The Mind's Own Physician Quotes

“Depression” is a problematic word. We all believe we know what it means because we toss it off so easily: “Oh, I’m depressed; I got a run in my stocking.” At the same time, when we are describing severe psychopathology, we presume that because the word is descriptive, it offers a definition as well. We move to the next step and presume that because we can take a picture of the brain and “see” depression, it therefore is real. It has been occurring to me more and more, not just from these conversations, but also from my work, that when the brain is in clearly different states—and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders80 says they are the same pathology—maybe our definition of the psychopathology is too broad. We need to redefine the nature of suffering to understand how it may be a condition more like dukkha, instead of a disease with a physiological cause as specific as something like a brain lesion. That is not to deny that true psychopathology exists, or that the patients I take care of do not suffer from a brain disease. I believe very strongly that they do. But I also see patients who, with focused attention and by acquiring new skill sets, can bring themselves out of it in the same way that William James did when he decided to focus his attention from inside to outside. The ability to focus attention means your brain is in a different state. Maybe we ought to understand those as different definitions of illness. What I’ve learned from all of you is that maybe we have to start making those distinctions more strongly. That will allow us to focus attention on how to handle ourselves in a world with natural levels of suffering, and help us not stigmatize people who don’t have the brain capacity to even start. Those are two separate items.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“Finally, I would like to close with a Buddhist practice of dedicating merit. Whatever benefit and merit may have arisen here, we dedicate it for the benefit of all beings.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“A few lines from Wordsworth’s “Prelude” come to mind: “There is a dark inscrutable workmanship that reconciles discordant elements, makes them move in one society.”100 I think of the continual flux, the deconstructing and cohering of patterns of connection in the brain, moment by moment. Whether you call it Tao or dharma or God or I-don’t-have-the-slightest-idea, there is certainly a sense that we are participating in something quite extraordinary and mysterious. This time together has been like a bell ringing for five sessions over two and half days. The bell has now rung, but the reverberations have the potential to go out infinitely. We do not know what the consequences are of having eavesdropped on this conversation in His Holiness’s portable living room, but whatever the consequences may be, they will have something to do with all the questions that didn’t get answered. The challenge is to ask where those questions come from in the first place, and what your job on the planet is, whether it has to do with children, with trauma, with the military, with government, or with something else. The challenge is to ask, “What is my job on this planet, in this moment, given who I am and everything I know—including whatever has come from this dialogue? Might this inquiry begin to cohere and synchronize for us, individually and collectively, into some deeper manifestation of what it might actually mean to belong to Homo sapiens sapiens, the species that knows, and knows that it knows, in other words, the species of awareness and awareness of awareness?” Or will we go back to sleep on our way home? I was so touched by what Richie said, and I want to bow to him for holding seemingly different worlds in a way that truly has heart. I value our friendship tremendously and am deeply appreciative of the opportunity to have been able to work together to develop this meeting and host it together.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“Coming back to the issue of helplessness, the teachings talk about different levels of compassion and different kinds of compassion. There is the compassion where we feel we can do something about the situation, and the compassion where we feel we can’t do anything. I wonder if His Holiness would speak about that, because it is such a powerful consideration. Does compassion change to something else in those circumstances, or is it supported by our wisdom, our insight into emptiness? What sustains compassion when we feel helpless? HH Dalai Lama: As you are aware, in the Buddhist texts there is a recognition of a type of compassion that is reinforced and complemented by the faculty of wisdom. In the texts this is sometimes referred to as “compassion endowed with the wisdom of emptiness.” The idea is that when compassion is complemented and reinforced by the faculty of wisdom, the individual has the ability not only to empathize, but also to understand the causes and conditions that led to that suffering, and to envision the possibility of freedom from that state. Therefore, this compassion complemented by wisdom is thought to be very powerful and much more effective. It is a more forceful state of mind. Generally, compassion is characterized as a state of mind that wishes to see the other free of suffering. In that sense, an individual who experiences compassion can also feel a sense of helplessness. That type of compassion may be primarily a form of empathy, with the wish that other persons be free of suffering, but it can be more powerful when it’s not simply a wish to see others free from suffering, but also has the added dimension of willingness to help others be free of suffering. Here, it is wisdom or intelligence that plays the pivotal role in allowing a compassionate wish to translate into altruistic action, and it is a more powerful type of compassion. The texts also speak of boundless compassion and great compassion. Great compassion is defined as the forceful compassion that gives rise to the altruistic aspiration to seek enlightenment for the benefit of all. According to the Mahayana Buddhist texts, when an individual has generated great compassion within himself or herself, then Buddha nature has been awakened or activated.