charley puts it:

“At the end of a session I’m usually glad I did it, it’s mildly satisfying – but so is a good cup of coffee, a nice walk, writing a paper, etc. That is, I’m not getting direct feelings that there’s some special satisfaction from meditating, so I’m not motivated to meditate much more.”

Shinzen’s response was really interesting, and is worth quoting in full:

“I think part of the problem is from Buddhism itself. Most Buddhist literature gives one the impression that the path is supposed to involve some big spiritual orgasm that happens suddenly and changes one forever. The reason that Buddhist teachers (including myself ) talk about the path in this way is that occasionally something like that does actually happen. When it does, it’s quite dramatic. However, it’s been my experience that for most people who practice meditation, it doesn’t happen that way. Rather the changes are gradual, so gradual that people acclimatize to them and don’t really realize how much they’ve changed.
The other problem is that the changes are not necessarily best measured by insights that occur, but rather in most cases best measured by the amount of suffering that a person would have gone through but didn’t go through because of the path. But since that measure is both hypothetical and a measure of absence, it’s difficult for most people to realize how HUGE it really is.
So I would say don’t worry if you’re not getting epiphanies. Your practice as you describe it is just fine.”

The idea that progress can often be both hypothetical and a measure of absence is something that’s occurred to me lately in the context of my physical exercise routine. I was just telling my wife how I’m somewhat disappointed in how little I’ve seemed to gain from this past month or so of really disciplined exercising. Based on how my body responded to exercise when I was younger, I figured that by now I’d be seeing some difference in the way I look with my shirt off, at the very least. But that middle-aged-looking flab that’s crept into my midsection is still hanging on, and perhaps even making gains. My wife reminded me that, had I not been exercising so much lately, perhaps I’d be even more flabby! For some reason this “hypothetical, measure of absence” type of progress is not very inspiring! At least it’s not as motivating as the kind of good ol’ positive results you can see in the mirror.

As Charley brings up, meditation is a little tricker, because there’s this “promise” that if you keep up a disciplined practice for long enough, you just might get rewarded with the ultimate prize of spiritual enlightenment. Of course, you also might not get enlightened no matter how much you practice, or you might be meditating in a less-than-ideal way for years before catching yourself, or you might get suddenly enlightened without having to practice much at all. It’s almost as if too many secrets have been let out of the bag when it comes to spiritual practices. For instance, how can one earnestly pursue a Zen koan when one already knows, from reading Alan Watts or whatever, that one only really “gets” the answer after giving up trying? Knowing the punch line in advance robs you of the genuine belly laugh. It’s like knowing for certain that you’ve just taken a placebo. It’s probably not going to work its magic.

Then again, maybe it’s good to drop all expectations when it comes to meditation. After all, it’s really about dropping into the present moment and learning to hang out there with attentiveness and curiosity. In that state of mind, one can allow whatever happens to happen, without resisting or grasping, and that’s its own reward.

The program below is introduced as a “Special series discussing the problems of survival and freedom in America”. Mike Wallace begins by saying that his aim in talking with Fromm is to “try to measure the impact of our free society on us as individuals. Whether we’re as happy as we like to think we are, or as free to think and to feel.” Imagine Bill O’Reilly or Brian Williams or Katie Couric devoting an entire program to such questions! These kinds of questions are incredibly important, yet conspicuously absent from public discourse. In terms of Integral Health, it is simply impossible to understand individual health and happiness without understanding the way our individual lives are shaped by societal forces.

During the discussion, Fromm talks about the “marketing orientation” of the American citizenry of the 1950s: “Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality – or as one says sometimes, our ‘personality package’ – for something.” Fromm (I’m paraphrasing here) goes on to describe modern social relationships as shallow, with real intimacy being hidden by a superficial friendliness. He suggests that the average American is only genuinely concerned with private affairs, never losing sleep about the pressing societal problems which threaten our very existence. He says the average person prefers to leave such things to specialists in the government, talking about problems shown on the news with friends and coworkers, but with no more sense of urgency than one would talk about a car that needs repair. Fromm asserts that, despite our apparent preoccupation with it, true love remains a relatively rare phenomenon. He laments that it is all too common that the most important things we talk about on Sundays are the very things that we pay relatively little attention to in our everyday lives. Again, he’s talking about life in the 1950s, but it’s easy to be struck with how little things have changed, at least in many respects. Like when he says: “I think our danger is that we talk one thing, and we feel and act another thing. I mean, we talk about equality, about happiness, about freedom – and about the spiritual values of religion, and about God – and in our daily life, we act on principles which are different, and partly contradictory.”

