Our lives are filled with distractions.
Email, Twitter, texting.
We're constantly connected to technology,
rarely alone with just our thoughts.
Which is probably why there's a growing movement in America
to train people to get around the stresses of daily life.
It's a practice called mindfulness.
I believe that the entry point
for living a more conscious life is mindfulness.
I would urge you all
to start practicing mindfulness right away.
What is your favorite thing about racing?
I think the mindfulness of it
is what I really enjoy the most
because you really have to be focused on the here
and the now.
When this year's top buzzwords are compiled,
mindfulness will surely be close to the top of the list.
So Angie, in the video you talked a little bit
about mindfulness, so could you tell us a little bit more
about what it is and how it works?
And what we're talking about
is called mindfulness meditation and people who do it
believe that it makes their brains healthier and fitter.
I grew up in Alaska.
My mom left when I was eight
and my dad took over raising my brothers and I.
We moved to the homestead where my dad had been raised.
He was raised in an abusive household and went to Vietnam.
Picked up some more trauma.
He began drinking to try and medicate his anxiety
and it didn't go well for him.
He became abusive and I ended up moving out at 15.
I knew when I moved out at 15
that statistically I should end up repeating the cycle.
As much as we get a genetic inheritance,
we get an emotional inheritance.
If you look at my family's emotional inheritance,
it leads to substance abuse or alcoholism or physical abuse.
I didn't want that to be me.
I wanted to avoid being a statistic.
After I graduated high school,
I ended up in San Diego where my mom was.
I went to take care of her.
I was working in a computer warehouse.
My boss took me aside to have a talk with me
and I realized he was propositioning me
and I turned him down.
When I wouldn't have sex with him,
he wouldn't give me my paycheck.
I wasn't able to make rent
and so my mom and I began living in our cars.
My car ended up getting stolen
and I ended up being homeless for a year.
I was having panic attacks and stealing.
I wasn't doing well.
Somewhere between the age of 15,
when I said I would never be a statistic, to 18,
three short years later, I was a statistic,
I was homeless and gonna end up in jail or dead.
I quit believing in myself.
So I had to get very, very serious about my thoughts.
Two-three-four, what is your position?
Be aware of two IEDs
near a house on the main road.
The combat mission may technically be over,
but for anyone who thinks the danger is over,
consider that there have been 560 IED explosions in Iraq
in just the past month.
I had spent a lot of time after 9/11 in war zones.
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq.
Many times in Iraq.
Do you feel like the war is over?
We're combat troops, we're still here,
we've still got a job to do.
I had come home and gotten depressed.
I was insufficiently self-aware to even know
that I was depressed and I made the very dumb decision
to self-medicate with recreational drugs
including cocaine, ecstasy.
Even though I hadn't been doing drugs every day
or anything like that,
it was enough to artificially raise the level of adrenaline
in my brain to change my brain chemistry
and made it much more likely for me to have a panic attack.
Now one of the world's most commonly prescribed medications
may be providing a big bonus.
Researchers report people
who take cholesterol lowering drugs called statins
for at least five years
may also lower their risk for cancer.
When I was anchoring the news updates
on Good Morning America,
that's the person who comes on at the top of the hour
and delivers the headlines,
and just a few seconds into my spiel
I just lost it.
But it's too early to prescribe statins slowly
for cancer production.
My heart was racing, my lungs seized up,
my palms were sweating, my mind was racing.
I actually just couldn't breathe, I couldn't speak anymore.
So I had to quit right in the middle
and that was really embarrassing.
That does it for news.
We're gonna go back now to Robin and Charlie.
The backstory was even more embarrassing
because when I went to see a doctor about it
he asked me a bunch of questions.
One of the questions was, "Do you do drugs?"
And I said, "Yeah, I do."
And he leaned back in the chair and gave me this look
that communicated the following sentiment:
"Okay asshole, mystery solved."
I loved to run.
Whether it was cross country, playing basketball, jumping,
and just be engaged physically.
There's something magical about that.
There's something magical while being in flow
where things are just happening
and it's like you're not there
but you're right in it, you are it.
So when I was in college I was actually rooming
with Dr. J at the time, Julius Erving, back at UMass.
It was preseason, just playing with the team,
and I got injured.
I had an ankle injury and it pretty much ended my career.
I didn't really know who I was
if I wasn't playing basketball
because I was one of these quiet types
that let my game do my talking for me.
Being an athlete all my life and loving to run
and loving to compete and having the camaraderie
of being with a group of people that had a common purpose,
that was very challenging for me
to get away from all of that.
And that's when I started the pain medicine.
I started abusing that
and then getting into drugs and alcohol.
My parents split up when I was four.
My mother died when I was nine.
I lived with my father's parents after that,
whom I hardly knew.
My father came back briefly.
I hadn't seen him since I was four and by now I'm like 11
and he was like a different person.
Took an overdose of sleeping pills.
He didn't die but he spent the rest of his life
in some mental health facility or another.
I'd lived in five different family configurations
and every one of them had been switched
because of trauma or loss or something like that.
And so I was terribly unhappy and afraid and angry
but I didn't quite know what was going on within me
I just knew it didn't feel really good.
The pace of life seems to be accelerating.
We've got a major accident H-1 east side.
It's actually the most polluted city in America.
We're more connected to information
but less connected to each other.
In these increasingly uncertain times,
a growing number of people have discovered
a surprisingly effective antidote.
Mindfulness.
Mindfulness comes in two forms.
One is a specific type of meditation,
mindfulness meditation.
Every time you put your mind on your breath
and then it wanders, that's what the mind does,
and you notice it wander and then you bring it back,
you're strengthening the neural circuitry
for paying attention.
This is quite a parallel with going to the gym
and lifting weights.
Every time you lift that weight, every repetition,
strengthens that muscle just a little bit more.
Among novice practitioners,
we saw changes in the brain
after just two weeks of practice.
This was a kind of proof of concept study
that underscored how quickly these changes can arise.
Strengthening that mental muscle
builds an ongoing quality of attention
simply known as mindfulness.
The way I define mindfulness is paying attention
to our present moment experiences with openness
and curiosity and a willingness to be with what is.
So it's a quality of attention
that we can have at any moment
whether we're walking down the street or talking to a friend
or eating or brushing our teeth.
We can bring that quality of awareness to our experience.
We just start making better decisions for ourselves.
In other words, we start taking better care of ourselves,
we feel better about ourselves,
we generally feel better about other people.
We just become more relational, more empathic.
So I think that's all good.
When you're aware of a sensory experience
while you're having it without the compulsive activity
of the mind to define it
is a very wonderful state to be in
because it's a state of peace.
And it offers us degrees of freedoms so that
we can navigate the inevitable ups and downs of life.
There's no moment
that's not a wonderful moment for mindfulness.
I'm a big believer in the growth of mindfulness,
that mindfulness can change the world.
Some people still associate meditation
and mindfulness with the 1960s,
during the rise of hippie culture and an influx of yogis
and gurus from the East.
But in the 1970s a small number of young scientists
and other seekers began to explore different types
of meditation in a more analytical way.
As I was studying to become a scientist
at MIT in molecular biology,
it also was very important to me to try to bring
that other stream of my own meditation practice
together with what I was understanding
about science and the universe.
I did have an experience back in the late '70s
of being on a two-week meditation retreat
at the Insight Meditation Center.
One day at about the 10th day of this retreat
sitting alone in my room meditating
I had a vision of what might be possible
that had to do with bringing what I was learning
and practicing at this retreat center
which was a very Buddhist place
into the mainstream of the world.
Since I happened to be already working in a laboratory
at the University of Massachusetts Medical School,
I thought what a perfect place to do it,
bring it into a hospital.
Nobody wants to go there unless they are really suffering
beyond a certain point where they can't deny it anymore.
I started to seek out physicians,
asking, "What percentage of your patients
"do you feel you actually help?"
And I was astonished by the answers that they would say.