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“The recognition of how much we need to care as a natural outcome of seeing the world in a certain way comes together very powerfully with the recognition of how little control we have over making things be the way we want. Even though compassion is held up as an ideal in the West, it’s also often discounted, especially in its manifestation as kindness. It’s almost a secondary virtue—if we can’t be brilliant, or brave or wonderful at least we can try to be kind—as though it is in some way meager or mediocre. But in the reality of people’s day-to-day lives, I think kindness is a tremendous thread that’s of great importance not only for living in a better way, but for having a bigger view of what life is.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“On the other hand, if you spent those thirty years, or three thousand years, primarily studying mental phenomena, you might draw a different conclusion. The simple point here is that multiple theories, or multiple moments of awareness, may best be validated when they are brought into conjunction with moments of awareness or perspectives that are radically different. Whether our perspective is Christianity, Buddhism, the philosophy of Greek antiquity, or modern neurobiology, the way forward may be to overcome the illusions of knowledge by engaging deeply, respectfully, and humbly with people who share radically different visions. I think there’s a common assumption from a secular perspective that the religions of the world cancel themselves out in terms of any truth claims: Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism say many different things on many fronts, so when you shuffle them all together, they all collapse into nothing. In that view, the only moment of cognition that seems to be left standing is science, with nothing to bounce off of because religions have canceled each other out. It’s also often believed that the contemplative traditions feel they already know the answers. You set out on your contemplative path and are guided to the right answer. If you deviate from that, your teacher brings you back and says, “Not that way. We already know the right answer. Keep on meditating until you get to the right answer.” That is completely incompatible with the spirit of scientific inquiry, which seeks information currently thought to be unknown, and is therefore open to something fresh. As I put these various problems together in my mind, a solution seems to rise up, which is a strong return to empiricism and clarity. What don’t we know and what do we know? It’s very hard to find that out when we only engage with people who have similar mentalities to our own. As Father Thomas suggested, Christianity needs to return to a spirit of empiricism, to the contemplative experience, rather than resting with all the “right” answers from doctrine. The same goes for Buddhism. In this regard I’m deeply inspired by the words of William James: “Let empiricism once become associated with religion, as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion, and I believe that a new era of religion as well as philosophy will be ready to begin . . . I fully believe that such an empiricism is a more natural ally than dialectics ever were, or can be, of the religious life.”99 We may then find there are indeed profound convergences among multiple contemplative traditions operating out of very different initial frameworks: the Bible, the sutras, the Vedas, and so forth. When we go to the deepest experiential level, there may be universal contemplative truths that the Christians, the Buddhists, and the Taoists have each found in their laboratories. If there is some convergence, these may be some of the most important truths that human beings can ever access.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“However, perhaps there is a different possibility. It could be that evolution has endowed the brain with self-stabilizing mechanisms so that it always safely enters a good state if we leave it in its default mode—if we just decouple it from the disturbing outer world and let it run by itself. Maybe it’s done that way. That would be even better.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“As the role of the individual becomes more important, how do we encourage people to be aware that health is a value and that they have responsibility for this? How do we develop partnerships so that people are willing to take it upon themselves to develop and meet goals and modify their behavior appropriately? We believe that stress reduction, a quiet mind, a forgiving mind, and a compassionate mind are essential to promoting health. As we think about meditation promoting ethical values, in my very naive way I wonder if how one treats one’s body, and how one might stop abusing one’s body, would be part of embodying ethical values.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“This was one instance in which the medical profession totally rejected something that they were not ready to accept because, in part, there was no framework for understanding the new concept. It was only later, when the causative agents were clearly identified through the work of Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, and Joseph Lister, that it became accepted that germs cause disease. Koch discovered that a microscopic agent was the cause of tuberculosis and showed this with total certainty, leading to a revolution in medicine. All of a sudden, science and technology seemed to hold tremendous power, once it was understood that so many diseases were caused by infectious agents, and powerful new technologies could be developed to treat them with great specificity. This naturally gave rise to a “find it and fix it” culture. Over the last one hundred years, medical science has given rise to many wonderful