Helping Clients Find Their Wise Hearts - NICABM

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A Webinar Session with Ruth Buczynski, PhD and Jack Kornfield, PhD

nicabm N a t i o n al I n s t i t u t e f o r the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine

Helping Clients Find Their Wise Hearts

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Helping Clients Find Their Wise Hearts Contents How to Free Our Patients from Suffering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 How the Truth of Sorrow and Suffering Leads to Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The Distinction between Their Story and the Capacity of Presence . . . . . . . . . . 6 How to Separate the Story from the Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 The Importance of Turning toward Fear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 How to Counsel toward the Wisdom of Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Bearing Witness: The Lending of Heart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

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Finding Inner Wisdom during Times of Sorrow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Emptiness: Identifying and Counseling the Struggle from Within . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Mindfulness as Defined through Fearless Presence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Why It’s So Difficult to Stay Present in Daily Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 How to Sustain Mindfulness Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Meditation and Psychotherapy: Two Paths to Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Self-Care for the Practitioner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 TalkBack Segment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 About the Speakers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

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The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine www.nicabm.com


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Helping Clients Find Their Wise Hearts with Ruth Buczynski, PhD and Jack Kornfield, PhD Dr. Buczynski: Hello everyone and welcome. I’m Dr. Ruth Buczynski, a licensed psychologist in the state of Connecticut and the president of the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine, and I’m so glad that you’re here today. We have a lot of people on this call, calling in from all over the world and from all over the United States. We have a very, very special guest in our series. I have wished for years to have Jack be part of our series and our work at NICABM. So tonight, he’s here with us! This is a first for us and maybe for you although I’m sure that you’ve also seen Jack’s books and perhaps had a chance to attend one of his workshops throughout the world. I’m talking about Dr. Jack Kornfield. He is the author of After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path. Let me hold that up so you can see it. He’s also the author of many, many books although we’re only showing you two of them His most recent is Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are. I’m again going to put that up so you can see it.

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Jack holds dual credentials, and that’s very special. He’s trained as a Buddhist monk in monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma way back in the 70s, and he also holds a doctorate in psychology from the Saybrook Institute. He bridges both worlds and I’m very excited to have him here. Jack, it’s great to see you and to be with you here tonight!

How to Free Our Patients from Suffering Let’s get started. How can we help our patients free themselves from suffering? Dr. Kornfield: I want to start by talking about my own training. Buddhist psychology, which is the basis of it, is really a science of mind more than anything else. The focus is on human dignity and nobility or fundamental goodness. That’s called Buddha nature. It’s not focused as much as Western psychology is on pathology, but rather on finding the spirit or the beauty in each human being.

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“Buddhist psychology is not focused on pathology, but rather on the spirit and beauty in each being.”

We as healers, or physicians, or practitioners, or those who tend to one another all have our measures of suffering in life, which are called, in one language, the Eight Worldly Winds; there’s praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and disrepute. All of these are woven together. I was just teaching in France and one of the physicians was using the principles of mindfulness and Buddhist psychology in this very large clinic. He’s also an epidemiologist and was giving statistics where, The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine www.nicabm.com


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if I remember correctly, he said that by age 55, 70% of the people have one chronic illness, which might be arthritis or high blood pressure or remission of cancer or something like that. By the time people reach age 65, 90% will have one chronic illness and 70% will have two.

“By the time people reach age 65, 90% will have one chronic illness and 70% will have two.”

He also said that we tend to people with their medical problems as they come in with all the science that we have. But we’ve discovered that we need to tend to their spirit or their soul in some way.

Living, aging, and being in this culture as we do, we need to learn to come to terms with the fact that there’s loss as well as gain, blame as well as praise, and our life is woven together with pleasure and pain. This is what human incarnation is. Now with this, we can respond to it as organisms, as human beings, in different ways. We can respond out of fear and confusion and wall ourselves off. We can respond out of aggression and anger or out of greed and try to get more and more as if to protect ourselves from that, but we’ll still have pain and aging....

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Or we can respond with an understanding heart that says this is the measure of pain or suffering that we have. This is the measure of joy and beauty in our life. When we respond by acknowledging with graciousness that this is the way human incarnation goes, then the experiences that we have as a human being enoble us, cause us to live more freely, and allow us to flower.

“When we acknowledge with graciousness the way of human incarnation, our experiences enoble us, cause us to live more freely, and allow us to flower.”

Most of the trainings of Buddhist psychology focus on addressing the kinds of suffering that people experience and lead them to find in themselves resources – capacity, spaciousness, love – that allow them to meet those difficulties with an easy heart. Meditation and these trainings are not a grim duty. They’re not something to add on top of going to the gym and going to therapy and all these other things. Florida Scott-Maxwell, the author, writes, "No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement."

“Meditation...is not a grim duty to add on top of going to the gym and going to therapy...”

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We can take these trainings in understanding because they are so powerful. Modern neuroscience is now substantiating them in all kinds of ways and showing their increase in neuroprotection and greater capacity for attention and presence and greater capacities for compassion...

We can take these and make them “one more thing we have to do,” but that is not their purpose.



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Their purpose is not self-judgment. Their purpose is to bring a sense of joy and ease, and to allow us to live with the ever-changing circumstances of our lives with an easier and freer heart.

“...meditation allows us to live with ever-changing circumstances.”

How the Truth of Sorrow and Suffering Leads to Freedom Dr. Buczynski: Jack, you’ve talked about seeing the truth of sorrow and suffering and when we do that, we finally can achieve freedom. I think I’ve more or less rendered that accurately. Can you tell me a little more about what we mean by that? Dr. Kornfield: In our lives, one strategy to deal with our difficulties is to run away, to deny them, to keep ourselves busy, to get addicted, and in some way, to avoid the facts of our lives, and if we do that, we have to keep ourselves moving. We become tense and fearful because we’re not dealing with what’s actually true. If I have somebody who comes to see me who has just had a diagnosis of leukemia and they want to pretend that it’s not happening – there’s a certain understandable denial that happens initially, “Oh, this is not really important” or “I’ll get through it easily.” They try to run away from it.

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They can’t do the very things that they need to: tend to both their body and their heart. They actually need to turn toward what’s difficult – to lean into the wind rather than run away from it. They need to face their fears because otherwise their fears will follow them and manifest in all kinds of ways. When we evoke the strength of spirit and courage of heart in people, sometimes it gets confused with an idealism: “Well then, if I have a meditation or mindfulness practice, everything will be beautiful and it will all be okay.”

“When we evoke the strength of spirit and courage of heart, sometimes it gets confused with an idealism.”

People can get idealistic. But, in fact, understanding disappointment and loss – bowing to it and saying this is loss, this is disappointment, this is how I register it, this is the history I’ve had with it – brings a kind of dignity. When Nelson Mandela walked out of Robben Island Prison after 27 years with so much graciousness and magnanimity, he showed that they can imprison your body, but not your spirit!