"Well maybe 10%, maybe 15%."
I was like, my God.
What happens to the rest?
They said, "Well, they either get better on their own,
"but for the most part, they just never get better."
Jon found a few doctors
willing to refer their chronic patients
and the Stress Reduction Clinic was born.
I would say, "Listen, from our point of view,
"as long as you're breathing,
"there's more right with you than wrong with you.
"What we're gonna do is pour energy and attention
"into your experience in the form of mindfulness,
"in the form of wakefulness,
"in the form of present-moment awareness
"and see what happens over the course of eight weeks."
You could see people transform.
The doctors would say, they'd say,
"I don't know what you did with Mrs. So-and-So
"but you were able to help her more in eight weeks
"than I've been able to help her in eight years."
And I would just smile and say,
"Well actually I didn't do anything, she did it herself."
Jon called his eight-week course
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR.
Four decades later MBSR courses are now offered in thousands
of hospitals and other facilities around the world.
Hundreds of thousands of lives have been transformed.
We want you to meditate in the way
that is a love affair for you.
Because it's just not like,
"Oh God, I promised I'd wake up for the next 50 years
"early in the morning and meditate my ass off
"before I go to work."
It took me a long time to realize
this is actually a love affair.
Just taking my seat has gotta be a love affair
with the actuality of things as they are,
not as we, or I, would want them to be.
It's absolutely essential that it is understood
that mindfulness is intrinsically an ethical practice.
How would you even know if you're doing harm
unless you're aware, unless you're awake,
unless you're mindful of your impulses to control.
You're engaging in the meditation practice for the sake of,
as they say, all beings.
The retreat center where Jon had his epiphany
for how to bring mindfulness into the mainstream
was co-founded by the woman who grew up
as a depressed, angry girl in Buffalo.
When I was a sophomore in college,
I took an Asian philosophy course.
I had a philosophy requirement and I just chose that one
because it was convenient to my schedule.
And of course the course completely changed my life.
It was in the context of the course
I heard about the prospect of meditation practice.
I heard there were actual practical tools you could use
that could change your mind,
that could make you a lot happier,
and it was a question of finding them
and actually practicing them.
The school had an independent study program.
I created a project, I said,
"I wanna go to India and study meditation."
And they approved it so off I went.
I began my meditation practice in January of 1971.
The first night of the retreat was difficult.
I couldn't focus and I was very young, I was 18,
and I was very distraught and fragmented.
I had been through a lot in my life.
I was also extremely judgmental.
I'm somewhat famous for once having marched up to Goenka,
my first teacher, and looking him in the eye and saying,
"I never used to be an angry person
"before I started meditating."
Thereby laying blame exactly where I felt it belonged
which was on him, of course.
And I'd been hugely angry but I didn't quite know it.
There was sort of two parallel processes.
One was discovery.
What am I feeling?
What is the truth of my experience?
Layer, under layer, under layer.
And the other part was being kind to myself
and compassionate to myself rather than so judgmental.
In that discovery, and it was only after that, I think,
that the whole emphasis on kindness toward oneself broadened
and became a real effort to understand the nature
of kindness and the power of kindness toward others as well.
It still remains the pivotal turning point of my life.
When Sharon returned to America,
she taught one to two week retreats with Joseph Goldstein,
who she'd met in India, and Jack Kornfield.
Some combination of us would go
and teach the retreat and then it would end
and we never knew if there'd be another retreat
and so we were sleeping on people's couches.
Eventually Sharon, Joseph, and Jack
found a former Catholic seminary building
in Barre, Massachusetts,
and scraped together money through fundraising and loans
to create the Insight Meditation Society,
America's first permanent retreat center
started by Westerners.
We moved in Valentine's Day 1976.
Up above the doorway, when we first looked at the building,
it said Fathers of the Blessed Sacrament,
and when we moved in we asked someone
to get up on a very tall ladder on a very cold day,
and we said,
"Could you please rearrange those letters
so it says something about us?"
He came up with Metta, M-E-T-T-A,
which means loving kindness or friendship or love.
When I was a graduate student at Harvard,
I got a traveling fellowship to go to India.
It's quite an interesting accident of history
that the people I bumped into by accident
have now become really the leaders
of the mindfulness movement in America.
Like Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg
and maybe three or four other people
who are now leading teachers of mindfulness.
Please join me in welcoming Daniel Goleman.
I began to feel
there's something very important going on here,
and it was off the map of psychology then.
As a clinical psychologist I was learning
how to meet someone and figure out what was wrong with them.
That was what clinical psych was about.
Here it was what could be right about people?
It was the upside of human potential.
So I was very excited and I went back to Harvard
and I said, "Hey, guess what?
"There's an upside to human potential
"and it all seems to have to do with meditation.
"Isn't that great?"
"No, that's probably a career-ending move,"
they said.
And for me it was 'cause after coming back
and teaching a bit, then I went into science journalism,
and one of the things I always wanted to write about
was the scientific benefits of mindfulness and meditation.
Daniel became a best-selling author
starting with his 1995 paradigm shifting book,
"Emotional Intelligence."
His latest book, "Altered Traits,"
co-authored with neuroscientist Richard Davidson,
examines the scientific evidence.
When we started out way back there were three articles
that were published in the scientific literature
on any kind of meditation that we could cite.
Now there are more than 6,000.
In the last five years
it's just been practically exponential growth.
Today there are more than a thousand a year.
Here's the good news.
Right at the beginning,
there are very, very positive benefits.
People check their email
more than 70 times a day on average.
They check their Facebook more than 20 times a day.
Every time you bring your mind back,
it seems, at least theoretically,
the circuitry for paying full attention and monitoring
mind wandering, get stronger.
One of the other findings about beginning meditation
is that you're triggered less, you recover more quickly.
And when you're triggered, you get less upset.
There is some very good suggestive evidence from UCLA
that meditation slows the aging of the brain.
People who we call long-term practitioners,
if you do a day retreat,
like six to eight hours of meditation,
something happens to your genes.
What happens is that all of the genes that create,
there are hundreds or more genes that create inflammation
in the body, down regulate.
They go quiet.
This is really interesting medically
because chronic inflammation
is one of the at-cause factors
in a whole range of diseases from diabetes and arthritis
to heart disease and so on.
So after all these years
and despite what my professors at Harvard told me,
I'm very happy that I have followed this
and pursued mindfulness, pursued meditation,
and I think that we've been vindicated by the evidence.
And thank you very much for coming tonight.
Richard Davidson however was ready to listen
to what I had to say and we've been lifelong friends since.
After my second year of graduate school in 1974,
I went off to India for the first time
to get a taste of meditation practice.
When I returned from India,
I came back with a conviction
that meditation was something very important
for Western psychology and neuroscience to embrace
and a fervent aspiration to pursue research in this area.
But it was made very clear to me
that if I wanted a successful career in science,
this was an absolutely terrible way to begin
and I had better find something else to study.
For years, Richard stuck to basic research.
Until one fateful meeting.
When I first met the Dalai Lama in 1992, he challenged me.
He said, "You've been using tools of modern neuroscience
"to investigate stress and anxiety and depression
"and adversity.
"Why can't you use those same tools
"to study kindness and compassion?"
And that was a wake up call.
I didn't have a very good answer for him.
And he said,
"I want you to take these practices
"out of their religious context,
"bring them into the laboratory,
"and if you find that they're valuable,
"disseminate them to the world."
And that was my assignment for the rest of my life.
What Richard and others
at the University of Wisconsin Madison's
Center for Healthy Minds have discovered
is that meditation has the power to rewire
and restructure the brain.
We first began to look
at very long-term meditation practitioners.
These were individuals who spent years training their mind.
Sure enough, when we did those studies,
we found that their brains were quite different
from the brains of ordinary individuals.
What we're looking at here is a representation
of a larger body of research
that depicts how mindfulness meditation works in the brain.
The moment we're lost and recognize it,
the moment of recognition engages the salience network.