Speaking of the “religious renaissance” he was seeing back then, Fromm describes it as “the greatest danger that true religious experience has ever been confronted with.” He goes on to say that man today, being concerned with production and consumption as ends in themselves, has very little energy and time to devote himself to the true religious experience, which Fromm defines (in response to Wallace) as “the capacity to feel deep love and oneness with others and nature.” Wallace also asks Fromm to define “happiness” and “democracy”. Regarding happiness, Fromm offers: “People today seem to define happiness as the experience of unlimited consumption. Happiness should be something which results from the creative, genuine, intense relatedness – awareness, responsiveness, to everything in life – to man, to nature.” Regarding democracy he says: “Democracy once meant an organizational society and a state, in which the individual citizen is – feels – responsible, and acts responsibly, and participates in decision-making. I think what democracy means today, in reality, is to a large extent, manipulated consent – not forced consent, manipulated consent -and manipulated more and more with the help of Madison Avenue.” Fromm adds, “We have a mass man, a mass bureaucracy, a manipulation of everyone to act smoothly but with an illusion that he follows his own decisions and opinions.”

Fromm gives Wallace–and the people watching this ABC News Special–a lot to chew on. Again, I think many of Fromm’s concerns and observations are just as relevant today as they were fifty years ago. Without further ado:

Mindful Schools, a community outreach program of Park Day School in Oakland, CA, seems to base their training on the principles of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR model (adapting it to the context of elementary school). According to the news story above, Park Day School (a private school) paid for the training to be offered to students at nearby Emerson Elementary School (a public school serving many economically disadvantaged kids). Ah, sweet hope! I would love to be involved in this kind of work one day.

Elisha Goldstein also did an interview with Susan Kaiser Greenland a few months back on the topic of teaching mindfulness meditation to children. This is a very positive trend as far as I’m concerned.

Addiction is a chronic relapsing brain disease. Brain imaging shows that addiction severely alters brain areas critical to decision-making, learning and memory, and behavior control, which may help to explain the compulsive and destructive behaviors of addiction.

Ah yes, the brain. The three pound hunk of tofu that is the ultimate source of all problems and all answers. (Deep, prolonged sigh.) Of course it’s true that any human behavior or experience can be understood in terms of neurobiology and brain states, and it’s also pretty clear that this understanding is valuable and worth pursuing. But it simply doesn’t follow—in theory or in practice—that therefore dysfunctional behaviors and experiences are neurobiological diseases. In our everyday lives, we take for granted that human life is complicated and plays out on many levels. And long before “neuroplasticity” became a buzz word, we already knew that what we do, how we use our attention, and how we relate to one another affects the quality of our lives (and the structure and function of our bodies/brains).

I worked on a chemical dependency unit in a psychiatric hospital for several years, and I’m fairly certain that most of the professional staff would accept information provided by NIDA (and most everything on the HBO site) uncritically, as I’m sure it fits seamlessly with what they learned in graduate school. But young people tend to question everything, and the patients I worked with were anywhere from 12 to 18 years old. Part of my job was to lead educational discussion groups with these kids several times a week. I also accompanied them to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings several times a week. These kids constantly questioned staff members about all the contradictions they perceived between AA’s philosophy, the treatment center’s information packets, and their own life experiences. For the most part, the contradictions the kids brought up were crushed by the weight of authority, not cleared up by reasoned argument and explanation. I was quite often in the awkward position of covering for and/or attempting to recast the many misconceptions served up daily and repeatedly to patients, some of whom were desperate for accurate information. The kids (who were almost all cigarette smokers) would inevitably point out things like: “Nicotine is super addictive, right? Well, I personally know several people who quit smoking on their own, without any treatment centers or twelve step groups. So, why is everybody here telling me I can’t stop getting high on my own, that I’m powerless over the ‘disease of addiction’?”