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“...your spirit can be supported through mindfulness training...”

In the same way, your spirit can be supported through awareness, through mindfulness training. Your spirit can be supported through reclaiming your own capacity for compassion and presence to handle the very difficulties that come up in your life.



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The Distinction between Their Story and the Capacity of Presence Dr. Buczynski: You talked about seeing (difficulties) as loss. It makes me think that perhaps we need to make some distinctions. I’m used to patients coming in and saying, “This is what always happens to me. I lose out on this...” Then they go into what you might call a mind-chatter. Dr. Kornfield: Their story. Dr. Buczynski: Yes, their story. Actually could you capture that idea? How’s their story different from what you’re trying to get people to do? Dr. Kornfield: Sure, and actually, I want to capture it with a story! I was spending time with Ram Dass, who is a good friend, this winter and remembered a moment when he was teaching and somebody asked him, “Here you are teaching Hindu practices and in some ways acting as a Hindu teacher, but you were raised Jewish.” Ram Dass said, “That’s right and I was bar mitzvahed and had Jewish training as well.” So they said, “What about all your Jewish training?” And he said, “Well, I really respect the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism and Hasidic teachings and there’s beauty to it.”

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He and I both recognize that, but then he looked out and he said, “But you konw, I’m only Jewish on my parents’ side.” Of course, it’s a witty line, but there’s a profound truth in it, which is: we take our identity to be our personal history, and we tell certain stories about it. I had a woman who came to see me who had a great deal of loss.

“...we take our identity to be our personal history, and we tell certain stories about it.”

Her husband had left and abandoned her and their three or four-year-old daughter in the very same way that her father had left her mother and the young children in his family. She had this very deep belief that there was something wrong with her – that she wasn’t loveable and that’s why these people were abandoning her. We spent quite a bit of time just being in the presence of her grief and loss and allowing herself to feel the things, not with the story, but with the direct experience in her body and finding enough compassion to hold it. In the session, when she was ready, we went back to the scene where her father had left her...and she had this very deep realization that she was the one who made up the story that he left because he didn’t love her.

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In fact, she had evidence that one of the reasons that he didn’t talk to her after he left (and died not that long after) is that he loved her so much he couldn’t bear to see her and he had to get out of this marriage because he said that it was killing him! She had this deep realization that she had told her whole story about her sorrow and it was made up by herself and wasn’t necessarily true. The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine www.nicabm.com


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When she saw it, then I said, “Can you sit with your own humanity...with the fact that you’ve told this story, but it’s not true? Can you instead be with your own presence here, with the loss but with the beauty of your child, with all that has been given to your life with a dignity in the middle of it?”

“She could live her life and not the life of her story.”

It really was a moment when she began to inhabit her capacity to be present without identifying with some story or history. She started to realize that she could be free and she could start again. She could live her life and not the life of her story.

How to Separate the Story from the Emotions Dr. Buczynski: That’s a lovely story and this whole issue is so important – the idea of the over-identification of the story. In any intimate relationship, you have a fight with someone that you’re close with or you’re upset with someone...and there’s a big story that we create about it instead of being with whatever the experience is – the loss or the fear or whatever it is. Let’s say you’re a therapist and your patient is doing that. What do you say to patients to try to help them understand the difference between the story and the emotion that goes with the story?

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“...the capacity for attention and presence can be developed.”

Dr. Kornfield: There are a few parts to it. One of the most beautiful things to discover, and again a lot of the modern, new neuroscience research is showing that the capacity for attention and presence can be trained.

While they’re innate in us, they also can be developed. We get new neural connections and a greater sense of neural integration in measurable amounts – capacities for emotional resilience... More simply, what I’ve done is to have people sit quietly when they come to meet with me. I’ll suggest they come ten minutes earlier and just sit. I don’t give them a lot of meditation instructions and it’s certainly not Buddhism – spare their friends and family. It’s about being present to their experience: feel their breath, notice what’s happening and even if they can’t do that, we’ll sit quietly for five minutes at the beginning of our session. By doing this, all the chatter of, “Oh, I had this difficult meeting at the water cooler,” or “My mother-inlaw on the phone said...” starts to die down. They get more in touch with what really is weighing on their heart or what they are really longing for.

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They become more present and then I say, “Before we start to deal with the difficulties you have, let’s become

“Before we deal with the difficulties you have, let’s become present for what’s here now...without any story.”



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present for what’s here now. How is your body? What does it feel like now – your feet on the floor or your breath? What emotions are present without any story? What state are you in – open, closed, sad, happy? I have a friend who is one of the vice-presidents of Facebook dealing with the conflicts between their 900 million members. He said that instead of just giving company policy, he’s also written a protocol which says, “If you have a problem with someone else who posted a picture you don’t like or something about your child, instead of complaining to the company, why don’t you write them directly and say this concerns me.” He realized that they needed to tell that person how they felt. So he said, “Why don’t you tell them how you felt about it?” He discovered that people often didn’t know how they felt, so he gave them those little emoticons – sad, happy, frightened, betrayed.

“...people often don’t know what they feel...”

He gave a whole list of feelings and then said, “Now, tell how you feel and then you might also ask them what their intention was.” Then he said (to me), “Now, I’m beginning to have the opportunity to teach emotional intelligence and conflict resolution skills to 900 million people!”

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But here’s the point: people often don’t know what they’re feeling. By sitting quietly and checking in with their body, their breath, and the emotions that are there, we can start to dialogue. “Well, I feel a little of this...” and I can inquire, “How does that feel? What is connected to that?” Other feelings open, and they begin to learn the capacity to be present for what’s there in their emotions, in their body, in their feelings independent of the stories. Then we can go into, “Here’s the dilemma. Here’s the story and the feelings that story evokes. We begin to separate the capacity to be present from all the history that we tell about it.

“We begin to separate the capacity to be present from all the history that we tell about it.”

Mindfulness itself is the capacity to be present here and now, which is always where we are and to see with a beginner’s mind – to use Suzuki Roshi’s phrase. In that argument you described in a relationship...we load all that history into the next time we see the person, and then we can’t really look and see the person.

We can’t really look and see the sparkle in their eyes or the fact that we chose to be with them for 26 years (because there were things that endeared them to us) or the fact that we also are human and have our difficulties.

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We don’t see the radiance and the effort that everyone’s putting in just to maintain their life. When we get quiet, all of that becomes available to us.



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The teachings in Buddhist psychology have a kind of contemplative dimension that understands that it’s not just about insight and knowledge, but it’s allowing ourselves to have a deeper connection. This is true for a physician or a nurse with their patients on an oncology ward or a mental health professional, or for that matter, a teacher with a classroom of students.

“...it’s not just about insight and knowledge – it’s allowing ourselves to have a deeper connection...”