And one of the nodes in the salience network
is the anterior insula, a second,
important node is the anterior singular cortex.
Those parts of the brain are critical
in this monitoring function.
Then what happens is we want to reorient our awareness,
bring it back to the breath,
and that requires the engagement of a prefrontal network
that directs attention, and the parietal lobe.
And so we then direct attention back to the breath
in a process of reorienting.
And then we can sustain our focus of attention.
And the sustaining also involves the prefrontal cortex.
Okay, let's get started.
If you want to lay down and be careful that you--
What we envision is that we are providing people
with lifelong skills that they'll continue to use
over and over again.
And it's through continued practice
that enduring change can occur.
When you become aware that you're distracted,
then gently bring your awareness back to your breathing.
To be aware of a thought as it arises and falls,
or any other experience, a perception,
a choice, sensation,
all does the same thing.
You realize that you,
as a being,
are not a thought.
Deepak Chopra began his professional life
as a board certified physician.
Then, in 1985, just as Jon Kabat-Zinn,
Daniel Goleman, and others had done,
Deepak decided to focus more on what was right with people
instead of what was wrong.
As a medical doctor I was always interested in healing.
You can't do that by looking at the human body
in a very fragmented way, as a physical machine.
I just extended my understanding of healing.
It's a natural progression.
Deepak's insights on healing, wellbeing,
and other topics have led to more than 80 books
as well as speaking engagements around the world.
Each species--
In the midst of all these sounds and my voice
and the sensations and the breath,
in the midst of this, keeping your awareness in your heart,
mentally ask the question,
"Who am I?"
The word mindfulness in itself
is a little misleading because it implies a full mind.
And awarefulness would be an awkward, clumsy word.
So we'll keep the word mindfulness.
But every experience that we have, this experience,
is illuminated by the light of awareness.
And then the compulsion to say this is good, this is bad,
to judge, to label,
all of that increases the activity of the mind.
That restless activity of the mind
ultimately is the cause of all stress.
But when you're embedded as awareness,
as the loving presence in which all is happening,
that's a state of perfect homeostasis, perfect equilibrium.
More schools are adding mindfulness, meditation,
and even yoga to their curriculum
to help kids develop coping skills that can last a lifetime.
MindUP founder and creator,
actress Goldie Hawn,
believes that when children better understand
how their brains work,
they can better handle their emotions.
I want it to be woven into the tapestry of their day.
Some scientists suggest a brain training technique
called mindfulness could help teenagers manage stress.
When Atman and I were little kids,
my parents were heavily into yoga,
and meditation, and contemplative practices,
Ayurvedic cooking and being vegan back then.
Our dad would wake us up every morning
and make us meditate before school.
We thought it was weird as I don't know what.
Honestly we kinda kept it in the house
and we kinda called ourselves closet meditators
'cause we had to keep it secret from everybody else.
During college the Smith brothers
met a kindred spirit in Andres Gonzalez.
They returned to the crime and poverty of West Baltimore
determined to provide children with positive life skills.
Having the two of them with me through this journey
was extremely powerful because we struggled a lot
at the beginning.
It was a good eight, nine years of doing this for free,
and a lot of judgment being passed onto us,
and people asking us,
"What are you doing with yourselves?
"Why don't you get a real job."
We were presented with the opportunity to coach football
for some fifth grade boys at an elementary school
and we decided to do an after school yoga program
and things kinda took on a life of their own from there.
That success gradually led to other programs
featuring yoga and mindfulness both after school
and during the school day.
Inhale and push.
Hurry up and get to class.
There's one young lady in particular that I really wanted
to see if this program would benefit her.
After the program had been in session for about four months,
she came in my office one day
and closed the door and said,
"Today makes a difference in my life.
"I'm not gonna get in trouble anymore.
"I'm gonna use what I've been learning
"in the after-school program."
Are we ready for our Mindful Moment?
Now every day at Robert Coleman Elementary
starts with a series of exercises
known as the Mindful Moment. - Your fingers and toes.
And if any thoughts of the past come into mind,
just let it go.
One thing we realized is, a lot of times,
children are traumatized before they get here.
And during the day teachers can refer any kids
who are struggling to the Mindful Moment room.
They're not going to the office, they're coming here.
Last year we had close to 1,300 referrals.
So that's 1,300 times that kids came to us
and we were able to work with them and able to return them
to class focused and ready to learn.
In order for us can have a focused and calm day,
we know we have to start with Mindful Moment.
One thing they want to teach us, control your anger.
Do something like a couple deep breathing and don't fight.
On the other side of Baltimore
at Patterson High School,
principal Vance Benton knows firsthand
that the program works with older kids, too.
We have it every morning, it's 12 to 15 minutes.
It's going on the PA.
The mindfulness room is also open all day.
So children can self-refer,
come on in and get some mindfulness.
Teachers can refer students at any point in time
and get 20 minutes and get on back to class.
Place it over.
Being that we have a lot of students
from other countries fleeing their village,
they also experience the same things
our Baltimore City students are experiencing
in terms of death and violence.
I want the children to have something
that they can always have with them beyond the school day.
Now the Holistic Life Foundation
serves more than 7,000 kids
at over 40 different Baltimore public schools.
Once they love themselves,
then you see it start to ripple out.
We see them start to treat their friends differently
and their teachers differently, the principal differently.
But it has to start within
and it kinda just reverberates out
and it starts to affect the entire community.
The Mindful Awareness Research Center
at UCLA started in 2006.
When we teach in institutions we definitely do not want it
being perceived as religious, and it's not.
The teachings are rooted in Buddhism,
but they are not Buddhist.
They're what it means to be human.
We have free drop-ins all over campus all the time.
And we also go out to the public.
Welcome everyone to our Thursday
mindful awareness meditation.
If we were to check into our mind at any point in the day,
we would probably notice that we're in the past
replaying things, wishing they hadn't happened,
going over them thinking I could have done them differently.
Or we're planning for the future.
What am I gonna be doing?
Obsessing about it, catastrophizing.
So mindfulness is this invitation to the here and now
and people report that when they're more present,
there's a sense of connection, of gratitude, of presence,
of awareness that really begins to infiltrate their lives.
So what we're doing here really is a training ground
for being mindful throughout the day.
All right, let's get started.
We can begin with a few deep breaths.
And now we'll begin the process of paying attention
to moment after moment, breath after breath.
As you do this, you may notice that your attention wanders.
You can stay with a breath or two.
Then you find yourself lost in thought.
This is actually completely normal.
You're not doing anything wrong.
This is what happens with the human mind.
Gently redirect your attention back to your main focus.
That moment of recognizing that you're lost in thought
is actually a moment of mindfulness.
So you just keep redirecting.
You get lost in thought,
you come back to your breathing and you just keep doing it.
I'm trying to get people to come with me
because I think it would benefit a lot of people
'cause it crosses boundaries of age and background
and it's really like universal in helping people.
I am a mom.
This is how I take care of me
so that I can be present
but I can also help everyone else that I am responsible for.
I was hired originally to work on a grant
on a research study of mindfulness for ADHD.
When we did this study with ADHD,
there was actually a statistical significance
that mindfulness helped kids and adults pay attention
so much so that the scientists who reviewed the data
looked at it and said,
"What medication did you put them on?"
And we said, "No no, meditation."
One of the studies we did with insomnia,
we had older adults with insomnia and there, again,
was pretty good results in terms of people's ability
to fall asleep and less rumination, less depression.
Following his panic attack on live television
and admitted drug use,
ABC's Dan Harris was searching for help.
My wife gave me a book about Buddhism and I was hooked.
I was really hooked.
And my problem at that point was the Buddha,
what he was recommending, sounded utterly repellent.
And that was meditation.
Because I was of the view that meditation
was for freaks and hippies
and people who are really into Enya and aromatherapy.
I describe myself as a fidgety skeptic.
I don't know where I came up with that, but it's true.