As Stanton Peele (one of the few clear-thinking “leading experts” on addiction I’ve come across) has been pointing out for decades, addiction is and has always been politically and socially defined as much as it has been scientifically defined. Peele covers this ground thoroughly in his recent article The Fluid Concept of Smoking Addiction:

The neurobiological model of addiction is static. It is built on the difficulty – often stated as the near impossibility – of quitting or moderation. The model does not attempt to explain how (or, more accurately, why) people cease addictions – even though such cessation is more typical than not with every type drug. The neurobiological model really has nothing to say about why smokers quit (as a majority do), for example due to the pleading of a spouse or a child. In the terms of the model, cessation is unexpected, unexplained, unpredictable, and simply falls beyond its purview or boundaries.

I used an Integral Health framework to help my patients make sense of their substance abuse problems. In practice, our entire staff operated under the integral premise, i.e. that we must address every conceivable dimension of the patient’s life if we hope to make the most effective impact. Some patients, especially those who were heavy opiate users, were given (non-narcotic) drugs to deal with their withdrawal symptoms. Other than that, there was little about the treatment program that had anything to do with directly impacting brain chemistry. We helped patients become more aware of their thought patterns. We taught them healthy coping strategies to deal with the challenging situations and emotions that would inevitably continue to crop up in their lives. We brought their families in for counseling sessions. We contacted teachers, probation officers, judges—anyone who would be working with these kids once they were discharged back into their respective communities—and developed detailed aftercare plans. We covered all the bases, because we knew that substance abuse problems both develop and are potentially resolved in a multidimensional, bio-psycho-sociocultural context. Surely, most thoughtful people (including the folks at NIDA) know this to be true, and yet the “leading experts” continue to present their oversimplified, disingenuous “brain disease” model to the public (complete with brain scan images that often signify very little, and the obligatory lip-service footnote containing the term “biopsychosocial”). I confess, I’m not entirely sure why this is the case. I suspect it has something to do with how government and academic institutions secure their funds. The more influence the pharmaceutical industry has on research and policy processes, the more traction the brain disease model seems to get. And, of course, the public eats up (literally, in the case of pills) easy answers and quick-fix remedies that require as little life-style change and psychological work as possible.

So, although it may seem reasonable to rely on the opinions of leading experts in a given field, this doesn’t always hold true when it comes to the field of mental health. Integral and integrative understandings of addiction and other problems do exist, but they haven’t yet had the appeal and/or financial backing required to capture the imagination of either the leading experts or the general public.

On the bright side, I’m sure all this will change once I click the “Publish” button and everyone on the internet reads this blog post!

In an integral health model, moving toward optimal health is not possible without acknowledging, engaging with, and addressing all dimensions of our lives, including the dimension of social systems and institutions. And as long as corporate profit is the highest organizing principle of our health care institutions, our conceptions of health and well-being will be distorted accordingly, leading to interventions that can often cause more harm than good.

ORGASM INC., a new film by Liz Canner, “is a powerful look inside the medical industry and the marketing campaigns that are literally and figuratively reshaping our everyday lives around health, illness, desire — and that ultimate moment: orgasm.” Check out the trailer:

Orgasm Inc. Official Trailer from Astrea Media on Vimeo.

So I’m making a concerted effort to be more constructive in my rantings and ravings instead of merely tearing into whatever pushes my buttons. I don’t want throw out the babies with the bath water, so to speak, because there’s usually some truth to be found in most perspectives. That’s the whole point of an integral approach to health, to weave together what’s useful so that problems can be approached more effectively.

The challenge though, is to figure out exactly which perspectives are appropriate or useful in what specific contexts, to articulate how various partial truths fit together into a comprehensive plan of action. I’m hoping to rise to that challenge in the coming weeks by diving deeper into this integral inquiry through engaging others’ perspectives, reflecting on my experiences, and writing about whatever struggles and insights come along the way.

I’ll sign off for today with what I think is the most interesting part of Menand’s piece, where he ventures into this integral territory with some provocative reflections:

Mental disorders sit at the intersection of three distinct fields. They are biological conditions, since they correspond to changes in the body. They are also psychological conditions, since they are experienced cognitively and emotionally—they are part of our conscious life. And they have moral significance, since they involve us in matters such as personal agency and responsibility, social norms and values, and character, and these all vary as cultures vary.