The Importance of Turning toward Fear Dr. Buczynski: There’s one thing you mentioned before, which I think might be useful to talk more about. You talked about turning toward fear. First of all, we feel it so often and it may be the cause of many problems in life, including foreign/ international problems. Let’s just spend a little bit more time on turning toward fear. Dr. Kornfield: I’d like to do that and I’d like to talk about it both personally and collectively. In our society, at this point, we live in a media and political world that is actually generating fear.

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Almost eighty to a hundred years ago, the political analyst, H. L. Mencken, said, “The aim of politicians is to generate fear in people – whether it’s to get votes or to direct the energy of the populous in an unconscious way.”

“...people cling to their hate so stubbornly because once it’s gone, they’ll be forced to deal with their own pain.”

James Baldwin wrote something so compelling when he said, “I imagine one of the reasons that people cling to their hate so stubbornly is that they realize that once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their own pain.” Collectively, we project our fears on the communists, the immigrants, the Muslims – whoever happens to be the other – the blacks, the browns or somebody who is different.

I speak of those last ones coming from a white culture, for example, and we do it in some way because we haven’t learned to bear witness to the insecurity of life. With mindfulness, you learn what my teacher spoke about as the wisdom of uncertainty. Alan Watts called it the wisdom of insecurity. The security, as Helen Keller said, is mostly a superstition. Children don’t have it, and we don’t have it. Life is this ever changing process, and the real security is to be present for what’s here now – not to all the fantasies and fears that we have.

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Fear is a natural thing. It’s our organism’s way to try to protect itself, but as human beings, we can spin-out a great deal with it. Mark Twain said, “My life has been filled with terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”

“...we haven’t learned to bear witness to the insecurity of life.”



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When somebody comes in and has anxiety and fear, first of all, I’m very sympathetic because it’s hard to hold, hard to carry, and the stronger it is, the more the separate sense of self grows. The separate sense of self is called, in Buddhist psychology, sometimes the body of fear because we feel separate and we have to protect ourselves in worry...rather than sensing the field of being or presence that is actually well-being no matter what. As I said about Nelson Mandela, whether or not we’re in prison, we have the capacity to feel well-being in ourselves – to feel connected with the world – and we all know it somewhere deeply. I then teach people how to sit and acknowledge the fear as if to bow to it – pay respect – because it’s very powerful. How does it feel in the body? What are the stories that it tells? Are they true or not? What are the emotions that come with it? Sometimes there’s grief with fear or there’s loss, or there are various kinds of pains that come, and we can tease those apart and realize that you can be present for these in a spacious way.

“I teach how to sit and acknowledge the fear – to bow to it and pay respect – because it’s very powerful.”

The image from Buddhist psychology is if you put a teaspoon of salt in a cup of water, it tastes very salty, but if you put the same spoon of salt in a lake, the water is pure and clear.

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In the same way, you can make the heart more spacious and open and gracious so that the fear and confusion and those difficulties are held in a spacious heart. I’m using the word heart quite deliberately as well as the word mind because we talk about mental health, but it’s also the health of the heart.

“To be present and to train oneself in mindfulness... requires loving awareness.”

To be present and to learn, to train oneself in mindfulness, or to offer it to others, you can only offer that if you’ve really found this capacity in yourself. It requires a wedding of love and awareness. I like to use the phrase loving awareness.

What we bring to the measure of fear – or confusion or sorrow – is this capacity of loving awareness to say, “Yes, this too is part of the tainted glory of humanity. This is part of life, my life and others. We all share in this.” There’s a field of compassion, and we discover that we can be present with a kind of dignity for it. It doesn’t mean fear goes away, but rather that we befriend our fear and know that who we are is bigger than that.

How to Counsel toward the Wisdom of Uncertainty

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Dr. Buczynski: As you’ve made so many comments I think each of us has some profound areas to follow up on. One of them was about the wisdom of uncertainty. Now uncertainty is something that a lot of us spend our lives trying to get rid of. First of all, why do you think there’s wisdom in uncertainty and how do you counsel people toward that? The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine www.nicabm.com


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Dr. Kornfield: Because uncertainty is a description of reality, you’re always happier and healthier if you deal with the world, incarnation, and life the way that it is rather than some fantasy you have about it. There’s the societal fantasy that if you have enough money in the bank, or if you have enough possessions, you’ll be happy – that’s a consumer fantasy. Another is that you’ll always have someone who’s going to love you in this perfect way, and even if they do love you...that’s today. You don’t know what’s going to happen next week or next year. Things change. We’re a river of change, and if we try to hold on, what we end up getting is rope burn. It’s a kind of recipe for suffering. If instead, we accept the fact that everything changes and discover that we can float, that we can surf rather than try to stop the waves, then our life becomes more responsive. It becomes more of a dance and there’s a tremendous joy that comes in it.

“Things change. We’re a river of change, and if we try to hold on, we end up getting rope burn.”

There’s a passage of psychological instruction, in the Buddhist text where it says, “Live, enjoy, and wellbeing even among those who are troubled. Live, enjoy, and well-being even among those who are sick.”

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We have within us this capacity for presence and joy, and you see it when all these people love to go and listen to the Dalai Lama speak when he travels. A stadium full of people will come. They’ll come just because he is this Lama who carries the profound Tibetan teachings. That’s a part of it, but I think people really go to hear him laugh. He has this wonderful, beautiful laugh.

“How can someone who’s suffered so much...laugh like that?”

How can someone who’s suffered so much and who carries the weight of the difficulties of the Tibetan people under the Chinese army’s occupation...laugh like that?

Then he says, “Well, they’ve taken away so many things. Why should I let them take away my joy, my peace of mind, my good heart?” To know that this is possible is a ground for whoever we are working with or for ourselves. You discover that that’s possible in the middle of change, and you say, “All right! Things are changing. It’s difficult, but I have to let go.” There’s a certain grief and loss that must be honored and felt, but it’s not the end of this story, and it’s not who you really are. That’s a limited identity. You were that for a while. Now, you’re going to be something else and that’s the way life unfolds itself all the time.

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If I were to ask one of my great meditation teachers, masters in Thailand, different questions, often he would laugh and he’d say, “It’s uncertain, isn’t it?” If I were to say, “What about enlightenment?” He’d laugh and he’d say, “It’s uncertain, isn’t it?”

“This is the way things are. Relax. Enjoy the waves.”



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He would find it the funniest thing, and he would laugh because he’d say, “This is the way things are. Relax. It’s not going to change by your contracting. You might as well enjoy the waves.” If you can sit quietly after difficult news, if in financial downturn you remain perfectly calm, if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy, if you can happily eat whatever is on your plate, if you can fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill, if you can always find contentment just where you are, you are probably a dog!

“If you can remain perfectly calm after difficult news and not have a twinge of jealousy when neighbors travel to fantastic places... if you can always find contentment where you are, you’re probably a dog!”