It's hard for me to sit still
and I was raised by secular scientists,
I'm married to a scientist,
I'm very skeptical of stuff you can't prove.
When I started to see that there is this science
that suggests that meditation is really good for you,
that really began to change my attitude about it.
The other thing that really changed my mind
is that it's simple.
You don't have to sit in a funny position,
you don't have to join a group,
you don't have to believe in anything.
It's simple and secular.
Dan was also surprised
to find himself becoming an advocate.
One of my colleagues was saying, essentially,
"What's the matter with you?
"You used to be cool, why are you meditating?"
And, I was at a loss,
and I said, "Oh it makes me about 10% happier."
And I could see the look on her face transform
from scorn to something approaching interest.
And I thought that's my shtick.
I called the book that and that's grown into a podcast
and an app and more books
that has resulted from this wisecrack around the office.
I'm struck by the absurdity of it
but I think there's something there
in that people were ready for a reasonable claim.
In the 10% Happier app we teach you
how to train your mind through meditation,
a practice that is simple, secular,
and scientifically validated.
In my experience, it's a game changer.
It's not magic, it takes work,
but it's worth the investment and it will pay off over time.
You should get marginally better at being awake
and not on autopilot for the rest of your life.
Really to me it's about this meditation cliche
of respond, not react.
You learn how to respond wisely to things
instead of reacting blindly.
Long before singer-songwriter Jewel
had even heard the word mindfulness
she was a homeless teen suffering from panic attacks.
I had to develop a lot of strategies
while I was homeless to survive.
How to rewire a lot of the self-defeating thoughts
that I had.
What was I thinking, could you choose your thoughts,
and I began to look at curating my thoughts
much more carefully than I cared about any other thing.
That put me in the driver's seat.
It meant I wasn't a victim of my brain.
One of the strategies Jewel developed
on the streets is called antidote thoughts.
A thought that plagued me a lot
was that I didn't know what I was doing
and that would send me into a tailspin
multiple times in my life.
I would just start by coming up
with what is the opposite of that.
The opposite is I know what I'm doing.
Well that was a lie but I was capable of learning
so that became my antidote.
I'm capable of learning and I won't give up 'til I do.
Another of Jewel's self-taught techniques
led to one of her most successful songs
after she was discovered by a record producer
while playing in a coffee shop.
♪ My hands are small I know ♪
♪ But they're not yours they are my own ♪
♪ They're not yours they are my own ♪
♪ We are never broken ♪
I decided to start watching my hands
because the hands are the servants of your thought.
By forcing myself to be observant in real time of my hands,
I made myself present in the moment.
When I did that, my anxiety calmed down.
♪ Heartache came to visit ♪
"Hands" really is one of my odes to mindfulness.
Pretty much all of my songs are about me
learning to become a whole human,
to live my life mindfully with presence,
being the driver of my life.
Jewel's ability to live mindfully
was tested when just a few years after being homeless
her first album sold millions of copies.
You take a girl with my background and you throw fame
or even possibly money in the mix
and it usually is a recipe for disaster.
So I had to really get in touch with that
and come up with a strategy for that.
For me it was leading with vulnerability,
telling the truth, talking to people about my flaws,
never making myself seem more perfect than I was
so that I had an honest representation of myself
as I started my career.
Thank you.
Following an injury,
George Mumford went from playing basketball
at the University of Massachusetts
with future Hall of Famer, Julius Erving,
to being addicted to alcohol and drugs
due to his chronic pain.
How did I get motivated to go
from being a substance abuser to being in recovery?
I was a financial analyst so I was analyzing things
and I realized that the mindfulness was telling me
that I was really interested
in what motivates people, especially myself.
I had to learn how to deal with my pain,
and mindfulness, and just cultivating wisdom,
understanding the mind-body process.
So I got into it for survival
and then it became not to survive but to thrive.
I've been thriving ever since.
Originally when I started doing the mindfulness
I worked with people in recovery.
At the time I was working at the Center for Mindfulness
back in the day.
It was called the Stress Reduction and Relaxation program.
And Jon Kabat-Zinn was the founder and the director
and he had a relationship with Phil Jackson
because they used to teach at Omega Institute.
But they had just won their third NBA championship
and the stress of all the people
coming at 'em wanting things,
Phil wanted someone to come in and help them deal with that.
'Cause he dealt with the whole person.
And then in the meantime,
Michael Jordan's father got murdered and Michael retired.
So when I got there in October of 1993,
they were in full-blown crisis.
So I could talk to them about being in the zone
and what it took to have that mental toughness
and how to cultivate that, how to train for that.
So the mindfulness is the key
because if your mind is not right,
even though you have talent,
even though you've done the training,
you won't have access to it.
With George's help,
and the return of Michael Jordan a year later,
the Bulls went on to win three more NBA championships.
George then followed Phil Jackson to the Los Angeles Lakers
where they helped Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal
win another three championships.
I would say mindfulness makes us flow ready.
That we need to have a little bit of complexity
and we have to have this willingness
to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
So we have to play in between comfort and discomfort.
And that's when we're getting, when we're moving,
pushing the edges of our capacity,
that's when we experience flow.
And that's why it doesn't last
because the mind and body gets acclimated to it.
And so then we gotta push further.
Over the past 10 years mindfulness
has become increasingly popular
across society and within the law.
Finally tonight a new tool for police
and maybe for you as well.
Officers balancing the high-risk stress of the badge
through meditation, using their minds to sharpen their edge.
When the chief introduced the mindfulness to us
in March of this year, I said to myself,
"Oh, I remember doing that."
Because of my years of playing basketball,
if I'm able to keep myself cool,
whether it's just, or it's just realizing
what's going on right now not what's going to happen.
I find that it benefits me on my calls
and dealing with the people and the public.
I ain't afraid of you!
About four and a half years ago
my life started to spiral out of control.
I had heart pain, I was stressed out,
I was feeling depressed.
I tried traditional remedies
such as therapy and exercise
and nothing seemed to work.
I stumbled across mindfulness meditation at my darkest hour.
I tried it and there was something about it
that spoke to me immediately.
Then I came across Mindfulness-Based Resiliency Training
that Lieutenant Goerling was doing in Oregon.
Meeting our distractions
without any judgment or elaboration.
Today Lieutenant Richard Goerling
is leading officers and support staff
from several departments
through his specially-designed Mindful Policing program.
I started out on a a quest in about 2003
to quite simply improve the police-citizen encounter.
What I found in my own experience taking an MBSR class
was that there was something there
that was unlike any other training I'd ever experienced.
Some sort of deep internal awareness and skills
that I cultivated in simply eight weeks of training.
And that really set me on this path
working with a lot of other collaborative partners
to bring mindfulness to policing here in the United States.
Noticing the difference in sensation
from the palm of your hand versus the backside of your hand.
Maybe there's some warmth or coolness there
that isn't there in the palm of your hand.
Our longevity, we give up a minimum of 10 years of our life
just simply for being in the profession.
We have the worst cardiovascular disease profile
of any population.
We're twice as likely to be clinically depressed
as the general population.
We're taking suffering human beings
who are deeply impacted by trauma in varying levels
and we're just telling them,
"Hey, go sleep better.
"Hey, don't drink too much.
"Hey, be compassionate."
It doesn't make any sense.
When what we do with mindfulness training
is we're building skills that disrupt these habituated ways
of being that are driven by stress and trauma
and we're cultivating a whole new way of being.
And that way of being is maybe best framed as resiliency.
I will be in the middle of trauma
and I will be there fully present,
I will be there skillfully.
And with a period of adjustment when it's over
I will emerge as strong as I was
when I started or potentially even stronger.
It makes us a little more human
when we come into that call
and it makes the people we're dealing with more human
and there can't be anything but success
that comes from something like that.
Prisoners are quite naturally trying to protect themselves
just usually with armoring up,
physically and psychologically,
and with anger and bitterness.
So it's very hard
to connect with that genuine regret and remorse
which to me is what we have to get in touch with
for that transformation to really begin to happen.