Many people today are infatuated with the biological determinants of things. They find compelling the idea that moods, tastes, preferences, and behaviors can be explained by genes, or by natural selection, or by brain amines (even though these explanations are almost always circular: if we do x, it must be because we have been selected to do x). People like to be able to say, I’m just an organism, and my depression is just a chemical thing, so, of the three ways of considering my condition, I choose the biological. People do say this. The question to ask them is, Who is the “I” that is making this choice? Is that your biology talking, too?

MINDFUL LIVING: THE PIONEER

As creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Jon Kabat-Zinn has brought the benefits of meditation practice to hundreds of thousands of people and inspired a movement that is changing our society in many ways. In this exclusive interview with the Sun’s Barry Boyce, he discusses the philosophy, goals, and promise of the mindfulness movement.

Barry Boyce: Does mindfulness go beyond simply cultivating our attentiveness?

Jon Kabat-Zinn: The ultimate promise of mindfulness is much larger than that, more profound. It helps us understand that our conventional view of ourselves and even what we mean by “self” is incomplete in some very important ways. Mindfulness helps us recognize how and why we mistake the actuality of things for some story we create, and then makes it possible to chart a path toward greater sanity, well-being, and purpose.

Based on that understanding, how would you describe the central mission of your work?

In part 2 of Coming to Our Senses, I talked explicitly about the word dharma—describing it both in terms of the teachings of the Buddha (with a capital D, often spoken of as Buddhadharma) and also as the way things are, the fundamental lawfulness of the universe. So although the Buddha articulated the Dharma, the Dharma itself can’t be Buddhist any more than the law of gravity is English because of Newton, or Italian because of Galileo. It is a universal lawfulness. I specifically asked His Holiness the Dalai Lama at the Mind and Life XIII conference in Washington, D.C., in 2005 whether there was any fundamental difference between Buddhadharma and universal dharma and he said “no.”

The central mission of my work and that of my colleagues at the Center for Mindfulness has been to bring universal dharma into the mainstream of human activity for the benefit of as many people as possible. That’s a very broad calling, so as a skillful means I chose very consciously from the beginning to anchor it in medicine and healthcare. I thought that would be the most fertile ground for introducing meditation and the wisdom and compassion of the dharma in its universal aspect to a wider world, hopefully in an authentic and meaningful way. After all, hospitals function as dukkha magnets in our society, so what better place for the teachings of suffering and the end of suffering to be made available in ways that people might be able to resonate with and adopt as their own?

This year, we’ve been celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the UMass Medical Center. The original vision has in some sense come to fruition, because Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction has indeed spread to hospitals, clinics, and laboratories around the world. It’s being researched, offered clinically, and experimented with in ways that were virtually inconceivable thirty years ago. I think that has come about because the world is longing for authentic experience that transcends the usual limitations we impose on ourselves—through cultural traditions, ideologies, belief systems, and so forth. People are searching for ways to realize the full spectrum of their humanity.

Why do you think a scientific approach is important in spreading the practice of mindfulness?

I am not really interested in “spreading” mindfulness, so much as I am interested in igniting passion in people for what is deepest and best within all of us, but which is usually hidden and rarely accessible. Science is a particular way of understanding the world that allows some people to approach what they would otherwise shun, and so can be used as a skillful means for opening people’s minds. By bringing science together with meditation, we’re beginning to find new ways, in language people can understand, to show the benefits of training oneself to become intimate with the workings of one’s own mind in a way that generates greater insight and clarity.

The science is also showing interesting and important health benefits of such mind–body training and practices, and is now beginning to elucidate the various pathways though which mindfulness may be exerting its effects on the brain (emotion regulation, working memory, cognitive control, attention, activation in specific somatic maps of the body, cortical thickening in specific regions) and the body (symptom reduction, greater physical well-being, immune function enhancement, epigenetic up and down regulation of activity in large numbers and classes of genes). It is also showing that meditation can bring a sense of meaning and purpose to life, based on understanding the nonseparation of self and other. Given the condition we find ourselves in these days on this planet, understanding our interconnectedness is not a spiritual luxury; it’s a societal imperative.

Three or four hundred years ago, not so long in the scheme of things, people practicing meditation did so under fairly isolated conditions, mostly in monasteries. Now meditation is being practiced and studied in laboratories, hospitals, and clinics, and is even finding its way into primary and secondary schools. The people teaching and researching it have in many cases been involved with mindfulness for ten, twenty, thirty, or more years by now. They are not just jumping on some new mindfulness bandwagon. And their work has resulted in many professionals being drawn to mindfulness for the first time. That in itself is a wonderful phenomenon, as long as it is understood that mindfulness is not merely a nice “concept” but an orthogonal way of being that requires ongoing practice and cultivation.

