“Meditating is a way of loving”

Jon Kabat-Zinn is one of the scientists who has contributed the most to researching and disseminating the effects of meditation on stress reduction and health. Thanks in part to his work, terms like mindfulness or “mindfulness,” a form of meditation applied to everyday life, are becoming increasingly familiar in the West. He is the author, among other books, of Vivir con plenitude las crises (Ed. Kairós), Mindfulness in everyday life(Ed. Paidós) and The practice of mindfulness (Ed. Kairós), who wrote “to inspire people who love each other enough to want to meditate.”

Dr. Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. in molecular biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is best known for creating a program to reduce stress based on mindfulness meditation: the famous eight-week program known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) or Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program (REBAP).

A life dedicated to researching mindfulness

In the late 1970s, he founded the Stress Reduction Clinic, which years later became what is now the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society. This clinic, associated with the Massachusetts School of Medicine, was a pioneer in bringing meditation to hospitals to improve the evolution and quality of life of patients by applying the MBSR program. This program has been serving as a model for various meditation programs implemented in medical centers around the world for years.

Fundamental is his research work, which he has developed mainly in fields such as the influence of the mind in healing processes, the clinical application of meditation or the Effects of Mindfulness on the Brain, Immune System, and Emotional Health.

In addition to hospitals, Dr. Kabat-Zinn has conducted meditation programs in prisons and in companies with a demanding work environment. Today they exist mindfulness instructors around the world and different versions of the program adjusted to different needs and objectives.

In this lengthy interview We talked to him about his personal experience with meditation, his research work and his vision of mindfulness or mindfulness meditation as a tool to lead a more conscious and serene life.

Meditation: a ball of oxygen for the day to day

How did you get interested in meditation?
–My mother was a painter and my father, an eminent scientist, an immunologist. I grew up in a family in which there were two different forms of knowledge: that of science and that of art. From a young age I was interested in how these two currents could be combined or even integrated.

Then, at the age of 22, while studying molecular biology at university, I came into contact with Zen meditation. I realized that Buddhist meditative practices opened up a path that encompassed both scientific knowledge and art, plus probably others.

It was something that I had been looking for intuitively since I was very young, perhaps since I was 4 or 5 years old. And when I found it, I began to practice meditation regularly, with different teachers, and I went deeper and deeper. Meditation became a unifying force in my life.

–What do you remember of your first steps in meditation?
–The important thing was to take some time out of the day to “not do”, to simply “be”. People often misunderstand what it means to meditate. It is believed that it is to do something concrete to achieve a special state. But in reality it is about stopping doing, getting out of the daily routine and hustle and bustle to dedicate yourself for a while to remain with an awakened conscience.

“People often misunderstand what it means to meditate. It is believed to be doing something specific to achieve a special state.”

From very early on I discovered that for me it was the best way to start the day. That fed me. It was like an oxygen balloon that went straight to my heart. And then the rest of the day was going much better. It happened to me like orchestras: before playing a piece they have to spend a long time tuning the instruments. Meditation tunes us up before we go out into the world so we can play the tune.

Do you meditate every day?
Yes, between half an hour and an hour. Or more, if we include the time I practice yoga, which for me is another way of meditating. Sometimes different doors can be used to enter the same room. Now, while meditating formally in the morning is very important, there is another way to do it that is even more so.

It is about bringing meditation into daily life or, in other words, allowing life itself to become a meditative practice, because authentic meditation depends more on how life is lived than on whether it is practiced by setting aside time each morning. . Meditating thus becomes being more present in everything that is happening throughout the day, avoiding judging and reacting impulsively.

“Authentic meditation depends more on how life is lived than on whether it is practiced by setting aside time each morning.”

–You have dedicated yourself to teaching a meditation called mindfulness or full attention. Is mindfulness meditation another name for Buddhist or yoga meditation?
–In a way, yes. Mindfulness is the core or meeting point of the different meditative practices. There are many currents and philosophies based on meditation, as well as many techniques to practice it, but they all have in common that full attention, which I understand in a broad sense as pure awareness. All traditions have alluded to it, but Buddhist meditative practices are the ones that have defined it more precisely. Hence, mindfulness has been considered the axis of Buddhist meditation.

But I like to define mindfulness in practical terms as the awareness that is awakened by paying attention to the present moment intentionally and without judgment. And I like to add: “as if your life depended on it.” Because in many ways, both literally and metaphorically, life can depend on the quality of that caring and open-heartedness.

A way of being and a way of suffering less

Why is it so important to pay attention without judging?
–Practicing full attention does not prevent us from judging: we constantly judge and will continue to do so. But it helps to become aware of how much we do and to what extent we can come to believe our own judgments. If one stops and observes the mind, one realizes how many ideas and opinions it holds about almost anything.

Many of our value judgments are made automatically, without thinking about it, and these judgments are followed by an emotional reaction that will be positive or negative depending on whether we liked what we are judging or not.

“If one stops and observes the mind, one realizes how many ideas and opinions it holds about almost anything.”

Mindfulness helps to see things more as they are and not as much as we think they are or as we would like or fear they were. This is very liberating and reduces suffering, because much of our suffering comes from not getting things the way we want or getting things we think we don’t want. We are constantly fighting against life, yearning to be happy based on waiting for the universe to give us what we want. But the universe doesn’t take us so much into account…

–He maintains that meditation is not a technique but a way of being. What is it referring to?
–There are thousands of meditative techniques but the techniques are there to be worked on and developed by using something. They can be useful at a certain level but at times they can be an obstacle. On the other hand, meditating does not consist in doing but in being more present, being less critical and less emotionally reactive, more capable of discerning…

Ultimately, it is about being more compassionate, with oneself and with others, and also, why not say it, wiser, since one no longer lives trapped by the appearance of things and gains an understanding of what is happening. So, when you act, you act from being, and that is a very different act from unconscious action.

What things should we pay that attention to?
The important thing is not what you pay attention to but how you pay it. Nor is it about devoting more attention, but rather paying a special type of attention, less attached and less limited by the image one has of oneself and of what surrounds them. In any case, in practice it is logical to ask what one can pay attention to. It can be the breath, the sensations that this breath causes in the different parts of the body, what it feels like on the skin, the sensations that a yoga posture causes…

“The important thing is not what you pay attention to but how you pay it.”

But I insist: it is an attention that is focused in the moment, a lucid and even-tempered presence of mind. Because in that presence of mind resides our essence. The problem is that we tend to be so busy thinking and doing that we forget about it.

–Meditation teaches not to identify with what one feels or thinks. If we are not what we think or what we feel, what are we?
–That is the fundamental question of any deep meditative practice: Who am I? or What am I? When we are asked that question on a daily basis, we usually answer what our names are, what we do, where we were born… But who are we beyond all those attributes?

Mindfulness meditation constantly asks the question but gives none of those answers. Because the answer is not in words but in silence. Allow yourself to realize that if you are not who you think, you may be consciousness itself. Or put another way: you are the one who is awake; not the one who feels or thinks, but the one who is present, the one who asks the question. And awareness, that presence of mind, is more powerful than thoughts and feelings, because it allows you to shed light on them, understand them, and even change them.

The benefits of mindfulness for health

– What effects does mindfulness have on health?
–More than 20,000 clinical patients passed through the Stress Reduction Clinic in just over thirty years to complete the MBSR program (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or “stress reduction with mindfulness”). Patients with very diverse health problems, the vast majority of whom obtained very good results.

It has been seen that meditation reduces anxiety and depression, regulates blood pressure, improves psoriasis and modifies the activity of brain structures such as the hippocampus and the amygdala, involved in emotions, attention and memory. In cases of chronic or very serious diseases, the medical problem may continue but the person feels better: they learn to live with the disease and regulate pain. In addition, it has been proven that it is not necessary to spend a long time practicing for these structural and functional changes to take place…