Notice if it can bring a little more energy in
or a little more softness in.
Just finding the balance there.
Recalling that you have your breath as your ally.
Your home base.
Mindfulness practice begins to put us a little more
in charge of our own physiology to begin with
where you can breathe and get yourself
back into a calmer place.
A place where you can make better decisions.
So that can be life-saving when you're in this environment.
So my name is Fleet Maull
and I'm really happy to be here tonight.
I founded what we now call Prison Mindfulness Institute,
it used to be called Prison Dharma Network,
in 1989 while I was serving 14 years
in a maximum security federal prison hospital
in Southwest Missouri.
How I got there is some things I have deep regrets about.
I ended up getting a big sentence for drug trafficking.
And it was cocaine.
When I first got locked up,
I really hit a wall primarily around the fact
that my son who was nine years old then
was gonna grow up without a dad.
I developed this real passion
to at least not cause any more harm
and then if I could learn to maybe do a little good.
And it grew while I was in but it really took off
once I got out when my colleague, Kate Crisp,
got involved and we started building it
into a national organization
that today involves about 190 different
meditation-based prison projects all around the world.
Take a big breath in.
Stretch, stretch up, and then exhale just softly.
So we're still breathing, we're still feeling.
Same practice, really.
We're just moving instead of sitting still
and we can hold our seat
even as we move the more we practice.
Well, who do we want them to be when they get out?
Angry, bitter, full of shame,
still caught up in all their victim mindset
and victim thinking, or do we want them to come out
as better human beings?
Well if we want 'em to come out as better human beings,
better neighbors, better citizens,
then we better give them some opportunities
to do some work on themselves.
It really, really made this class very special today.
Having somebody here that's been in our position before
and that knows what we go through in our daily life
and actually could get out and head to the streets
and do something positive and come back.
It's an inspiration and I just appreciate the fact
you're here today and you gave us some hope
of us doing something positive in the future as well.
Thank you.
You're on next week with aware of this moment.
Better believe we gon' fly with you.
Yeah.
- Go out there, first class-- - Ready to roll, huh?
Okay yeah, thank you.
- Thank you. - Thank you, thank you.
We're a perfect sitting duck.
We'll be connecting up with you here shortly.
Roger, we'll be waiting.
It's important to stay awake.
Right there, go!
If you're comfortable closing your eyes,
that just helps avoid distraction.
If you want to just focus on the book
on the table, that's fine.
I was appalled to find from 15 to 22 veterans a day
in this country taking their own lives.
After working with a number
of veteran service organizations,
I saw too many people still falling through the cracks.
I really have to offer this
because I know the power of mindfulness
and I know it can really have an immediate
and long-term effect.
And then very specifically bring our attention to our toes.
Wiggling our toes.
Noticing the mobility that we have,
the distance between our toes and our shoes,
if our toes feel hot or cold.
We notice achiness, stiffness.
The nonprofit Mindful Warrior Project,
founded by Gail Sofer, provides veterans,
active duty military, their families and caregivers
in the Los Angeles area with mindfulness exercises
to help cope with post-traumatic stress disorder,
panic attacks, and other ailments.
This is our situational awareness of our own bodies.
We're not trying to fix or change anything.
We're just noticing what's happening.
Some veterans can feel like,
"Hey, I'm already too mindful.
"I'm aware of everything, and I'm on red alert,
"and I'm scanning, scanning, scanning, scanning.
"I don't need to do more of that."
There's a difference between being hyper-vigilant
and vigilant with openness and curiosity
and not assuming a threat.
That's a huge difference 'cause in mindfulness
when you suspend judgment, you're suspending assumptions,
you're not jumping to conclusions.
You're really exploring.
Don't ever let anyone tell you that mindful eating
has to do with the quality of the food.
It's the quality of the experience.
Just noticing this as if we've never seen this before.
As if we're from another planet
and we're exploring something.
It helps me have less anxiety.
And if I do have an anxiety attack,
it helps me to be able to have more control
of what's going on in my life.
I use it to make sure that I don't go back
into the dark places that I was going to with my PTSD.
I wouldn't go into places
where there was large crowds or loud noise.
I couldn't really stand that.
The other thing was anger.
I was angry all the time and I didn't like that.
So my mindfulness practice actually put me in a place
where I could start living again and experiencing
what everybody else was doing that were "normal.
What I'm gonna do is hand you an object
and you may or may not have seen this object before.
I can promise you it's edible
but that's all I'm going to promise.
The Center for Mindfulness has really been the leader
in the fields around developing gold standard treatments
like mindfulness-based stress reduction
to help people manage their stress, for example.
Just notice how much it weighs.
What it might look like in your hand.
You can even start rolling it around in your fingers
to see what it feels like.
We developed a program called Eat Right Now
that helps people change their relationship to emotional
and stress eating so they can break that addictive cycle.
Explain what that tastes like?
Without even biting.
And then really paying attention
as we take one bite through this thing.
Feeling the texture,
feeling the taste that might be released.
If our brains are set up to form habits,
the problem is when we get so caught up in these habits,
they no longer serve us.
If we start eating because we're stressed out,
so we're stressed, we eat some chocolate,
and we feel a little bit better,
we're not eating because we're hungry,
we're eating because we are stressed out.
And that stress can kind of perpetuate eating
because we're stressed and we can hack that system.
So if we get stressed out and we get curious,
we bring some mindful curious awareness to that situation,
there's a different reward that comes from that.
We don't have to eat something to feel better.
We can naturally drop into our awareness and curiosity
and that in itself is joyful.
So how many of you have eaten this thing?
Do you know what it is that I just gave you?
It's black garlic.
Black garlic, yeah.
Did anybody have a first gear moment in this last week
where you noticed any aspect of the habit loop?
The same sort of usual thing
being sort of irritated about teenagers in the house
and they left a big bag of Doritos on the counter
and I just was like telling them to be quiet.
So I just reached in, I started eating the Doritos,
and I was like, oh, why am I eating Doritos?
Like I'm not hungry, I'm just mad that they won't be quiet.
And then I did have a moment
where I just kind of took a moment to wake up.
With our Eat Right Now program,
we had 40% reduction in craving-related eating,
that's pretty good.
From a behavioral standpoint,
we get five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment
with our smoking cessation program.
On a regular basis I get folks telling me
that they quit smoking,
this has saved their life and things like that.
And that's really rewarding.
Welcome everyone.
This is our Meditation for Beginners group tonight.
We have a lot of people coming to us right now with anxiety.
And anxiety falls into various categories.
Someone could come in with a more generalized anxiety,
which we call it kind of a free-floating.
They'll worry about work, they'll worry about home,
their family, their friends.
There's other kinds of anxieties
like a post-traumatic anxiety
where they may also replay what the trauma was.
So there's specific kinds of tools
I can give someone like that.
This is a situation that makes a lot of people
feel powerless and then you have this...
So what we're trying to do with someone
who's in a state of depression
is empathize with what the real life situation is.
And then what mindfulness and meditation does
is to relieve those top layers of suffering.
If somebody goes, "I'm all to blame for this."
We hear a lot of all or nothing statements.
"This is all my fault."
So people start to do this self-blaming,
regretting, replaying.
Like Sharon Salzberg says those are the add-ons.
If we get rid of the add-ons,
I can help you deal with what's actually happening
in the present.
So that's where this blend of therapy and mindfulness
could be really useful for depression.
Now let's bring our awareness once again
back to the people around this table.
Knowing that everyone at this table shares a special bond.
I got my PhD in Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine
and began working a lot with people with cancer.
All of that has led to the development
of a nonprofit organization called True North Treks
where we take young adults with cancer
out into beautiful back country wilderness destinations
where we take them backpacking and canoeing
and help them reconnect with their peers
who have been through something similar.
And then help them learn to connect again with themselves
through training and mindfulness
and through mindful movement and yoga.
Every night I'm like what is it doing there
and just freaking out and not sleeping.
