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<div class="doc-content" id="dg_story"> <div class="dark-link perm_post"> ignited.</p><p><strong>Richie:</strong> And at the point of inflection is a paper that Jon and I published together in 2003, which is actually, right, my most highly cited scientific paper.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> So they tell me.</p><p><strong>Richie:</strong> So they tell you? Yes. And this was a study that was actually done here in Madison, Wisconsin, which is where both Cort and I are now. And it was done with employees at a high-tech biotech company, who initially claimed that their lives were beautiful and there was — they had very little stress. But it was very clear that their lives were quite challenged. And we studied the impact of an MBSR course that was actually taught on site, that Jon himself taught, over the course of eight weeks. He flew out to Madison for 10 consecutive weeks to do this. But that was really a turning point.</p><p><strong>Richie:</strong> And it was the first randomized controlled trial of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. And it showed that there were changes in the brain and changes in the immune system, including increased antibody titers to an influenza vaccine, indicating that the vaccine was working more effectively in the participants who were randomly assigned to the MBSR training. And so this was kind of a remarkable opening, and it really ushered in, I think, the modern era of research on the scientific study of meditation.</p><h2 id="s03" style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, Arial, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #006b6b; letter-spacing: 1.5px; text-transform: uppercase; margin: 40px 0 20px 0; padding-bottom: 6px; border-bottom: 1px solid #d4e4e4;">THE GATEWAY IS THE PROBLEM</h2><p id="h3_meet" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; color: #5a9e9e; margin-top: 28px; margin-bottom: 12px;">Meet People Where They're At</p><p><strong>Cortland:</strong> One of the pieces that I think is so brilliant about both the way you framed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and a lot of the scientific work, and everything that's happened since then — and I'm kind of a living example of what I'm about to say — is that it started not with some abstract meditative thing that people wouldn't understand or resonate with or be interested in. It started with real-world problems. It started with just the classical "meet people where they're at."</p><p><strong>Cortland:</strong> I had a complete and total allergy to anything that felt like religion or organized religion. But I was suffering. I had a lot of anxiety, as I've shared many times. I had a huge phobia of public speaking. So I would've — I'd be having a panic attack if the me from 1993 was here on screen with you guys. I would be literally having a panic attack.</p><p><strong>Cortland:</strong> And so for me, reading your book and the way you framed it, it did two things — two really, really important things that I think so many of us need and that open a door for us. Which is one: we're struggling, we all have some challenge in our life. If it's not anxiety, it's something. And these days, those numbers are through the roof, as you mentioned earlier, Jon.</p><p><strong>Cortland:</strong> And so the first thing it did is just show, "Oh, here's something you can do. Here's a way to deal with this challenge you have in your life. And it's not as hard as you might think. It's just right there in front of you. You just need to learn some things."</p><p><strong>Cortland:</strong> And the other thing is, then the problem — like for me, the anxiety — it opens up this whole world of things I didn't even know were possible for me. It's kind of like a world of possibility for the human mind that most of us just are oblivious to until that door is opened up. But the gateway is the problem, right? Like, I need to hear, "Yeah, I'm burnt out right now. I'm stressed out. I have problems in my relationships," or whatever it is. And so you come for that, but then you start to see that it just opens up into this whole world of possibility for your life, your humanity. That just is kind of amazing.</p><p id="h3_moreright" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; color: #5a9e9e; margin-top: 28px; margin-bottom: 12px;">More Right With You Than Wrong</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> It's because you're met as who you are as a human being. It's not like there's something wrong with you. And you can carry the idea that there's something wrong with me because I've got pain, or I'm depressed, or I'm anxious, or my life is all screwed up. But our perspective has always been right from the get-go, that as long as you're breathing, there's more right with you than wrong with you. And we are gonna pour energy in the form of attention into what's right with you. See what happens when we exercise that muscle, when we train and learn to exercise that muscle.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> So yeah, I'm just so touched to hear you speak in that way, because in a sense you're representing the heart of what MBSR was meant to do — is basically be a very big embrace of people falling through the cracks of healthcare for whatever reasons, and then challenging them to do something for themselves that no one on the planet can do for them, and believing that it was possible to do that something.