What are some of the new frontiers that mindfulness has entered in recent years?

The mindfulness work is spilling into areas way beyond medicine and healthcare and also beyond psychology and neuroscience. It’s moving into programs on childbirth and parenting, education, business, athletics and professional sports, the legal profession, criminal justice, even politics. For instance, Tim Ryan, a Democratic congressman from Ohio, has become a major advocate of greater support for mindfulness research and program implementation in both healthcare and education, based on his own experiences with ongoing practice. In so many different domains, it’s becoming recognized as virtually axiomatic that the mind and body are and always have been on intimate speaking terms, at least biologically. We need to learn to be much more tuned in to the conversation and participate actively if we are going to function effectively and optimize our health and well-being.

Does the synchronizing of mind and body bring benefits beyond functioning effectively?

The awareness we are speaking of when we are using the term “mindfulness” also encompasses the motivations for our actions, for example, the ways we are driven by self-aggrandizement or greed. In the financial crisis of 2008-2009, we’ve seen the effects of greed played out on a massive scale in the banks and insurance companies. Healing that disease won’t just be a matter of bailouts, stimulus packages, and magically creating greater confidence in the economy. We need to create a different kind of confidence and a new kind of economics, one that’s not about mindless spending but is more about marshalling resources for the greater good, for one’s own being, for society, and for the planet. Mindfulness can help open the door to that by helping us go beyond approaches that are based on conceptual thought alone and are driven by unbounded and legally sanctioned greed.

It seems that the notion that we can think our way out of our big problems has been tarnished recently.

That’s a key point. Even very, very smart people—and there are plenty of them around—are starting to recognize that thinking is only one of many forms of intelligence. If we don’t recognize the multiple dimensions of intelligence, we are hampering our ability to find creative solutions and outcomes for problems that don’t admit to simple-minded fixes. It’s like having a linear view in medicine that sees health care solely as fixing people up—an auto mechanic’s model of the body that doesn’t understand healing and transformation, doesn’t understand what happens when you harmonize mind and body. The element that’s missing in that mechanical understanding is awareness.

Genuine awareness can modulate our thinking, so that we become less driven by unexamined motivations to put ourselves first, to control things to assuage our fear, to always proffer our brilliant answer. We can create an enormous amount of harm, for example, by not listening to other people who might have different views and insights. Fortunately, we have more of an opportunity these days to balance the cultivation of thinking with the cultivation of awareness. Anyone can restore some degree of balance between thinking and awareness right in this present moment, which is the only moment that any of us ever has anyway. The potential outcomes from purposefully learning to inhabit awareness and bring thought into greater balance are extremely positive and healthy for ourselves and the world at large.

On the other hand, if we continue to dominate the planet the way our species has for the past six or seven thousand years, it could be very unhealthy. Regardless of the beauty that’s come out of civilization, we could continue on a path of colossal upheavals that basically come from a human mind that does not make peace with itself—war, genocide, famine, grossly inadequate responses to natural disasters. These upheavals could destroy everything we hold most dear.

Earlier you talked about the promise of mindfulness being much greater than simply focusing attention. What are some of the keys to bringing about the profound effects of mindfulness that you’ve been talking about?

Ultimately, the path is uncertain. All we can do is listen deeply to the calling of our own hearts and of the world, and do the best we can. One of the ways that I have tried to bring the healing and transformative potential of the dharma into modern everyday life in the West has been through attempts to develop an American vocabulary, a Western vocabulary, for speaking about things that until now we haven’t really had a vocabulary for except within religious traditions. I emphasize the universality of the power of mindfulness and awareness, but I’m not talking about a universal church or a universal religious movement. I’m talking about understanding the nature of what it means to be human. I don’t even like to use the word “spiritual.”