things. However, it is now very heavily focused on disease. We spend almost no time on health. We make an assumption that for every disease, there is a defect that we need to find and fix. We don’t deal with people throughout their lives, but only when they’re sick. In the United States, we have become accustomed to assuming that one’s health is managed by one’s doctor, and that individuals have little responsibility or control over their health. Where does this leave us? On the one hand, life expectancy in 1900 was forty years. Today it’s eighty years. We have doubled life expectancy in a hundred years. That’s almost miraculous. On the other hand, in 1900 the most likely cause of death for a young man between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five would have been infection. Today, it’s murder, suicide, drug abuse, or violent accidents. We have made tremendous progress, but some of the consequences of our progress are absolutely terrifying. In addition, we have a tremendous accumulation of chronic diseases, many of which are fostered by people’s own behavior. One of the problems with Western medicine is that it tends to make a reductionist assumption that for every disease, there is a single causative factor that we need to find and fix. We now are learning that there are often multiple factors, rather than a single reductionist cause of disease. People are born with a baseline risk, and then environmental factors impinge on that risk over time. There is a tremendous difference in susceptibility to different diseases, yet we often have a lot of control over environmental factors that contribute to disease progression.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“HH Dalai Lama: For me, analytical meditation is more useful, just analyzing the pain. For example, when you experience a trauma, that experience has already occurred. I mentioned at the beginning that many problems are essentially due to ignorance. Ignorance brings with it an unrealistic attitude. And unrealistic attitude brings a lot of mental problems. Accept reality, and approach it more realistically. If something can be done, there’s no need to worry. If it cannot be done, there’s no use worrying. Finished. One source of problems is grasping at some sort of enduring permanence. Another source of problems is extreme self-centeredness. For each of these mental ailments, we need different approaches, different antidotes to transform and shape the mind. That’s my view. To realize intelligence more effectively, I prefer a sound sleep more than meditation!”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“if I can perceive myself as transparent or empty, then what comes toward me can go through me and out the door.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“HH Dalai Lama: Sometimes I think modern scientists approach a particular area with pinpoint focus, trying to find some absolute, independent answer. That’s impossible! Even looking further and further into the smallest of particles, their very existence depends on other particles and is momentarily changing. You can’t find something absolute and permanent. That’s true even of matter or gross energy, and mind is more subtle. It is very difficult to understand phenomena, particularly mental phenomena, in an isolated context without looking at their relationship to many other factors. One really needs to have a more comprehensive or integrated view, rather than trying to find an absolute location.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“I would ask you to expand on what the goal of meditation is from your perspective. HH Dalai Lama: The objective of spiritual practice in the traditional context of Buddhism was well summarized by Ajahn Amaro in the framework of the three trainings: ethical discipline, cultivating concentration, which is the meditation practice, and, based upon that, cultivating insight. At the initial stage, because some of our impulsive behavior is destructive and damaging, we need to find a way to restrain ourselves from engaging in these impulsive, destructive actions. This first stage of training is where we deliberately adopt a set of precepts or a code of life, which is the training in ethical discipline. Since these impulsive, destructive behaviors really stem from a restless, undisciplined state of mind, we need to find a way of dealing with them directly. But our normal state of mind is so dissipated and unfocused that the mind cannot deal with mental problems immediately. Therefore one must first cultivate a degree of mental stability, an ability to focus. This is where the second training in concentration or meditation comes in. On that basis, once we have a certain degree of stability, then we are able to use our mind, empowered with a focused attention, to deal with destructive emotions and habitual thought patterns. The antidote that overcomes the negative and destructive tendencies of the mind is insight.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“Jack Kornfield: I’d like to see the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders expanded beyond pathology. The upcoming revision should have a whole section on human potential and highly developed well-being. We should expand our vision, both individually and collectively. What is a wise society and what is a wise individual in a wise society? There are possibilities of profound inner peace, joy, creativity, and freedom—remarkable dimensions of mental health that all our collective work is pointing to. Zindel Segal: To follow up on what Jack said, a lot of the way we identify emotional problems is by considering them as episodes. Something starts, you have a difficult time, then it ends, and you’re back to being who you were. But if you look at the actual trajectory over people’s lives, they have many episodes that start and stop. For some people with depression, they never actually pull out of it completely and continue to have difficulties in a low-grade way. We are now starting to consider these not as episodes but as chronic problems that