</p><p id="h3_paradox" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; color: #5a9e9e; margin-top: 28px; margin-bottom: 12px;">The Paradox of Non-Doing</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> Although here we get into the funny languaging thing, because it's not a doing. So it's like a little bit of an orthogonal rotation in consciousness that's required right from the beginning. And say, "Yeah, you've come here, but what are we gonna do? Nothing. We're gonna actually learn how to be instead of to do, and not identify ourselves as 'my diagnosis.'"</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> And one way to do that is to focus in on the personal pronouns, like "my diagnosis." Because it's like, well, are you your diagnosis, or are you more than your diagnosis? And then, well, who are you? And that's already a koan.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> And if you do this skillfully so that you're not alienating people with some kind of Asian weird language, but coming from a place where you actually recognize the essential nature of every single human being — of course the first thing they're gonna do is feel it. And that's called compassion, but it's not fabricated compassion. It's authentic recognition of someone else's humanity. And all the MBSR teachers — I mean, you can't be a teacher unless you understand what I just said and how that gets brought out. Because I'm not sure you can train it even, but how it gets brought out in people who are drawn to do this kind of work.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> Well, first thing is you have to have your own deep meditation practice and care very, very deeply about how to share it with other people without selling anything or beating them over the head, or making promises about even results, because the best results come from not being attached to outcome. So there's so many different paradoxes associated with this.</p><p id="h3_befriend" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; color: #5a9e9e; margin-top: 28px; margin-bottom: 12px;">Befriending Pain</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> You could say that the chances of it succeeding back in 1979 were close to zero. And the reason it did succeed perhaps was because of what I just said, but also the fact that the people who were being sent to us were being sent from the pain clinic and other clinics where people had, on the average, an eight-year history of their major complaint and no improvement. So they were ready for anything. Because it's like, "Cut this out of me." But if you've had four surgeries and they've been unsuccessful, you can't cut out the pain anymore. You have to actually learn to — and this is not, I'm not saying this glibly — but learn to befriend it in a certain way.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> And so, yeah, that's — and now I think you can tell me, the NIH, doesn't it emphasize participatory medicine as one of its four Ps, or whatever — that it's important to get people to participate in their own trajectory towards greater levels of health over the lifespan?</p><p><strong>Richie:</strong> Yeah. Yes, yes. Yeah, no, I think it's making inroads in all kinds of ways. And I think that this body of work has been extraordinarily important in helping to move it in that direction.</p><p id="h3_reaching" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; color: #5a9e9e; margin-top: 28px; margin-bottom: 12px;">Reaching the Ones Who Need It Most</p><p><strong>Richie:</strong> One of the things that we wanted to talk to you about, Jon: while I think that what you said earlier on is certainly absolutely true — if you compare the number of people, the percentage of the population that's meditating today compared to when you started in the late seventies, it's very, very different. And yet it is still also the case that the majority of people don't meditate. And many of them are suffering. Many of them are interested in ways to reduce their suffering. And I wonder what your reflections these days are, for people who are like first responders, like public school teachers, various kinds of healthcare providers whose lives are super complicated — they'll tell you they don't have 45 minutes a day. Are there things that you would recommend to those people that you think would be helpful, genuinely helpful, in moving them along this path?</p><h2 id="s04" style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, Arial, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #006b6b; letter-spacing: 1.5px; text-transform: uppercase; margin: 40px 0 20px 0; padding-bottom: 6px; border-bottom: 1px solid #d4e4e4;">MEDICINE FOR HUMANITY</h2><p id="h3_fullcat" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; color: #5a9e9e; margin-top: 28px; margin-bottom: 12px;">Full Catastrophe on Planet Earth</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> I'll start by saying, in 1990 — or in the late eighties, when I was writing my first book, <em>Full Catastrophe Living</em> — my editor said to me, "Jon, you cannot put the word 'catastrophe' in the title of this book. No one will ever read it." But I think from the perspective of 2026, everybody knows what the full catastrophe of life is. And it's really full catastrophe on planet Earth, not just in the US, but all of a sudden it's in the US in spades.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> Just look at what's going on in Minnesota and everywhere else in the country where we're imprisoning people by the hundreds of thousands and deporting them, helter-skelter, willy-nilly, without any real process whatsoever, or respect for people's individuality, or even judges making decisions about whether things are legal or not. So all of a sudden the body politic — I mean, you could say medicine's oriented towards the body, right? And the mind of the human being. But now we're talking about the body politic of the world, not just the United States, but the world, and the mind of the world in a certain way.