The reason I read this is that we can get very idealistic as we learn whether it is a mindfulness practice or discovering these capacities for compassion and wakefulness and think, “Well now, everything is going to be hunky-dory. It’s all going to be fine.” But the point isn’t that it’s going to be a particular way. We breathe; the earth breathes; night and day change; joy and sorrow come like the waves of the ocean. It’s possible to become spacious – to be loving awareness in the midst of it all.

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Here’s a little hint for this and I talk to people I work with about this. If you go into the bathroom and look at yourself in the mirror, you’ll notice that you’ve aged, right? Almost everybody has that experience, but the weird thing is that you don’t necessarily feel older, and that’s also a common experience. The reason for this is that the body exists in time. The body ages and you look at it, and you see that it has more wrinkles or that it’s drooping or it’s losing... But the witnessing awareness knows, just by looking in the mirror that that’s not who I am. That’s the body, but I don’t feel older because consciousness doesn’t age Consciousness is free and timeless and ever present.

“Consciousness doesn’t age, but who we are is ever-changing...”

When we shift to loving awareness, we can be present for life. We can engage and respond, but we are not so caught and identified by who I am because who we are is ever-changing. This becomes not a problem for people with the training of awareness and it’s mirror of love or compassion, which needs to be added for it to be accepting and loving.

Loving awareness becomes a skill or capacity, a graciousness and a way of being – no matter what happens.

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Dr. Buczynski: Thanks. Jack, you also mentioned something else that I wanted us to follow up on.



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Bearing Witness : The Lending of Heart You talked about bearing witness. That’s a quality, especially in our western approach, which has become: what action can I take to solve this problem to make it go way? Or, what action can I take to get rid of this uncertainty? There are so many issues – someone’s had a horrible diagnosis, people are getting older, elderly people who are losing their freedoms...perhaps their cognitive abilities – it’s tough to get old. Talk to us more about this concept of bearing witness and how do we learn to do that. Dr. Kornfield: In a way, you’re really talking about love. When Huston Smith, the religious scholar who is a friend, had a tragedy in his extended family when his granddaughter was killed, he was sitting there for a very long time – for weeks dealing initially with the shock and grief... He said that the most helpful person in all of this was a young native American woman who lived nearby and would come over and simply sit with him. She didn’t try to talk to him or “fix” him in anyway. She just lent...her good heart to him in his grief, and he said it was an act of love. He wasn’t alone.

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“...the most helpful person was a young native American woman who lent her good heart...”

As the Sufis say, (there cannot be) any bitterness because you were not up to the measure of the pain entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, you are also a part of this cosmic heart, if you will, and you’re endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain. You are called upon to meet this pain in compassion instead of self-pity. So, there’s a capacity that we have as human beings to be present for and to bear witness to the measure of sorrows and the measure of (the pain we experience) everyday and the ocean of tears of humanity... We can do some very simple practices of mindfulness of grieving, being aware of the body, knowing the emotions as they come… as one does in mindful training with loving awareness.

“We can be present for the physical pains of the body in ways to increase the immune system.”

We can be present for the physical pains of the body in ways that don’t add to stress and increase the fear, but rather, as neuroscience has shown, to actually increase the immune system as we get through what you could call a bearing witness. There is again, this spaciousness and good heart…that too is part of the measure of humanity.

You say, “I will meet (the pain) with presence and dignity.”

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You start to feel an inner freedom that comes from this and cannot be taken from you.



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Finding Inner Wisdom during Times of Sorrow Dr. Buczynski: I want to talk some about sorrow. How can we help clients find their inner wisdom during times of sorrow? Dr. Kornfield: For the Lakota Sioux Indian, grief was considered holy. If you had suffered a great loss or carried a measure of grief, your tears were the vehicle that brought you close to the gods. People were honored when others responded to their grieving...with prayers... Sometimes we think that the grief or the sorrow that we carry is wrong, that there’s something wrong with us, but actually it’s trustworthy if we allow ourselves to feel it and to honor it. One of the beautiful things that you learn in the trainings of Loving Awareness and Mindfulness, and you learn this as a physician, as a nurse, and as a mental health professional, is that underneath this very deep trust is the healing capacity of human beings. As a physician, you can do a surgery and keep the wound clean, but the body does the physical healing. You can try to exorcize cancer from the body, but the body itself wants to heal itself and the psyche has this very same, deep healing capacity that’s trustworthy.

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“...in surgery, you can keep the wound clean, but the body does the physical healing...and the psyche, deep healing...”

The tears of grief need to be able to wash themselves through to the end. The storm clouds have to finish. When people come and they say, “Well, I’ve been grieving this great loss. This person I was so close to died...or I feel like it’s just going to go on forever. When is it going to end?” That’s the point where I say, “Well, you’re probably half done when you’re asking that question.” Somehow by honoring (grief) and accepting it, that’s a step. Another step is to express it. So, I’ll say, “Don’t just keep it (inside)” and as the Lakota Sioux would say with their prayers, “Dance it! Show me what it looks like. Move with it.” Write a poem, a story about the tears – the magnitude of your grief. Is it as big as a hurricane. Will it wash the waters of the four oceans? Find your way to give it an expression so that not only are you in its presence, but you are actually allowing it.

“...when we turn toward what is difficult and make space for it to open, it will change and turn.”

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As they begin to allow things, they begin to move and turn. I have learned this trust a 100,000 times: when we turn toward what is difficult and make space for it to open, it will then change and turn. Now, it’s also true that we have our habits and patterns.

People can get stuck, or released and feel so much better, but then the next morning go back into their betrayal, upset, outrage, or some conflict they’ve had or other difficulty or grief, and run the story about it which is different than the feelings. There are ways, then, to work with the cognitive dimension. The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine www.nicabm.com


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First, from Buddhist psychology, there are practices of noticing and becoming really conscious of the stories that are being told – if we’re not conscious of them, we just keep running them. After training to become aware of these stories, there’s looking at their veracity, or usually lack of it.

“...there are practices of noticing and becoming conscious of the stories being told – if we’re not conscious of them, we just keep running them.”

Then, there are also substitutions in which you can shift from that story to a story of compassion or a story of loving kindness or a story of connectedness with everyone else who has suffered a loss like this. If this person – your partner has died – you sit and weep and feel the fact that there are 8,400,000 other people, this very day, who are weeping with you because their partner was lost. Instead of it being personal, you feel it as part of the human lot to hold and carry with tenderness and understanding rather than something happened to me. All these things help with a shift of identity from it being the small self or a little story to knowing that we are part of the greater whole.

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Alice Walker wrote at one point, and she said, “One day I was sitting there like a motherless child, which I was, and it came to me that feeling of being a part of everything and I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. I laughed and I cried, and I ran all around the house. When it happens, you just can’t miss it.” Some part of us knows that we are not just this skin encapsulated or this small self that we take ourselves to be. We have to honor that and pay our social security and remember our zip code and all the things that make up our individual incarnation, but we are also made of congealed starlight that cooled down to become the sphere of the earth. As Brian Swimme, the cosmologist, said, “Four and a half billion years ago, the earth was a flaming ball of rock and now it can sing opera.” We know this when we are walking in the mountains or making love or listening to a great piece of music or being there at the birth of a child or at the mystery of someone’s death.