And until, I had to do something outside of my comfort zone
which was do the trek and it was the best thing
that I've ever done in my life.
We hear the word transformed all the time
and it's a combination.
It's a combination of being in nature
in such incredibly beautiful places,
it's about that power of social connection with their peers,
and it's about learning to cultivate a sense
of self-compassion for themselves through mindful awareness.
Huffington Post.
This idea of mindful leadership is provocative.
Tell us exactly what that means.
Okay, so the aspirational definition of a mindful leader
is someone who embodies presence
by cultivating four fundamentals of excellence:
focus, clarity, creativity, and compassion.
Now every floor in the new Salesforce Tower
in San Francisco is being drawn up
to include a mindfulness zone.
More and more companies are recognizing stress as an issue
and resilience as a goal
and mindfulness as way to get there.
So what I want to do today is just give you a little,
a brief introduction about what mindfulness is
and then we're gonna do
a brief mindfulness practice together.
The title of Chief Mindfulness Officer
definitely gets people's attention, I have to say.
It gets people very curious about what Aetna's doing.
Mindfulness can help you to reduce your stress level.
And stress is something that affects every part of the body.
It affects our heart, it affects our breathing,
it affects our digestion, it affects our immune system.
It is really an amazing role because what we get to do
as a department is, number one,
we get to come up really to kind of brainstorm ways
of bringing mindfulness to our employees, and number two,
we get to think about how to bring mindfulness
to our members.
So there's over 24 million people
who have some insurance connection with Aetna.
Aetna's mindfulness program started at the top
with a directive from CEO Mark Bertolini
following an accident in 2004.
I broke my neck skiing and detached the nerve root
for my arm that connected it to my spinal cord.
And almost died, right?
They gave me last rites in the helicopter
on the way to the hospital.
He became exposed to meditation and yoga
as a way to manage his pain.
And through that recovery and his experience
with mindfulness and meditation and yoga,
he discovered not only that he could manage his pain better,
but it had a lot of other benefits.
You might imagine your thoughts
to be like leaves floating down a stream.
Watching one leaf at a time as it floats by.
We developed a program in collaboration
with a vendor called eMindful.
The program is called Mindfulness at Work
and it meets once a week for 12 weeks
and it's virtual.
And during those 12 weeks
you're expected to do a mindfulness practice every day.
And what we found is that it significantly
reduces people's stress.
And we also found that people
are able to spend more productive time at work,
less time being distracted by physical pain,
or emotional challenges.
Over 45 minutes a week more productive time at work.
So those things have a big impact on a person's well-being
and also the company's bottom line.
If we ever want to solve our health crisis
we have to address the issues of healthy living
because unhealthy lifestyles
are causing 50 to 70% of all health care costs.
So instead of looking for the cure,
we need to cure inside ourself.
As we incorporate mindfulness
into an integral part of our health programs,
I think it's our best shot at improving the overall health
of the American people.
Around 40 years ago I was leading a very stress-filled life.
I was trying to ramp up the microwave oven business
at Litton Industries and my wife dragged me
kicking and screaming to a meditation seminar.
And they said 20 minutes twice a day.
I said, oh really?
So I've been meditating 20 minutes twice a day ever since.
42 years now and it's been the best thing
that ever happened to me.
'Cause at that time I had high blood pressure
and it'd come way down.
Well 20 years ago my wife had breast cancer
and she went through the medical procedures
like mastectomies and follow on chemotherapy
but she wanted something more.
Penny launched the Penny George Institute
at Allina Health System,
the largest health system in the Twin Cities
of Minneapolis-St. Paul.
And it became a regular practice then.
As they would say facetiously,
"Meditation or medication, take your pick."
My most creative ideas come out of meditation
because you clear away all the clutter
and all of a sudden you can see things clearly.
Over the years student interest has grown tremendously.
I'm teaching executives now.
We offer a special course in meditation
and it's way oversold.
And so it's nice to see how much interest there is.
I find amongst CEOs there's a tremendous amount
of interest today.
That never existed 10, 20 years ago.
Mobile devices don't have to be a distraction.
They can actually keep you centered.
We've rounded up some apps
that will help you meditate and be mindful.
What causes people to download
and engage with this over time?
Yes, so in the early days,
I think people thought we were a bit crazy.
Mindfulness and meditation felt like a bit of a niche.
Would people really pay for it?
But my goodness the world needs this.
People tell me that they sit at home
and they let their mind go blank
which is what they think they're supposed to be doing.
Of course our brains never go blank and they get up
and they're like, "This is not for me.
"It might be for that other person who figured it out,
"but it's not for me."
So we built be Muse to really help solve that problem.
Instead of dividing and distracting,
some new forms of technology have the ability
to calm and connect.
This is Muse.
You have sensors here on the forehead
that pick up your brainwaves
and also sensors behind each ear.
It connects wirelessly to your smartphone or tablet
and then when you slip the headband on,
it actually reads your brain data
and translates that into guiding sounds.
When you're thinking, distracted,
your brain's bouncing all over the place,
you hear it as windy.
And as you come to clear focused attention,
it quiets the winds.
If you stay very quiet
you'll even hear little birds chirping.
At the end of your meditation you actually get to see
what your brain was doing every moment.
There are additional guiding sounds choices
as well as guided meditations on various topics
from leading teachers including Deepak Chopra.
So I was an early adopter of that.
So my boys became interested in the Muse
because it's technology, period.
Because they are very much of their generation.
But they also actually really use it
and sit in it from a mindfulness perspective.
I hacked into it a little bit and into the process
and I just started using it while I did my stretches
and doing yoga and then doing a workout.
I would take my Muse on the subway at rush hour
which is a chaotic situation that frustrates a lot of people
and the goal was always to try to maintain
some kind of calm in the chaos.
Put it on like this.
Come in and tighten.
I'll often send patients home with a Muse
for a couple of weeks of practice
and then I have them check back with me to discuss
and explore some of the things that have come up for them.
Interaxon is also looking
to take the Muse system to the next level.
In VR experiences,
you create a totally immersive experience.
I think a great example of this
is let's say you have a fear of heights.
So what we can do then is create meditation experiences
that allow you to work with that fear directly.
What we're going to spend some time with now
is talking about difficult conversations
and really grounding this conversation in some work
that was done out of Harvard
and the Harvard Negotiation Project.
Tech companies known
for being on the leading edge of change
are also embracing mindfulness programs for their employees.
The nonprofit Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute,
or SIYLI, grew out of the Search Inside Yourself program
developed at Google by Chade-Meng Tan in 2007.
Rich Fernandez joined soon after.
It was kind of just a quarterly offering
but it was getting more and more attention
as mindfulness gained momentum.
And now we have thousands of Google employees
going through Search Inside Yourself.
Google then allowed the program to be expanded
beyond Google employees through SIYLI.
The unique approach in Search Inside Yourself
is that we offer secular science-based mindfulness
and emotional intelligence.
And we offer this as a set of trainable skills
that impact both well-being as well as performance,
and importantly, leadership,
and they get to interact with their peers
in a particular way based on our curriculum
so that they can actually see some of the effects
this has on things like listening,
building trust, greater collaboration.
They exercise what we would call mindful listening
which is to listen with the intention to understand
rather than to react or respond.
It's possible to exercise mindfulness while we walk.
And the sense of solidity and connection that we have,
it can really be accessed when we slow down.
It sounds simple but it's not easy
because when you try to pay attention
to what that experience of walking is like,
it's very often the case that the mind's gonna wander away
and the attention is gonna be elsewhere.
Lost in thoughts, ideas, and feelings, to-do lists.
No one I don't think should approach mindfulness
or meditation as having a specific prescription.
It's an invitation for it to land
in the way that it does on each person.
Scott Kriens devoted part of his tech fortune
to creating one of the newest retreat centers in the west,
the 1440 Multiversity above Santa Cruz, California.
It's 20 minutes from downtown Silicon Valley
and it's a 75-acre redwood forest basically.