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> Especially with AGI looming on, and interfacing everything that we're gonna be doing. We are in a kind of critical moment on planet Earth that's never ever happened before — but a lot of it's happened before. Violence has been forever. But now with the convergence of the polycrisis, as they call it — with the earth suffering from pollution, cutting down the rainforest, the lungs of planet earth, all of that kind of stuff — we are really in a moment where humanity itself has to wake up. In our organizations, in some sense our institutions have to kind of reboot to recognize that we're in a different world.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> I mean, Canada — look at what the prime minister of Canada said just about the relationship to the United States. They're completely discarding it and rebooting for a new reality. Well, we are all in that kind of situation, wherever we live and whatever our jobs. And so we have to realize, no, we are in new territory now, and it's really important to trust in your own deep goodness, to trust that there's nothing wrong with you, even if you have 10 diagnoses, that there's much more right with you than wrong with you as long as you're breathing.</p><p id="h3_dharmaassign" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; color: #5a9e9e; margin-top: 28px; margin-bottom: 12px;">A Dharma Assignment</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> And so what we were saying to patients back in 1979, we need to now say to ourselves globally — to recognize what's worth saving in humanity and in cultures, and how do we regulate our own intrinsic propensity for violence and for othering at unbelievable scales, with nuclear weapons and robotic weapons and drones and stuff like that. It's untenable. No body could survive this kind of disease, and no body politic is gonna be able to survive it either.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> So if mindfulness was important in 1979, it's infinitely more important now, that in some sense we need medicine for humanity. And how it will unfold, I don't know, but I feel like whether we explicitly agree with what I just said or we have some different formulation about it, the world is on fire in a certain way that we have caused, and that we need to also be the solution. And in order to do that, we need to wake up.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> And this is why I feel like podcasts like this are really important, because we don't know who is listening, who is ever gonna be hearing this. But the hope is — and I'm guessing this is why you do it — that whenever we put stuff out into the world, we're putting it out for other beings who resonate for mysterious reasons maybe, but they're drawn to see their own lives in a kind of — maybe [they see] openings and potential for making the world maybe even slightly a better place, a less violent place, a less "us-ing" and "them-ing" kind of place. And over time, what else can we do in terms of hope for humanity? We need to not wind up in despair or endless depression, even though there's plenty of cause to be depressed, but instead to actually maintain a certain fundamental optimism and love the beauty of what life really is. All life. So we have to protect all life on planet Earth. And that's a dharma assignment.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> I don't see a lot of different wisdom streams that actually have the potential — in some sense that we've demonstrated, at least in medicine and healthcare, and it's got a long way to go there — but have the potential to actually help people wake up to our true nature. Which maybe includes a propensity for violence, but it also includes a propensity to regulate that violence and understand that it can be extinguished, if you practice in the way that many, many, many people that you study, Richie, in your lab, have actually followed a path and have reached a point where they are representatives of a certain kind of benign compassion and wisdom that makes the world safe for other people and makes for the possibilities of creativity that don't have a shadow side.</p><p><strong>Richie:</strong> That's wonderfully put.</p><p id="h3_arc" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; color: #5a9e9e; margin-top: 28px; margin-bottom: 12px;">Changing the Arc of History</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> It's a big thing to say, but I really do feel like, as a not just a father now but a grandfather, that there's no way that I can influence the world that my grandchildren are gonna be growing up in, in five or 10 or 15 years, other than trying to be true to what we are talking about and doing whatever I can without too tight an attachment to an outcome. Because it's so much bigger than any one of us that there's no way the human mind can actually conceptualize what the future of humanity is going to be.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> But the more we can embody what the presence of humanity is — the true presence, which is what they call the Dalai Lama, I think: meaning "presence" — when we learn how to be more present, then the potential benefit for the future is immediate in the next moment. And that's how I think we change the arc of history.