require different treatments from just fixing an episode. We can encourage people to practice lifelong ways of looking after themselves: mental training, even when they are not symptomatic; lifestyle changes such as exercise, even when they don’t necessarily need to lose weight. These are examples of taking responsibility for one’s own care. Meditation training is a very important part of that, along with other approaches that don’t necessarily need the presence of an illness to be of benefit. Jon Kabat-Zinn: That relates to what Alan was saying about an attitudinal shift. Your whole life can change in relationship to exercise or diet, for example. It’s not like “Now I’m on a diet,” but rather “This is simply the way I eat and the things I choose to nourish myself with,” including the diet of what comes in through your eyes and your ears, through television, through the newspaper, and through your relationships.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“Jack Kornfield: I’d like to see the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders expanded beyond pathology. The upcoming revision should have a whole section on human potential and highly developed well-being. We should expand our vision, both individually and collectively. What is a wise society and what is a wise individual in a wise society? There are possibilities of profound inner peace, joy, creativity, and freedom—remarkable dimensions of mental health that all our collective work is pointing to.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“I want to suggest that we study an intervention that I call media fasting. As I said, we’re not designed as an organism to take in the suffering of the whole world. We can only do that when we’ve undertaken Bodhicitta and a number of practice tools that help us take on that much suffering. In my own work with child abuse, I realized I needed, as an antidote to the suffering that I was taking in, to decrease the number of hours I was working in child abuse and increase my hours of meditation practice. I have tried media fasting with some students, and it’s been very helpful. We either nourish or assault the brain with what we take in through our senses. When we take in that much suffering and human cruelty, just as when we teach our youngest men to kill, to break the primary precept of all religion, we’re doing a great wrong to the entire human organism. I don’t watch television at the monastery, but when I stay at hotels, I do. My husband says, “Turn it off!” but it helps me understand what everybody else is taking in. All the violence that pours into our minds and hearts through television is really a terrible diet, especially for children. And then teaching our youngest people, our twenty- and thirty-year-olds who are going to inherit the world, to kill intentionally . . . Once you can intentionally kill another human being, then, of course, you can lie and steal and torture people and destroy property. It’s downhill from there. So I think that the antidote of media fasting could be a very powerful treatment for our mental health, collectively and individually.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“So we look at a state of the brain in response to a trigger, and in my personal work, this area, cingulate 25, becomes the nexus of the problem. How the rest of the brain responds to a trigger, as a function of your early life experience, your genes, and your temperament, indicates that what the brain is showing us is not the illness, but what the brain is trying to do to restore balance. We can enhance that through different teachings or different kinds of treatment. Consider the metaphor of heart disease. We all know that you shouldn’t smoke and that high cholesterol is a bad risk factor. You should exercise; you shouldn’t eat too many cheeseburgers. But at the point when you have the heart attack, it’s really easy to make the diagnosis that your heart muscle has died. At that point, you are no longer dealing with probabilities. Instead, a specialized test is done to determine the nature of your problem and to match it to the appropriate treatment. For example, if you have one heart vessel clogged, you need to have that single heart vessel opened. Somebody else, who has five heart vessels blocked, will need a different kind of treatment. The heart itself is telling us how it should be treated. Of course, you would like to promise to exercise more and eat fewer cheeseburgers—but only after you survive and have had whatever surgery you need. In cardiology, there is no problem with doing a test to identify how to optimize the short-term and longer-term return to health. We have to take the same approach to the brain, since we are reaching a point where knowing the signal in the brain is potentially very helpful. The state of the brain is really the response, not the cause. It is giving us a signal as to how we might optimize its return to normality. That’s a set of experiments that we are now trying to do.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“So we look at a state of the brain in response to a trigger, and in my personal work, this area, cingulate 25, becomes the nexus of the problem. How the rest of the brain responds to a trigger, as a function of your early life experience, your genes, and your temperament, indicates that what the brain is showing us is not the illness, but what the brain is trying to do to restore balance. We can enhance that through different teachings or different kinds of treatment. Consider the metaphor of heart disease. We all know that you shouldn’t smoke and that high cholesterol is a bad risk factor. You should exercise; you shouldn’t eat too many cheeseburgers. But at the point when you have the heart attack, it’s really easy to make the diagnosis that your heart muscle has died. At that point, you are no longer dealing with probabilities. Instead, a specialized test is done to determine the nature of your problem and to match it to the appropriate treatment. For example, if you have one heart vessel clogged, you need to have