“To awaken to this mysterious grandeur allows you to step out of your limited identity ...and you’re part of the whole.”

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To awaken to this mysterious grandeur that we, in life, are a part of, allows us to step out of our limited identity and have it connected with something that is greater, and then the two inform one another. It’s not that you lose yourself, but in some way, you are free – more to be your unique beautiful self because you are not so frightened anymore. You feel that you are a part of the whole.



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This, too, comes not as a philosophy, but when we become quiet – when we quiet the mind, open the heart, train loving awareness, and use these beautiful practices of compassion or forgiveness or loving kindness – that allow us to actually experience our connection with ourselves first and then with others.

Emptiness: Identifying and Counseling the Struggle from Within Dr. Buczynski: Let’s switch into emptiness. Emptiness is something that not just our patients, but a lot of people feel at one time or another in their lives. How would you help a patient who struggles with a sense of or a feeling of emptiness? Dr. Kornfield: First of all, we need to differentiate between two kinds of emptiness. What you are speaking of, we might call deficient emptiness and meaningless emptiness, which is more like depression where life doesn’t have meaning or my body doesn’t feel like it has vitality or things don’t seem to be very alive. There’s also a positive emptiness. In Buddhist psychology, in Zen, for example, or in Taoism, it is the most frequent expression of how we become liberated or free in the heart.

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To realize that just as what matters about a cup is not the handle and the container that was thrown on the wheel of the potter, what matters is the space that it holds – the space that allows our cappuccino or our chamomile tea to be in there. There’s something positive about emptiness because emptiness is the space from which everything is born.

“Emptiness is the space from which everything is born.”

One of the ways I work with people who come with a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness as you described, is that we’ll sit. We’ll pay attention to their body, where they feel (the emptiness). Sometimes there’s actually a hole in their body. My heart feels empty or my gut doesn’t feel anything, or maybe they don’t feel their whole body. They come to be in relation to their physical experience and then to explore the emotions... There’s emptiness, but with it there might be grief or sadness or actually fear or anger – all kinds of other things.

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“...Now that you’ve explored and described, let the emptiness get bigger.”

We begin to name what’s there around it. There’s the story, “Oh, this will last forever; nothing has any meaning; I’ve felt this for so long.” We begin to make all that conscious. Then, what becomes interesting is to say, “All right, now that you’ve explored and described this, let the emptiness get bigger.



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Let’s sit and practice together this attention, this deep mindfulness, and let the hole, the emptiness, and the meaninglessness grow. Let it fill your body. Let it fill the room. Let it fill the whole world if it needs to – even the universe.” People will get frightened and say, “If I let it get bigger, I’ll be lost. I’ll never come back.” That’s true with anger. If it gets bigger, it will just kill everything.

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“...when you allow emptiness to open...it shifts from a contracted deficient state to being spacious...”

We’ll say, “Let’s just try it. Let it, in your imagination, grow as big as a wind storm, as big as a tsunami – however big it needs to be.” When you allow (emptiness) to open, at some point, it changes. It shifts from being a contracted deficient state to being spaciousness in which...it turns into its opposite. There comes an experience of the space that contains everything and allows it. There comes a kind of well-being. If we resist it, we are identified and it feels small, but when things open, there is a remarkable shift.

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When contraction around desire opens, you let yourself feel all the desire there is and let it get huge. At some point that desire becomes a desire to express, to love and you feel this tremendous abundance in life – you feel connected. It’s the same with emptiness – it opens from a personal emptiness into a glorious emptiness and that is the space from which everything is born. I trust this process of the reversal of experience (from the small or contracted to that which we can inhabit and connect) because I’ve seen it over and over in people.

Mindfulness as Defined through Fearless Presence Dr. Buczynski: Jack, you describe mindfulness as fearless presence. Can you tell us why you call it that and what you mean by fearless presence? Dr. Kornfield: Yes, there was a woman who came to train with me in mindfulness, and she had a great deal of difficulty sitting. Every time she sat, she would get tremendously agitated. My response was to get curious. It’s not as if that’s a problem or you are doing it wrong, but something’s cooking.

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“If somebody can’t be mindful or loving, I get curious...”

If somebody can’t be mindful or can’t be loving, I get curious – what’s going on? It turned out, as I had her stay with it just for a couple of minutes and close her eyes, that all of a sudden her eyes opened wide and she said, “Ropes.”



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What was happening is that she was reliving an abduction that had happened to her quite a few years before. She’d been kidnapped and tied up and traumatized – it was terrible. As soon as she sat still, it reactivated all that historical memory. So, I said, “Don’t sit. That’s too much. It’s overwhelming.”

“When you work with trauma or great grief...you help find the resources to step-by-step begin experiencing that which has been too much.’’

When you work with trauma or great grief, the point isn’t to push someone into it, but to help them find the resources and the well-being so that they can step-by-step begin to experience that which has been too much. I said, “You have within you a capacity for dignity and presence that you may have forgotten because you got so overwhelmed by this experience. Why don’t we find a way that you can begin to approach it.”

She started by walking...she said, “I like walking in the trees nearby. People can see me, it’s safe, and I’m not in the woods, but I’m not trying to sit still.” I said, “Find a place that you feel the safest around here...Feel your steps and feel how you’re not bound in your steps. Feel that you can stop, you can turn back, and begin to feel the freedom that was given to you as your birthright.”

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She did little by little and then she’d come in and I’d ask her how she felt. She said, “It feels better.” I said, “Do you feel afraid to turn toward this great trauma of abduction?” She said, “I do.” Then, I said, “Well, let yourself be aware of the fear and see if you can take a little step.” Little by little – walking, moving, and being loving for herself in this way, she walked herself back into her body. She was out of her body and she felt her feet. She found her body and then overtime, there was a kind of growth of courage and she realized, “I can stay with this. I can face this and see all that happened.” Tremendous healing took place. So, we could call mindfulness fearless presence, but as we have, we can also call it loving awareness. It takes a lot of compassion and mercy and tenderness to be able to face the things that are difficult.

“It takes a lot of compassion and fearlessness to face what is difficult...”

Fearlessness is a kind of compassion.

Why It’s So Difficult to Stay Present in Daily Life Dr. Buczynski: Why do you think it’s so difficult to stay present in daily life?