</p><h2 id="s05" style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, Arial, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; color: #006b6b; letter-spacing: 1.5px; text-transform: uppercase; margin: 40px 0 20px 0; padding-bottom: 6px; border-bottom: 1px solid #d4e4e4;">AWARENESS AS SUPERPOWER</h2><p id="h3_ordinary" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; color: #5a9e9e; margin-top: 28px; margin-bottom: 12px;">Ordinary and Extraordinary</p><p><strong>Cortland:</strong> I think one thing that is so helpful about this is that on the one hand, it's this incredibly inspiring, expansive view of what it means to be human. And you can see why things like mindfulness — although that term might not be taken up in different religions and philosophies — there's something like it in every religion.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> Absolutely. Absolutely.</p><p><strong>Cortland:</strong> Something you've — I've heard you say, Jon, many times — which is this: there's nothing inherently religious about mindfulness per se. It's a human quality. It's like saying breathing is religious. You can work with the breath in a way that supports your religious practice, but in and of itself, it's just a fundamental quality of being human.</p><p><strong>Cortland:</strong> So on the one hand it's got this so inspiring and expansive [quality], but on the other hand, it's just right here. It's something that's — like in this moment right now, I can feel my breath, I can feel my feet on the floor. I can feel your presence and our connection that we share. I can sense the people who might be listening to this and have an aspiration that this be of benefit — these are just little things, little tiny shifts in our mental, emotional heart space that just add up to a totally different way of being human, right?</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> Right.</p><p><strong>Cortland:</strong> A little thing, grand vision, but this in-the-moment thing that's just always right here and actually kind of very easy to access. We just need to learn how to do it.</p><p id="h3_super" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; color: #5a9e9e; margin-top: 28px; margin-bottom: 12px;">The Superpower</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> Yeah. Although I would say it's — I want the listeners to recognize that while it's totally ordinary, it's also totally extraordinary. It's unbelievably extraordinary, as is everybody who's on planet Earth. That we're all in some sense both ordinary and extraordinary. And I may have said this the last time we spoke, but I've come to see human awareness as a superpower.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> In part because I'm so impressed with Greta Thunberg and her using the term "superpower" about her own challenges with being on the autism spectrum. And you can see that it's a superpower when she embodies it and when she speaks. It's like coming from a place that's just unbelievably profound. And I know she's been in dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama about those kinds of things. She is a very special person, but she wouldn't say — no special person ever says they're a special person, because they know they're not.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> What she's in touch with, though, is something everybody can be in touch with. Like, awareness is a totally distributive function. There's nobody that's not born with the capacity for awareness, as far as I know, unless some kind of deep, deep brain damage at birth or in utero. But accessing that awareness, accessing that superpower when you need it — and the only time you ever need it is now. Well, that becomes challenging because the mind is so all over the place, that "yeah, I want that superpower, but I'll go with this superpower" — which is a degraded, less-than-superpower. Thinking's a superpower, but the thinking gets you into a lot of trouble. Awareness is liberative, intrinsically, and actually clarifying, intrinsically. And so we cultivate access to it. We don't have to acquire anything. We just have to exercise the muscle, so to speak, of capturing this moment in awareness by paying attention.</p><p id="h3_greed" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; color: #5a9e9e; margin-top: 28px; margin-bottom: 12px;">Greed, Hatred, and Delusion</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> And so it's both very practical and it's also transcendent in a certain way. And it puts us in touch with a certain kind of — if you pardon my saying this — transcendent wisdom. A wisdom that recognizes interconnectedness and how things lawfully relate to each other, and where that goes off when greed, hatred, and delusion come into the picture. Which was the Buddhist absolutely perfect diagnosis of humanity: that greed, hatred, and delusion is the source of all of our suffering.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> Our own sense of "I want this and I'll get it at any cost." And we're seeing this played out by the president of the United States in a kind of pathologically amazing way, that many, many professionals have diagnosed him at a distance for that kind of behavior and speech and action. But the fact is that awareness is independent of that kind of ignorance and delusion, and it is in some sense the liberative vector for reclaiming, or actually recognizing for the first time ever, as individuals, the full dimensionality of what it means to be human.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> And then living that. And we see it in children all the time. A baby's born — it's like a religious experience to see a newborn, and a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old. They're just so cute. You go through the school and you see them running around and it's just unbelievable. How can we see 45- and 50-year-olds that way? Do you know what I'm saying? They're so cute. They're so lovable. Because we kind of lose a little bit of that intrinsic beauty, but it's there. His Holiness sees it in everybody independent of whether they're good guys or bad guys or anything like that. He sees it. That's something we can train.