that single heart vessel opened. Somebody else, who has five heart vessels blocked, will need a different kind of treatment. The heart itself is telling us how it should be treated. Of course, you would like to promise to exercise more and eat fewer cheeseburgers—but only after you survive and have had whatever surgery you need. In cardiology, there is no problem with doing a test to identify how to optimize the short-term and longer-term return to health. We have to take the same approach to the brain, since we are reaching a point where knowing the signal in the brain is potentially very helpful. The state of the brain is really the response, not the cause. It is giving us a signal as to how we might optimize its return to normality. That’s a set of experiments that we are now trying to do. Jack Kornfield: A similar diagnostic process is needed both in meditation teaching and in insight therapy. When people come in to see a teacher, they present specific and unique difficulties, traumas, problems with circumstances in their life, or struggles with their mind and personality. Skillful teaching requires a subtle evaluative process to sense what particular intervention out of the many practices will be most helpful to a given individual. For example, for people with powerful self-critical and judgmental thoughts, a necessary part of meditation instruction will be teaching them how to work with these thoughts. If we don’t attend to this problem, they can do all kinds of other practices, but those self-critical patterns will keep repeating, “You’re not doing it right,” and as a consequence, the other practices they are engaging in may be quite ineffective. Jan Chozen Bays: I want to suggest that we study an intervention that I call media fasting. As I said, we’re not designed as an organism to take in the suffering of the whole world.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“In certain monasteries there is an intensive meditative training that shows us how to experience our world as vibrations. When attention to this level becomes highly developed and the mind concentrated, sound is experienced as a series of vibrations at the ear and then at the heart. Then sight and thought can be experienced as vibrations. You can even sense yourself about to think. It’s like a little burp that wants to come, a prethought vibration that signals that a thought is about to emerge from the unconscious or the mind. It would be interesting to study subjects who’ve learned how to deliberately synchronize their inner vibrations or in some way work with the vibratory aspect of consciousness. When we speak of compassion or love for one another, we tend to lump these states all together. But there are many forms of compassion—loving-kindness, joy, gratitude, forgiveness, and equanimity—and each has different depths and different trainings. I would like to see a study that differentiates them. What happens when you teach a joy meditation to people who are depressed, as opposed to when you teach them a meditation on friendliness or a mental practice of gratitude? We could take these different contemplative practices and see which are most effective in different circumstances. Father Keating spoke about silence. In the Buddhist tradition, one of my teachers described twenty-one levels of silence, including silence of darkness, luminous silence where the body or space becomes filled with light, and silence with and without content. Again, these may be associated with brain states and traits that we can investigate, differentiate, and learn from. Most importantly, they point to vast inner possibilities. Western psychology has been so focused on pathology and the healing of disease that we have neglected our human potential. I would love to see research that goes further, that investigates the extremes of mental well-being and, ultimately, the nature of consciousness itself. There is much to learn about consciousness from contemplative practice. In meditation we can turn and shift identity from the content of experience to consciousness itself. We can examine consciousness and learn how to release identity from consciousness, and come to a kind of freedom beyond any states.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“There’s a growing sophistication in the neurosciences. We do not simply speak of the brain; now we can study the relationships of many structures, areas, and dimensions of the brain and its activity. In parallel to that, what we need in this conversation is a growing sophistication relative to meditation. I want to underscore that there is no such thing as “meditation.” There are many distinct meditative mental trainings. That’s a better phrase, because there is no single meditative state. There are dozens of trainings of mindfulness—mindfulness of body; of physical elements; of senses; of feelings, thoughts, identity, and relationships—and trainings of directed and undirected mindfulness. There are hundreds of forms of concentration practices: visualizations, mantras, development of positive emotions, contemplations, and so forth. For our science to develop, it has to become very clear which particular mental training we’re studying, and whether we are studying the states it produces or the long-term traits. In Buddhist psychology, mental health is simply defined as a decrease of unhealthy states of mind and an increase of healthy states of mind. The Abhidharma elucidates fifty-two mental states. Some are unhealthy qualities, including hatred, grasping, jealousy, confusion, rigidity, addiction, and worry. On the other side are qualities that define human health, among which mindfulness is key and which include flexibility, clarity, love, fearlessness, and ease. The Buddhist psychological training, or treatment, if you will, shifts us from what is suboptimal—the entanglement in confusion, addiction, rigidity, and so forth—toward what is normal, with a greater increase of healthy states and, finally, to extraordinary mental health, well-being, and inner freedom. What we need to do is to study the specific ways of training for each of these different capacities, and how human beings can help one another to train in them. In addition to inner training, another of the principles of Buddhist psychology is the use of collective practices that are communicated from one being to another in a supportive web of relationship. My friend, the writer Anne Lamott, once said to me, “My mind is like a bad neighborhood. I try not to go there alone.” Mental health is not possible in isolation. Connection with sangha, or community, and the collective aspects of human transformation is part of what makes mental health possible and sustainable.