And 1440 is named because that's the number of minutes
in a day and it's about being present
and aware for each one of those.
And that's a mindfulness task in itself.
If we're self-aware and we show up authentically
we can build trust.
And if we build trust in relationships,
whether it's in your family, in your workplace,
in your community, between nations, the world is better.
So some of the important work
that's made the biggest difference in my life
has happened in person in deep immersion with others
and that's really what Multiversity is here
to invite people to experience.
Mindfulness and awareness is a basic human capability
that we have that we sometimes lose track of
and we need to kind of get back.
As mindfulness spreads,
one surprising place it's emerging is in politics.
We're in a really unique spot I think
in the country's history where things are so hyper-partisan
and there's just a lot of fear, a lot of anger.
I got elected to solve problems
and that means working with people
who don't always think the way that you do
and figuring out a way to listen, deep listening,
to really see where they're coming from.
Maybe there's something in there
that we can agree on and we could work on together.
What first drew me to the practice of mindfulness,
I grew up Catholic, I went to Catholic school.
It was such a relief for me to say I could keep that
and then learn this amazing,
develop this amazing understanding
of what it means to be a human being.
And that was a big relief for me.
And that's when I got inspired to write the book
because I thought, "Wow, this is a secular practice
"and so we can teach this in our healthcare system.
"We can teach this in our schools.
"This is healing our veterans."
Today Tim is sharing his thoughts
on mindfulness with Sharon Salzberg at an event
called Healing the Heart of Democracy.
We have to reconnect because the old ways
of connecting are in many ways not working.
I feel like there's a quiet revolution happening
in the country.
Not just the growing appreciation
and understanding for contemplative practices.
We've just got these old systems
that were built for a time that no longer exists.
We need to all be tapping into what's best inside of us
and what's most creative inside of us
and it starts with, very simply, paying attention.
We're very fortunate, thank you.
I'm happy see you guys, what a great crowd, hey!
- Hey! - Yeah!
As the movement grows,
it's clear mindfulness really can be used anywhere.
Mindfulness has been great for my stand-up
because when I feel nervous or whatever
I don't have to give in to that.
I just have to look at, "Oh, I'm next."
And be aware of what's happening
and then just go up and do my thing
instead of spinning or making my heart pound.
Anybody know about mindfulness?
No?
But what I'm excited to do now, even take it a step further,
is to actually share tidbits about mindfulness
without saying "I'm gonna teach you about mindfulness."
And when I've been doing it I'm realizing oh my gosh,
my whole life I've been like multitasking,
which used to be sexy and hip but that's so 2016,
because what that means
is you're doing everything half-assed.
Do you like it?
Leigh's hectic life also includes
being married to film and TV star, David Koechner,
and raising five children.
Before I would look at 'em like this where they talked
to my back while I was at the computer.
"Uh-huh!"
Or I'm driving.
"Uh-huh, okay Junior."
And then all of a sudden now
I'm looking directly in their eyes and they have all of me
and they see that I really see them
and they're almost overwhelmed.
I can study with you.
My mother was mentally ill and I kind of grew up,
she was locked behind her door.
And when I became a mom I didn't really know what the heck
to do with my kids 'cause it wasn't mirrored for me.
And I thought what did I need from her?
What would have been my dream is for her to see me
and to hear me, to know that I mattered.
And from that basic principle has been the foundation
of the simplicity that parenting could be.
We said we would like to keep the homeless in our prayers.
Leigh also shares her insights
as the parenting expert
on Deepak Chopra's digital platform, JIYO.
The two most important things you can do as a parent
is to see your child and to hear your child.
That's it, it's that easy.
And look at my fingers, it's a peace sign.
If you do these two things with your child,
you will raise a peaceful child to send out into the world.
People have known the experience
of being aware for thousands of years
but it's always been a few luminaries in society.
Now because of social media,
because of the way we can spread information,
that experience which was a privilege for a few luminaries
becomes available to everyone.
I hope you will watch this movie,
"The Mindfulness Movement,"
that you will participate in this movement itself.
We can do it together but we can do it only by waking up
and being mindfully aware of experience as it happens
and mindfully aware of choices that we make.
It was interesting talking with her.
I have a lot of material so we'll see what comes out.
Well we're gonna start the meeting
with some meditation first
and then I'm gonna ask you another question
about that 'cause I'm curious.
Okay.
Should we start?
Mindful Magazine editor-in-chief, Barry Boyce,
along with publisher Jim Gimian got the first issue
onto newsstands in 2013.
Honestly it felt kinda crazy
because who starts a print magazine
in the era of of the iPhone?
But I think one of the key things
is that even though people are very attracted to information
that comes through their phones,
so many people have come to us
since we started Mindful and said,
"The very fact that I see this and that my mother sees it
"in the checkout line makes it seem like an ordinary thing."
And that's been the mission.
Claire, is Allison, is she a mindful interview
or a walk the talk?
We are hoping for her
to be a full interview feature like--
Yeah, and the cover shoot?
- Yeah. - So she'll be on the cover.
One thing that we really try to avoid
is what I call bliss face
which is just someone in this state of ecstasy.
You see it a lot in advertising around mindfulness
and it's really not about that.
Mindfulness, it can be gritty,
it can be celebratory, it can be hard.
So the idea is that we'll illustrate
each of those little tips in a lively way
so that people will get a visual hit
of getting outside and finding a buddy.
All right, cool, yeah, that's great.
The importance of the digital side
is that there's just a lot larger community of people online
who are curious about both the practices
and learning more about the science.
If mindfulness were just about getting a little bit
of relaxation and checking out,
floating away, then I wouldn't care about it.
So you get some relaxation which allows you to look deeper
and that becomes a way of having a more direct
and authentic engagement with your life
and with other people.
The bus is ready for you.
I'm seeing the bus for the first time.
Let's go, let's have a look.
- This is-- - Check it out, for real.
I think the orange
goes with the white.
This is ridiculous.
Yeah.
After you, sir.
Thanks.
Hi, I'm Dan.
- Eddie. - Eddie?
Nice to meet you, man.
Well basically that whole back
has been turned into a suite.
No big deal, just on a 10% Happier bus.
And 100,000 people might be actually finding a way
to a practice that might help them in some way?
I teamed up with one of my favorite meditation teachers,
Jeff Warren, who actually is Canadian,
but we did a cross-country US tour and the goal
was to meet people who want to meditate but aren't.
So we decided to do this cross country tour,
this kinda gonzo mission where we met people.
We met cops, met military cadets, teachers, celebrities,
and talked to them about what's standing in the way?
How do we get through that barrier?
- That is is a great-- - Yes.
I mean this, that's a very good question.
And sort of we did a taxonomy of issues.
The biggest ones are I don't have time for this.
I can't clear my mind.
This is self-indulgent.
I'll lose my edge.
People will think I look weird.
And consistency.
I started but I stopped
and now I can't get back on the wagon.
- Oh great, cool. - Meditation's pretty good.
Do I look happier?
Come on in here, we'll give you some one-on-one guidance.
Once I started doing it, it was clearly useful,
and stopping seemed masochistic even by my own standards.
But for other people it's really hard
to get this habit off the ground.
Sounds and thoughts and sensations, no problem.
You're just interested in the breath.
Five to 10 minutes a day
is often the recommendation for starting.
In our app we have a huge program called One Minute Counts.
Where even one minute of meditation is good.
It's not only true that one minute counts,
one second counts because one second is all it takes
to break yourself out of some trance.
I spent a lot of time puzzling over this very thing.
All of a sudden you're not being governed so powerfully
by your emotions and urges and impulses.
I think that meditation
is the next big public health revolution.
If a sizable percentage of the population
is less emotionally reactive,
what kind of impact would that have
in the classroom, in parenting situations, in workplaces,
in our politics, in our relationships.
This is, I think, has the potential
to have a genuine societal impact.
It's about developing the art of friendship
toward oneself and toward others,
toward all of life actually.