</p><p id="h3_flourish" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; color: #5a9e9e; margin-top: 28px; margin-bottom: 12px;">Flourishing Is Contagious</p><p><strong>Richie:</strong> We often say flourishing is contagious.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> Yeah. It is contagious. The motivation to flourish is contagious, and then the training of the muscles to actually make it authentic and robust requires practice. And that's so beautiful that you're writing about this, that you're actually coming out with a book that is emphasizing a very practical way to go about making your day and your life — day by day, moment by moment — a project of deep appreciation of the beauty of the present moment, and how blind it would be not to flourish even under very difficult circumstances, with all the beauty and all the possibility that we are afforded.</p><p><strong>Richie:</strong> And one of the premises of the book is that, just as you were saying, it's really the deep appreciation of the qualities that every human being is endowed with.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> Yeah.</p><p><strong>Cortland:</strong> They're trainable.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> Say that again. I missed what you said, Cort.</p><p><strong>Cortland:</strong> I was just gonna say that they're trainable. I think that's something that you both have pointed to — that we experience these things by accident. Sometimes you're out in nature and you have a moment of awe, or a feeling of connectedness, or you're with people you love and you have these moments where we would think of as flourishing, if we were to point to them. But it feels circumstantial. It feels like, "Oh, it's just based on whatever these external conditions were." And I think most of us don't realize you can train yourself to feel that connected all the time. You can train yourself — like, if you're not in awe every moment of your life, you're just not paying attention.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> Exactly.</p><p><strong>Cortland:</strong> Like, there is always something to be in awe of. It doesn't matter if you're in a trash dump — if you pay attention, life is amazing. And that feeling of connection and everything — it's all right here. We just need to cultivate it, we need to nurture it.</p><p id="h3_rhapsody" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; color: #5a9e9e; margin-top: 28px; margin-bottom: 12px;">A Rhapsody for Paying Attention</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> Thich Nhat Hanh called his first book <em>The Miracle of Mindfulness</em>. I mean, it really is miraculous. And Dacher Keltner — all of his work is about supporting that notion that awe and wonder have incredible human benefits, not just health benefits, but all sorts of benefit, because we live in such a magical, unbelievable universe. And of course, all first peoples always knew that, and that was how they lived in harmony in a certain way with nature — that can be very powerful and potentially really harmful or destructive, but you find ways to live with that.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> So it's like an insane kind of opportunity to not miss your life, because if you're missing this moment, what makes you think you won't miss the [next one]? And then pretty soon we're in Thoreau's place, where he said in <em>Walden</em>: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see what they had to teach, and not, when it came to die, discover that I had not lived."</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> So <em>Walden</em> itself is a rhapsody for paying attention. And for mindfulness. He paid attention to every nail that he hammered into his house and every length of wood. And there were times when he stood in Walden Pond right up to almost his nose and just gazed at what was going on on the surface of the pond. Or sitting in his doorway for hours watching the sun just move across the sky, and he rhapsodizes about it. It's absolutely beautiful. So it really is a rhapsody for mindfulness in a certain way, and totally American, which is why I quoted it so much in <em>Wherever You Go, There You Are</em>.</p><p id="h3_closing" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: italic; color: #5a9e9e; margin-top: 28px; margin-bottom: 12px;">Closing</p><p><strong>Cortland:</strong> Well, this is amazing. I have a feeling we're gonna have hopefully many, many more conversations like this.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> I'm up for it.</p><p><strong>Cortland:</strong> It is such a gift and an honor to spend some time with you both. I know on behalf of everybody who watches and who listens — just thank you so much. Not only for taking time for this conversation, but for all of the work that you have done in the world. And a wonderful note to end on. Just imagine sitting there, taking in the surroundings, and connecting to these qualities that we already have, but which we need to learn to get in touch with. So maybe we'll call it here. But just wanted to thank you, and please come back and join us again.</p><p><strong>Richie:</strong> Thank you, Jon.</p><p><strong>Jon:</strong> My pleasure. Always wonderful. Thank you.</p></div> </div> </div> <div class="inline-share-icons"> <div class="d-flex align-items-center flex-wrap gap-2"> <span class="me-2 fw-semibold">Inspired? 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