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“we have more efficient, more focused, and more effective ways of achieving the ends we want.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“In cognitive therapy, depressed patients are actually learning how to respond to their thoughts and feelings in a way that is very mindful. By writing down your thoughts you’re learning how to switch out of one mode of mind into another. You’re learning how to decenter from thoughts and starting to consider that they are not necessarily true and don’t necessarily represent the self. You’re also learning how to turn toward difficult feelings and emotions by writing them down. You have to say, “Yes, this is happening to me. I’m going to write this down.” And you are working to change their degree of believability. We believe that this teaches people a skillful means of responding to their thoughts and feelings when they are depressed. The challenge is how to do this for patients who are not currently in a depressed mood. Their depression may be gone, but they still need to learn that same emotional wisdom for dealing with judgmental or hopeless thoughts if they come to mind.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“It has to do with cognitive reactivity to sad moods. The reactive mind of people who have been depressed seems to be very evident when they feel temporarily sad. Psychologist and philosopher William James had something to say about this problem: “Thoughts tend, then, to awaken their most recent as well as their most habitual associates . . . Excitement of peculiar tracts . . . in the brain, leave a sort of tenderness . . . behind them . . . As long as it lasts, those tracts or those modes are liable to have their activities awakened by causes which at other times might leave them in repose.”60 The idea is that once people have been depressed, even if they are feeling fine, it may not take much to tilt them back into a way of thinking that resembles depression. One way of investigating this is to test people in the laboratory in two different mood states and look at how reactive the mind is in each. If we test people who have never been depressed, whether in a normal mood or when we make them feel sad temporarily for five or ten minutes, their level of depressive thinking doesn’t really change. It may even decrease a little bit when we make them feel sad. But for people who have had an episode of depression, making them feel temporarily sad is more likely to increase depressive thinking.61 The extent to which people who have recovered from depression are reactive in this way when they’re sad actually predicts whether depression will return over eighteen months. It’s as if the sadness brings them back into a way of looking at themselves that resembles the depression.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“HH Dalai Lama: Some forms of meditation are very difficult. One of my close friends was a very good meditator who attempted to cultivate single-pointedness of mind. He had the experience of spending a few years in a Chinese prison, and he told me that the meditation was actually harder than being a prisoner. The point is that he had to be constantly aware and attentive without losing his attention even for a moment. A constant vigilance was required. One factor that needs to be taken into account is the intensity and quality of the meditator’s motivation. In the traditional Buddhist context, meditators are highly motivated individuals who have a deep appreciation of the framework of the Buddhist path and an understanding of its causes and effects: If I do this, this will happen. They understand the nature of the path and its culmination. There is a deep recognition that the fulfillment of one’s aspiration for happiness really lies in the transformation of one’s undisciplined state to a more disciplined state of mind. These individuals take into account all of this context, so when they engage in meditation, they have a tremendous sense of dedication, joy, a very strong motivation, and sustained enthusiasm. But if you just tell a child, with no context at all, to start meditating, there will be no incentive, no inspiration. Robert, you made the comment that in small doses, stress can actually raise dopamine levels, which we assume corresponds in the rat to a heightened sense of well-being or pleasure. I wonder whether there might be an analogue in meditation, specifically in the training of single-pointed attention, or samadhi, which is not uniquely Buddhist. As one trains incrementally in developing attention, a quality arises that is described as suppleness or malleability of the body and mind, and is often conjoined with a sense of well-being, perhaps even bliss. It happens very strongly when one achieves a high state of samadhi, but even incrementally along the path, there are many surges of this type of malleability together with a kind of bliss. This may be an interesting area of research, to see from the neurophysiological perspective what some of the unexpected events are that come out of such attentional training.