And these days I tend to use connection as a term.
In addition to mindfulness,
Sharon has become one of the leading teachers
of a related practice called Metta, or loving kindness.
I just intuitively understood that, in a way,
love was what I was seeking and that,
and for me and for many others,
that some greater degree of love or loving kindness
is the secret ingredient in mindfulness
In a very different way.
To really have an open mind means an open heart.
And the way we change how we pay attention
is through the silent repetition of certain phrases.
The phrases are the conduit for the heart's energy,
they're the vehicle that is going to allow us
to be different with ourselves and with others.
May I be safe.
Be happy.
Be healthy.
Live with ease.
Live with ease means in the things of day-to-day life
like livelihood and family, may it not be such a struggle.
May I live with ease.
May I be safe.
Be happy.
Be healthy.
Live with ease.
This is like the song of the heart.
And all beings everywhere.
All people, all creatures, all those in existence.
Near and far, known and unknown.
May all beings be safe.
Be happy.
Be healthy.
Live with ease.
It's this profound knowing that our lives
have something to do with one another
and the implication of that is that everybody counts
and everybody matters.
Not everyone's gonna be my best friend
but everybody matters.
And so what would it be like to have a day like that
where we really approached ourselves and others in that way?
It's kind of a nice thing to do
in the middle of the day, isn't it?
BUFHA pride on three, one-two-three!
BUFHA pride!
Allow things to come and go.
But we are actually recovering energy
we are cultivating calm.
After helping the Chicago Bulls
and Los Angeles Lakers win NBA championships,
George Mumford still works
with a variety of athletes and teams.
This is what we've been training for.
Manage the moment.
You manage this moment, the next moment is gonna be fine.
Then you get into a rhythm, you get into a flow.
Whatever you focus on grows.
So you focus on it's gonna be great.
Okay, you gotta feel that,
you gotta be a champion before you win a championship.
The wisdom George shares also applies
to much more than sports.
I worked with people from Yale to jail
locker room to boardroom.
For me you gotta be in pain
or you gotta be seeking pursuit of excellence.
Either one of those. There has to be a sense of urgency.
And if you don't know how your mind-body process works,
then you have very little chance
of living to your potential.
If you don't know who you are,
you could end up being anybody.
And if you don't know where you're going,
you could end up going anywhere.
The Rock's like talking about being like the big dog.
And they give it all
It's the joy of the moment,
it's the joy of doing the thing for no reason,
for the thing in and of itself.
So we can live life that way.
It doesn't matter if we're playing basketball
or listening to music or speaking to a loved one.
That is the real essence of this practice
is it has to be done full engagement,
full on, full joy, full wonder.
And when we can get to that point,
that's what it's all about.
Rock?
Yes.
I'd love to do a check in today on a couple things.
One is the app. I'd also...
We really like the kids to prove to themselves
that they can do everything
because that gives them an intrinsic sense of self-worth.
When Jewel was a homeless teenager,
she created her own mindfulness techniques to survive.
Now she works with at-risk teens
through her Jewel Never Broken program
at the Inspiring Children Foundation in Las Vegas,
co-founded by Ryan Wolfington.
We actually give them opportunities to struggle.
Do you guys wanna give an update on the app?
Sure, yeah so we have--
They run the foundation, they run the website,
they do the fundraising, they do the video editing,
they do the marketing.
We teach them and guide them
but really they're given the task of problem solving
and proving to themselves
that they can creatively problem solve.
And when they are resilient, when they're tenacious,
when they stay with it, that there's tremendous reward.
On top of project driven learning,
we give them a psychology for life.
To be the observer of their thoughts,
to understand that not all thoughts and feelings are facts,
to check them, that they can choose which thoughts
and feelings to engage in,
to live mindfully, to live with vulnerability,
to live their values, to notice when they're not,
and to adjust, and to self-correct with kindness.
These kids live with a lot of courage.
It's inspiring to see.
Graduates of the Jewel Never Broken program
have gone on to top universities
including Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard.
K through 12 schools are also adopting the program.
So I thought it would be nice to do a check-in
and just see if anybody feels compelled
to talk about what thoughts they've been observing
that might be troubling them
or thoughts that they've been able to overcome.
Well I was really struggling with a variety
of different things especially with my relationship
with my dad.
He struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts
and stuff and sometimes he would tell me,
"You make me want to die.
Like "you're the reason that I'm in all this pain."
And that was really tough for me to handle
because it wasn't only him saying it,
it was a belief that I had held in my mind for a long time.
I tried to take my own life twice
and I would write down every single negative thought
and feeling that I would get in one column
and I would call it the lies.
And then in the next column I would write down
what I knew within myself to be true.
So that was kind of my first mindfulness experience.
As we talk about a lot, we're not our thoughts,
we're the observers of our thoughts...
Jewel's Never Broken philosophy
came from another trying time in her life.
After her initial success as a recording artist,
and while her mom was also her manager,
Jewel discovered she was millions of dollars in debt.
I realized I was broke, and in debt,
and that my mom isn't at all who I thought she was
when I was in my 30s.
It was a really big blow.
And it hit me really, really hard.
I was walking by a mirror one day at my house
and I remembered this allegory of the golden statue.
A warring tribe was coming to a village.
They decided to cover their golden statue in mud.
The warring tribe came and went.
The village forgot the value of this golden statue
until one day it rained and the gold was revealed.
I remembered that allegory
and it made me perceive myself in a different way.
I decided to approach myself not from the premise
that I was broken and I had to be fixed
but instead from the premise that a soul can't be broken.
I existed perfectly at all times
but I was covered in generations of hurt.
And I really more than fix myself,
I had to do an archaeological dig back to myself.
And when I approached things that way,
healing happened a lot quicker.
My number one job was gonna be having to learn
how to be a whole happy person
and that I would dedicate as much of my time
and my resources to that as I did the pursuit
of being a musician.
Thank you, guys, I'm humbled, thank you.
So mindfulness is a kind of invitation
to savor the present moment,
not to exchange it for some better moment.
And the more you are living in this moment,
the more the next moment is colored differently
because you've shown up for this one.
So that could actually change the future.
And in fact, that's the only way to change the future,
is by changing how willing you'll be,
you are to be in the present moment.
Just get it in your mind you're gonna do it.
And once you start seeing the benefits of it
and you like the way you act,
you like the way you handle problems,
you see the difference in the world.
You'll be inspired, you'll see things happening,
and you'll want that to be your way of life.
So I'd say mindfulness isn't just to get relaxed
and to be calm, it's really about cultivating wisdom
so that we eradicate or alleviate suffering.
This is how social change happens.
When we start being more compassionate and kind,
connected to ourselves, more self-aware,
these changes will impact every single thing
we're a part of.
And in this way, society can change.
I think a critical mass of people
who are living in awareness
and where they're aware of the choices they make
will automatically create a better world.
♪ If I could tell the world just one thing ♪
♪ It would be that we're all okay ♪
♪ And not to worry 'cause worry is wasteful ♪
♪ And useless in times like these ♪
♪ I won't be made useless ♪
♪ I won't be made idle with despair ♪
♪ I'll gather myself around my faith ♪
♪ For light does the darkness most fear ♪
♪ My hands are small I know ♪
♪ But they're not yours they are my own ♪
♪ They're not yours they are my own ♪
♪ We are never broken ♪
♪ Poverty stole your golden shoes ♪
♪ But did not steal your laughter ♪
♪ Heartache came to visit me ♪
♪ But I knew it was not ever after ♪
♪ We will fight not out of spite ♪
♪ Just 'cause someone must stand up for what's right ♪
♪ 'Cause where there's a man who has no voice ♪
♪ There ours will go singing ♪
♪ My hands are small I know ♪
♪ They're not yours they are my own ♪
♪ And I am never broken ♪
♪ 'Cause in the end ♪
♪ Only kindness matters ♪
♪ In the end only kindness matters ♪