Can we simply address what it means to be human—from an evolutionary point of view, from an historical point of view? What is available to us in this brief moment when the universe lifts itself up in the form of a human sentient body and being, and we live out our seventy, eighty, or ninety years (if that), and then dissolve back into the undifferentiated ocean of potential? A lot of the time we become so self-absorbed, so preoccupied, that we don’t pursue the kind of fundamental inquiry Aristotle proposed when he made the comment that “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

In addition to developing a universal, nonreligious vocabulary, I have tried to stress the critical importance of the non-dual aspect of meditation by emphasizing that it is not about getting anywhere else. This of course immediately brings up a lot of bewilderment in people, because almost everything we do seems to be about trying to get somewhere else. Why on earth would you not want to get somewhere else? If you’re in a lot of pain, or if you have some kind of illness or whatever, you always want to get back to where you were, or get to some better place in the future. It sounds almost un-American just to settle for what is, but that is a misunderstanding of the potential for living in the present moment. It’s not a matter of settling. It’s a matter of recognizing that, in some sense, it never gets any better than this.

What do you mean?

Quite simply, the future is not here, even though we can create as many illusions about it as we’d like. The past is already over. We have to deal with things as they are in the moment. So, it’s most effective to deal with them if you don’t perpetrate illusions on yourself about the nature of your experience, and then fall into wishful thinking or ambition that drives you to create more harm than good.

When we delude ourselves about the true nature of our experience, we not only harm other people. We also harm ourselves, because we don’t befriend certain elements of who we are, of our basic connection to others and to our environment. That’s very sad and very unsatisfying. Healing and transformation are possible the moment we accept the actuality of things as they are—good, bad, or ugly—and then act on that understanding with imagination, kindness, and intentionality. This is not easy or painless, by any means, but it is both an embodiment of and a path toward wisdom and peace.

In this regard, we are trying to create a way of speaking about mindfulness as a practice, a way of being, and also as the culmination of the practice in any given moment that is so commonsensical that people will say, “Of course, that makes sense. It makes sense to be in the present moment, to be a little less judgmental or at least be aware of how judgmental I am. Why didn’t I notice this earlier? It’s so obvious.”

Who can we rely on to do the work of bringing this message to more people?

This is a huge challenge, given how imprisoned we are and how blinded by our own conditioning. It would be great if the Dalai Lama could do it all by himself, but there simply isn’t enough of him and the other great teachers to go around. Plus, not everybody can hear it in the language of the traditional meditation vehicles. So perhaps we need many highly dedicated and skillful meditation teachers, steeped in their own practice, to fulfill the need that’s waiting out there. There’s so much suffering in the world. Who are we not to respond to it in some way? That is why a lot of our efforts in MBSR go into professional training, toward developing a whole new generation of people deeply grounded in this universal dharma expression and committed to bringing it into the world in various ways as a skillful means for healing and transformation at a time that the world is crying out for kindness and wisdom.

What’s required to teach mindfulness other than a good human heart?

If we are teaching mindfulness in one setting or another, it really needs to be grounded in our own first-person experience. It needs to be grounded in humility and not-knowing, an openness to possibility but also a deep seeing into self and other. Since it’s available to all of us, it’s not really such a big deal or a special private possession.

Of course, some people will take mindfulness and other practices and put their own stamp on them. Some people are going to make a big campaign out of it without really understanding the depth of it, or understanding mindfulness only in a partial way. The inevitable possibility that some people may approach or exploit these teachings and practices in misguided ways is part of the price of the success of bringing mindfulness into the larger culture.

One of the big responsibilities of those of us who are doing this work is to nurture and mentor the younger people and those who are coming to it for the first time. We can remind them, or clarify for them, that it is not just a fad or merely a smart career move at the moment to become a mindfulness teacher or exponent. The value of mindfulness is both profound and unique. It calls us to take a deep look into the nature of experience itself, and the nature of our own minds and hearts. This is a kind of scientific inquiry, since the mind is really a huge mystery from the scientific point of view.

All of this work hinges on appreciating how awareness can balance thought. There’s nothing wrong with thinking. So much that is beautiful comes out of thinking and out of our emotions. But if our thinking is not balanced with awareness, we can end up deluded, perpetually lost in thought, and out of our minds just when we need them the most.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Shinzen Young talks about the historical cross-fertilization between early Buddhism and other cultures, and goes on to share how now in the west, neuroscience, physics, contemplative traditions and psychotherapy are being cross-fertilized with mindfulness practice. He goes on to share the similarities and differences between psychotherapy and mindfulness. Filmed in Nov. 2009 at Mt. Carmel Spiritual Centre in Niagara Falls.