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Dr. Kornfield: For one thing, we live in a society that Anne Wilson Schaef has written about and called the addicted society, in which we keep ourselves busy with our electronics. The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine www.nicabm.com


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It’s the speed of our culture, the consumerism, that keeps us out of touch with ourselves. If we were in touch, in many cases, we would realize that we’re not living quite the life we want to. We would rather live more slowly, work less, have more time for love or music or play. We would like more time outdoors. We would like to tackle the injustices of the world. We would express our concern or outrage for the hungry children or the mistreatment of women or the fact that we have carcinogens in our water and our food. The busy-ness of consumer society keeps us distracted. Similarly, when we sit quietly, first, we can feel the unfinished business of the heart.

“The busy-ness of consumer society keeps us distracted.”

At the end of the day, if you sit quietly, you might get reruns of the conflict with your boss or the things that were difficult or the longings unfulfilled. We need to learn the capacity to stay present and honor that this is part of life and not make it idealistic. If you have an ideal, “Okay, I’ll sit and everything will be calm and clear and beautiful,” you’ll do it for about a day and then you’ll feel like a failure.

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“...like the Dalai Lama, you can take your seat in the middle of the waves...”

If instead you say, “I’ll take my seat like the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi or Gandhi in the middle of the waves and bring a good heart to all that I’ve been given,” then it becomes possible. As you do, little by little, not only do you change yourself, but you affect whatever you touch.

Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh said, “When the crowded Vietnamese boats met with storms or pirates, if everyone panicked, all would be lost. But if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered, it was enough. It showed the way for everyone on the boat to survive.” Our individual awakening – our individual presence, loving awareness, and balance – becomes, not only a transformation of our lives, but touches the students, clients, or patients we work with, the people in our family and the community, and the world around us.

How to Sustain Mindfulness Practices Dr. Buczynski: How can we help people who are having a hard time maintaining mindfulness practices in between our appointments?

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Dr. Kornfield: Sometimes it’s little rituals. I know people who go and do a kind of mindful washing of their hands between each person.



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As a medical person, you need to do it, but you could also do it as a prayer. May I cleanse my hands and bring clear sight and a clean vision and heart to the next person that I meet. Sometimes you can take a little bit of a walk between seeing patients.

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“In-between rituals can develop capacities of awareness.”

I’ll look out the window and see the vastness of the sky. Or I’ll put on a little piece of music or remember something. Or I will take twenty breaths and with each breath, breathing in and out, I will calm the body and open the heart. You can make little practices that start to feed this capacity for presence in between things. I know somebody who has a little practice and will not send an email without first pausing for three breaths and sensing what the intention behind that email is. It’s just a practice of looking at the email to see if it feels like it’s really fulfilling that best intention and then pressing the send button. Three breaths! Dr. Buczynski: Wow...that would be very present and it’s not that complicated.

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Meditation and Psychotherapy: Two Paths to Knowledge I want to close with some thought about bringing meditation and psychotherapy together. Perhaps some people come to meditation after they’ve spent time in psychotherapy. Other people come to psychotherapy after meditation. How do you see the two worlds – these two paths to knowledge? Dr. Kornfield: First of all, I’m a take all the help you can get kind of person. There are ways in which having a contemplative practice, and I wouldn’t even call it meditation, can be just your own way to quiet your mind and open your heart to get a sense of vastness and perspective and graciousness. Whatever way you can find to develop these beautiful capacities of awareness and presence, do so. Then, these ways also become important in the work that you do with others if you are a healing professional. But even more importantly, there are certain things that will come up in your meditation or contemplative mindfulness practice that you’ll need help with – they’re hard to bear witness to alone or they don’t get very clear for you. Then you can do it in the beautiful paired dance of mindfulness with someone who is a wise healer or a therapist.

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The two complement one another, and in that way, we both receive the support we need or as someone who is working as a professional, our capacity for presence and for loving awareness can offer the space. Somehow we give the gift back and forth. The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine www.nicabm.com


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There’s a kind of grace that comes in this, and it doesn’t just come from us to our patients. There’s a grace that comes from them, from their sincerity, their suffering, and their willingness to look or work through their struggles.

“...grace just doesn’t come from us to our patients... grace comes from them and we learn from one another...”

We learn from one another and that is really the beauty of it. I don’t draw the boundaries or distinctions. I see them really as part of a whole.

Self-Care for the Practitioner Dr. Buczynski: What about self-care, Jack? As a meditation teacher, you work long hours sometimes and with a lot of people who are suffering. Practitioners on this call, no matter whether they’re psychotherapists or physicians or nurses or physical therapists, they’re also working with people who are going or have gone through terrible tragedies. What might you say about self-care for the helper?

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“Self care is critical; it’s at the center of healing and awakening.”

Dr. Kornfield: Self care is critical; it’s really at the center of this work of healing and awakening. There’s a poem from Mary Oliver where she writes something like... “For years and years, I struggled just to love my life.” It’s the first line and that’s about half of spiritual life right in there.

Now, this love means that you care for yourself and value yourself and not the outer social values, but the values of taking time, tending your body, listening to music, and being in the presence of loved ones. There isn’t some simple spiritual practice you can do that will make you immune. I remember asking this very great Tibetan Lama, “Can you give me some white light exercise that surrounds me so I can just work all the time and not be affected by the intensity and the suffering and the struggles that we share together?” He listened to all this and he said, “No. My answer to you is to teach less and take more periods of meditation and relaxation and vacation. Live a more balanced life. That’s what you have to do. You have to live in a different way.” When we look in the mirror and we see perhaps that this body isn’t who I am, we also realize that it’s precious and we have to tend to it.

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What does this body and this heart and the goodness that we can bring to the world optimally ask of us?

“When we look in the mirror and see that this body isn’t who I am, we also realize that it’s precious...”



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It means, in many cases, making changes and even sacrifices. “I’ll have less money or fewer patients or whatever...but I’m going to live the life that’s beautiful, that’s been given to me to live, and I’ll make something really alive and loving out of it.” It’s a challenge, of course, and you have to go it alone. You can’t do it the way other people are doing it. You have to go against the stream sometimes and if you do, you find that you are liberated and in that, there’s a tremendous blessing.

“If you go against the stream, it can be liberating and a tremendous blessing.”

Dr. Buczynski: I’m afraid we’re out of time, Jack, this was a very, very touching call. I’ve taken many notes, and I’m sure that most of the people on the call have as well. To everyone out there, Jack is the author of many books; tonight I’ll just show you a couple of them. One is Bringing Home the Dharma and another, and I love this title is After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. Jack, thank you for all that you have done. You‘ve been working for, I’m going to guess, 40 years, or close to it between your training as a meditation teacher and your training in psychology and all of the teachings that you’ve done. Again, thank you for your life’s work. Dr. Kornfield: Thank you, Ruth, it’s really been a pleasure.

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TalkBack Segment with Ron Siegel, PsyD and Rick Hanson, PhD Welcome back. This was a great call. Let’s start again by just sharing what stood out to you most about it. Dr. Siegel: What stood out for me most is simply Jack. Now, part of this is I have a bit of a positive transference to him. He ran the first silent meditation retreat I ever sat in back in the mid 1970’s and the first teacher who leads the silent retreat can be very powerful for you. But, what he had back then in the 70’s, which has carried through throughout his career, is this remarkably heartfelt and practical approach to mindfulness practices and the teachings that they’re embedded in.

“Jack helps people to open up to the heart and to appreciate the vulnerability that we all share.”

A lot of these practices can seem kind of cerebral. They can seem as if we’re just watching thoughts or just paying attention to sensations. Jack really helps people to open up to the heart, to the level of feeling, and particularly to appreciate the vulnerability that we all share.

This is the vulnerability that becomes obvious once we stop distracting ourselves, start to slow down, begin to do mindfulness practice, and begin to notice what’s happening moment to moment.

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As our defense of busyness starts to drop away, we start to feel a great deal of tenderness, and there’s a poem – I think it’s a Mary Oliver poem – that says basically ”the cracks in objects are what lets the light in.” There’s a way in which, by allowing ourselves to be with this vulnerability, we really allow ourselves not only to heal emotionally, but also the potential for awakening in very profound ways cognitively is there as well. Dr. Buczynski: How about you Rick? Dr. Hanson: I was very struck by Jack’s phrase, “Consciousness doesn’t age,” and it goes to the larger point which is that awareness, this field in our experience and from a scientific standpoint, is still deeply mysterious. How in the world does the phenomenology of our experience such as the sense of the color red or the smell of cinnamon or the love in our heart… how do those experiences actually arise as it were out of the meat that’s still a great mystery?

“...awareness itself...is never tainted or stained or damaged by what it holds...”

(They arise) subjectively. We have awareness that feels like a field of space in which sounds, sights, tastes, touches, smells and mental phenomena, thoughts, feelings, emotions – what have you – come and go.

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Yet, awareness itself, which is what Jack was getting at, is never tainted or stained or damaged by what it holds which can give people immediately, directly, through mindfulness…a sense of refuge, a sense that they can be with what’s there – their own experience. They can stand in an observing place without being swept away. I find that very practical for people. They can see it directly in their own experience; it’s not metaphysical or scientific; it’s directly available and The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine www.nicabm.com


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things come and go in awareness, but awareness is never changed. It’s like the surface of the TV screen across which images flow. It could be the tranquility channel or the horror show channel, but the TV itself is never damaged. Then it also gives people an opportunity to pair, to bring together that sense of awareness which is not itself harmed by what it knows and the contents which bring a kind of positive quality. The awareness itself is increasingly infusing the negative material, which helps neurologically as well. As people have heard before, neurons that fire together wire together. So we’re associating that spaciousness that’s not damaged with content that could be very troubling. Dr. Buczynski: Ron, Jack talked about the process of understanding loss and how that can bring a certain kind of dignity. How can patients who are in that space go about processing loss in that way? Dr. Siegel: One of the ways that loss brings about dignity is that it brings us face to face with reality. Much of the time we have what we might think of as a false sense of security, imagining that all of our ducks are in a row and we’re going to be okay and our loved ones are going to be okay.

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But, of course, this is all very unpredictable and when losses arise, we start to notice, “Oh my gosh, everything changes.”

“...loss brings about dignity: it brings us face to face with reality.”

We start to notice the things that we’ve been clinging to; we start to notice that sometimes what we’ve lost is something precious and sometimes what we’ve lost is actually optional. It’s a self-image perhaps, or status in someone else’s eyes or something else which we tend to cling to passionately, but isn’t necessary for our well-being or for other people’s well-being. One of the ways that we can work with loss to bring dignity is by seeing the value in it – seeing the idea that suffering is grace – we can learn through our losses. This is easier to do if we don’t have a lot of negative stereotypes about feeling badly as Jack talked about the Lakota Sioux honoring grieving and seeing tears flowing as a way to connect with the gods. Even in our own Western European traditions, it was said in the 19th century that if somebody had lost a beloved and they weren’t still pining after them 20 or 30 years later, their love must not have been very deep as opposed to what we now have which is, “Hey, haven’t you gotten over that yet?”

“...loss is a part of life - a channel both for awakening and connecting us to one another.”

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It’s a matter of respecting that loss is a part of life – really a channel both for awakening and of connecting us to one another. Dr. Buczynski: Rick, one of the things that we talk a lot about is mindfully turning toward difficult emotions and I want to focus just a little bit on fear. How can we help people mindfully turn toward fear?

Dr. Hanson: Fear is an important practice and it’s been personally important. I would say that I’m mildly anxious by temperament. I can think of, right off the top, three skills or practices that clients can do related to this and they can pick one or none of these. The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine www.nicabm.com


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The first is to appreciate, really appreciate, the ways in which Mother Nature has endowed us with an ongoing trickle of anxiety that usually is a false alarm. In other words, our brains evolved to overestimate threats and underestimate opportunities and resources because that’s a good way to keep critters alive in the wild although it’s lousy for quality of life and longterm health and well-being.

“...people can challenge their paper tiger paranoia.”

People can challenge their beliefs or their presumptions or the way that they’re framing things in terms of this cognitive bias that essentially tilts people toward what I call paper tiger paranoia. So that’s the first suggestion: try to challenge assumptions about over estimating threats and underestimating opportunities and resources.

A second thing I’d suggest is to bring to awareness the facts – an awareness of the protections around and inside them. Literally, I’ll have them looking at the walls of a room or the locks on the door or bringing to mind a list of people who would come through for them or the resources they have inside. They have credit cards and car keys, for example. Those can actually help people realize that they can afford to release unreasonable anxiety and they can afford to feel as safe as they reasonably can.

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Then the last thing that I’ll often do with people is to encourage them to come into the now – the present moment where, for most people, most moments of most days, they’re truly and fundamentally all right right now. Most of the input that’s coming into the brain originates inside of the body and there’s a lot of visceral stimulation coming in. Most of it is signaling, essentially, and for most people, in most days, in most moments, all is well. We have to listen to those signals. You have to recognize that you may not have been all right in the past, and you may not be all right in the future, but in this moment, existentially, you’re basically all right, right now.

“Most of the input coming into the brain originates inside the body - there’s a lot of visceral stimulation.”

That’s available to us right now, and it’s a very visceral way to have a growing sense of inner peace. Dr. Buczynski: One thing that often makes us anxious, Ron, is uncertainty. Jack talked about the wisdom of uncertainty. How would you approach that with your patients? Dr. Siegel: I talk about this a great deal with my patients and it’s partly because I share with Rick being temperamentally on the anxious side and having noticed all sorts of antics that my own mind goes through to try to ward off bad events.

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A lot of that involves developing fantasies of having control – fantasies of having ducks in a row in various fashions.