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“In Buddhist ethics, if you feel a desire to speak in a very injurious or abusive way, perhaps when somebody has insulted or offended you, or even to retaliate physically, you are told to restrain yourself. When the mind is clouded by mental affliction, Buddhist ethics would say, “Now is not the time to act. Let it pass and then act when the mind is more balanced.” But your rats were less likely to get ulcers due to being shocked if they got relief by biting another rat, or at least gnawing on a piece of wood. I’m wondering what the implications are for human beings, when we are shocked by very disagreeable circumstances. From a neurobiological perspective, would it be good for us to go bite somebody, or at least chew on a piece of wood? Are there alternative strategies for us not to internalize the distress, get ulcers, and make ourselves mentally or physically ill? How do you see the interface between these two perspectives?”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“We also measured the oscillatory brain potentials and determined their synchrony during the moment when subjects see a picture for the first time and have to recognize it. In normal subjects, this produces a lot of activity in the high-frequency oscillatory gamma range, around forty hertz. But schizophrenic patients don’t show this increase, and they also have difficulties in synchronizing activity in different cortical areas. This may be one of the reasons why they have difficulties in coordinating their thoughts and coherently organizing their behavior (see figure 8). To conclude, if it is true that synchronization of these high-frequency rhythms serves to coordinate the many distributed processes in the brain, then a method of mental training like meditation that enhances synchronization should have profound effects on brain functions. Finding out what these effects are will be the goal of future research. Not all of them may be beneficial. It sometimes may not be good to synchronize things that should stay separated. But developing more synchrony might be highly effective in generating states of consciousness that differ from those we normally have when we act in a disassociated way in our environment.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“Our intention is to create a container right there in the classroom for recognizing the beauty of other people and their integrity and dignity as human beings; for kindness and compassion; for a sense of gratitude for being alive, even with all of one’s difficulties and dukkha; for cultivating interest and curiosity, and an orientation of non-striving. Americans are very driven people, always wanting to get someplace else. Learning meditation requires not trying to get someplace else so much as being where you already are, thus non-striving. It requires patience and being non-judgmental, being willing to have a beginner’s mind that sees things freshly.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“The more the attention is trained on the present, the more we are able to break the habit of being dragged around by compulsions and distractions—the mind constantly creating scenarios for the future, rewriting the past, being lost in distracted thought, or subjected to incessant reams of thinking. Most of us here have had those times where it seems like nothing can make the mind stop. It just goes on and on and on and on and on. The capacity to focus in meditation has a lot to do with learning how to think when we choose to think, and learning how not to think when we choose not to. The second capacity, the element of investigation, supports a quality of understanding. We learn to see how the mind works: its habits of reaction, running away from the painful, chasing after the pleasurable, and becoming bored, irritated, or restless with the neutral. By recognizing those habits and knowing them fully through the capacity of focus, we learn how not to be drawn into the compulsive cycles that come with them. An analogy that comes to mind is using a camera. Picking up the camera and holding it is like the qualities of responsible behavior and virtue: wisely picking up and holding your life. Focusing the lens is like the development of concentration. Framing the precise shot that you want to make is the element of wisdom. Actually snapping the picture brings the delight that comes with having caught a fine image—that pleasing quality of catching the moment in that way: “Yes! Got it!” This is similar to the insight and transformation that occur when we see the world in a different, more emotionally balanced way.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“The more the attention is trained on the present, the more we are able to break the habit of being dragged around by compulsions and distractions—the mind constantly creating scenarios for the future, rewriting the past, being lost in distracted thought, or subjected to incessant reams of thinking. Most of us here have had those times where it seems like nothing can make the mind stop. It just goes on and on and on and on and on. The capacity to focus in meditation has a lot to do with learning how to think when we choose to think, and learning how not to think when we choose not to. The second capacity, the element of investigation, supports a quality of understanding. We learn to see how the mind works: its habits of reaction, running away from the painful, chasing after the pleasurable, and becoming bored, irritated, or restless with the neutral. By recognizing those habits and knowing them fully through the capacity of focus, we learn how not to be drawn into the compulsive cycles that come with them.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation

“The more the attention is trained on the present, the more we are able to break the habit of being dragged around by compulsions and distractions—the mind constantly creating scenarios for the future, rewriting the past, being lost in distracted thought, or subjected to incessant reams of thinking. Most of us here have had those times where it seems like nothing can make the mind stop. It just goes on and on and on and on and on. The capacity to focus in meditation has a lot to do with learning how to think when we choose to think, and learning how not to think when we choose not to.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation