Breathe, Awaken, Remember: Takeaways from a Conversation with Jon Kabat-Zinn

This week, the American Public Media radio show, On Being, features a conversation with Jon Kabat-Zinn, renowned scientist, writer, and meditation teacher. You can listen to the full interview here.*

As I listened, there were a couple pieces that particularly stood out for me. The first was a quote from the end of Walden by Henry David Thoreau (which I am finally reading for the first time and will surely have more to share about in later posts). In the third to last line, Thoreau writes, “Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”

Krista Tippett, host of On Being, puts it this way, “any moment in which we’re not aware, any moment that we’re not attentive to, is lost.” “You’ve abandoned your own life,” adds Jon Kabat-Zinn. And he goes on to say, “all you have time for is this, because there’s nothing else than this.” All you have is time for this—meaning whatever is happening right now, because there’s nothing else than this in this moment.

One way to cultivate this wakefulness, awareness, attentiveness, and presence in yoga and meditation, is through the practice of continually coming back to the breath. Each time we come back to our breath, we come back to mindfulness, to wakeful consciousness. It’s a lifelong practice, again and again—with gentleness and loving-kindness—to remind ourselves to bring our minds back to the breath, and in so doing to come back again and again to being fully awake. As we keep coming back to the breath and back to mindfulness, we also begin to catch glimpses of something else—glimpses of the true self, who we really are, beyond our thoughts, beyond our bodies, beyond our emotions. The true self that is and was always there, from which we have strayed, forgotten, and are called to remember.

This brings me to the second piece that stood out for me in Krista Tippett’s conversation with Jon Kabat-Zinn—the poem “Love after Love” by Derek Walcott. You can hear Jon Kabat-Zinn recite the poem here.

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other's welcome, 

and say, sit here.  Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you 

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit.  Feast on your life.

 

*My thanks to Martha, a wonderful teacher at evolution, who reminded me what a source of inspiration this program could be.