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These inevitably fall to ruin. Inevitably, the best laid plans don’t work out exactly as we’ve expected them, so I talk a lot with patients about how we can’t know and what the best tricks are that the mind plays in order to delude ourselves into trying to know. For one thing, the mind does a lot of obsessional planning, sometimes that’s adaptive, sometimes it’s not.

“We’d rather have some sense of being in charge ...rather than opening to not knowing.”

But the other thing that it does is sometimes leap to catastrophic fantasies because it’s easier to think, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to get the bad diagnosis” than it is to think, “I just don’t know. I just don’t know what’s going to happen.” We’d rather have some sense of being in charge even if it’s to making ourselves miserable than really opening to not knowing.

There’s a story that Jack tells about his teacher Ajahn Chah. He didn’t include it in this particular presentation, but one of the monks in the forest monastery was going to go off to Bangkok to take care of some financial matters and he told the teacher where he’d be “I won’t be around the monastery tomorrow; I’ll be in Bangkok.” And Ajahn Chah said, “Maybe!” If we can only approach each moment as though we really don’t know what’s going to come next, then we could have this kind of beginner’s mind. Jack mentioned this notion. He didn’t give Suzuki Roshi’s full phrase about it, but Suzuki Roshi said, “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.”

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When we think we know, we’re simply not open to experience. We stay with our existing schemas and all of the new information that comes in we simply assimilate into that. When we really know we don’t know, we can start to accommodate; we can start to be flexible in how we understand the world so that while it’s scary to not know, it’s also extremely liberating.

“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.”

Dr. Buczynski: Thanks. Rick, how can practitioners hone their ability to bear witness for their patients? Dr. Hanson: I think that’s so central for clinicians both at the beginning of their career and throughout. It reminds me of that classic line, “Fences make for good neighbors.”

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“...people with porous boundaries have a hard time sustaining empathy because they’re just too flooded...”

There’s a massive body of research that shows that building up an internal sense of autonomy and stability here is a basis for joining with the other over there. Also, there’s a fair amount of research that shows that people with really porous boundaries have a hard time sustaining empathy because they’re just too flooded by what comes across the line there.

How to develop that capacity to be really centered, stable, and present here, while simultaneously very, very joined is a high art. The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine www.nicabm.com


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I’ll give two suggestions that I’ve used for myself and I’ve also shared with clients because they, too, want to be able to stay stable while they interact with other people. The first is to imagine yourself like a deeply rooted tree so that you’re really grounded to draw on the teachings of Buddhism about equanimity which is a very fundamental factor of the mind – it’s a combination of stability and balance and openness – all three together. So, you’re like a deeply rooted tree, oak tree or take your pick, and the winds whistle through the reactions of the other people, but we’re not ourselves knocked over by what blows through us and at the end of the storm, we’re still here. That’s a very visceral sense partly driven by imagery.

“...so many factors have led to this moment, most of which have nothing to do with us.”

The other thing I’ll talk with people about (and I try to remember myself to bring this balance of equanimity and compassion and kindness together) is to realize that whatever is showing up here in my mind or in my client’s mind or in the minds of other people in my client’s lives…whatever is showing up in this moment, whatever is swirling, whatever eddying pattern is rising in the river of reality, it’s due to “10,000 causes upstream.” In other words, so many factors have led to this moment, most of which have nothing to do with us.

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Let’s say there’s another person over there that’s angry with us or they’re sad or they’re upset or they’re just being rude in traffic…so many things have led that person to be where they are in this moment right now, and most of those things are just outside of our control.

“We can focus on what we can do without being so agitated about what’s out of our control.”

Openness and recognition of the big picture, as Ron was saying earlier, helps depersonalize it. We don’t take life so personally then and it helps us to be more relaxed. We can focus on what we can do without being so agitated about what’s out of our control. Dr. Buczynski: Thanks, and again, we’re out of time. That seems to happen so quickly. This was a very special call tonight.

Everyone, I’m going to be sending you an email and in the email there’s going to be a link to the Comment Board. If you would, please go to the Comment Board and talk about how you’re going to use what you’ve heard tonight, either share something that you’re going to use from what Jack said or from what Rick or Ron said, and share with us…how you’re going to apply it.

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When you do, please put in your first and last name, your city and state or country, and go ahead and share your thoughts. Also, if you are a Gold Member, I’ll send you a link to this call so that you can listen to it over and over again and add it to all of the other calls that we’ve had so far. I’ll send you a link to the video as well. The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine www.nicabm.com


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On Friday, I’ll send you the transcript. I know many people use the transcript and find that extremely valuable. If you’re not a Gold Member and you’d like to be, just click on the link right below. You’ll get all of the calls that we’ve had so far as well as everything that’s coming up when it’s broadcast. Next week, we’ll be talking with Pat Ogden, so you’re going to want to be sure to be here for that call. Pat’s an expert in sensory motor therapy, but also in trauma and she uses mindfulness an awful lot in her work. In continuing to think about applications, we thought it was important to bring her into the series. Until then, I’ll see you. Take good care.

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About The Speaker:

Jack Kornfield, PhD is one of the leading Buddhist teachers in America. A practitioner for over 40 years, he is one of the key teachers to introduce mindfulness and vipassana meditation to the West. His approach emphasizes compassion, loving kindness and the profound path of mindful presence, all offered in simple, accessible ways in his books, CD’s, classes and retreats.

Featured Books by Speaker: Jack Kornfield, PhD

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The Wise Heart

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

Click HERE to Purchase Now!

Click HERE to Purchase Now!

Find out more about this and related programs at: www.nicabm.com The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine www.nicabm.com


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About The TalkBack Speakers: Since 1989, Ruth Buczynski, PhD has combined her commitment to mind/body medicine with a savvy business model. As president of The National Institute for the Clinical Application for Behavioral Medicine, she’s been a leader in bringing innovative training and professional development programs to thousands of health and mental health care practitioners throughout the world. Successfully sponsoring distance-learning programs and annual conferences for over 20 years, she’s now expanded into the “cloud.” During the past 4 years, she’s developed intelligent and thoughtfully researched teleseminars, and most recently webinars, which continue to grow exponentially.

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Ronald D. Siegel, PsyD is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School, where he has taught for over 20 years. He is a long time student of mindfulness meditation and serves on the Board of Directors and faculty of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. Dr. Siegel teaches nationally about mindfulness and psychotherapy and mind/body treatment, while maintaining a private clinical practice in Lincoln, Massachusetts. He is coeditor of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy (Guilford Press) and coauthor of Back Sense: A Revolutionary Approach to Halting the Cycle of Chronic Back Pain (Broadway Books).

Rick Hanson, PhD is a neuropsychologist and author of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom and Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time. Founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and Affiliate of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, he’s taught at Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, and in meditation centers worldwide.

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Dr. Hanson’s work has been featured on the BBC, NPR, Consumer Reports Health, and U.S. News and World Report, and his articles have appeared in Tricycle Magazine, Insight Journal, and Inquiring Mind.


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