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Hi, everybody. Since self -improvement is kind of in the air this time of year, I thought I would choose our 2022 episode on mindfulness.
We cover its origins, how it became a thing in the West, and the upsides, and, yes, drawbacks.
I hope it changes your life for the better.
Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here -ish, and this is Stuff You Should Know -ish.
This is full -on Stuff You Should Know, Charles.
I remember that point, I feel like it was about eight to 10 years ago where everyone was just saying -ish on the end of things, instead of saying, you know, finding the real word that they were looking for.
So, like an approximation of the word, or of the thing they were describing?
So like, I'm 40 -ish?
No, not even that. Like, when there's like a real word that could be used and they would just throw -ish on another word.
I don't know what you're talking about, no.
Yeah, it was a thing.
It swept the nation.
When was it? Or maybe I'm thinking of the Macarena.
That's what you're thinking of.
Okay. All right. Man, that really did sweep the nation.
Remember that? Who let the dogs out?
It was like a one -two punch.
Who did let the dogs out?
Did they ever find that out?
No. I think it was a rhetorical question.
It's the kind of rhetorical question you could ask yourself, Chuck, while you're meditating.
But first, thanks, thanks, but I'm going to step all over the segue because before we get started, Chuck, I want to do, if you'll allow me, another shout -out for my little niece, Mila's movie, big time movie called No Exit, that's coming out as far as when this episode drops tomorrow.
So February 25th, 2022.
No matter when you hear this, just immediately go on to Hulu, subscribe if you haven't yet, and check out my niece, Mila, in No Exit.
Because she is amazing.
You sent me the trailer.
What did you think?
It looks like a taught thriller.
She looks fantastic from what you can tell from a trailer.
I know, man. You just saved all the bad parts for the movie.
I don't think they did.
I was reading an interview with the director and he was saying, like, she was doing such an amazing job of being terrified and freaked out and everything that, like, in between takes, the other cast members would be like, are you okay?
And she'd be like, yeah, why are you okay?
And she'd be like, you know, I'm acting, right?
Exactly. She's like, it's acting.
Like John Lovett said.
Yeah. So, on Hulu, No Exit, February 25th, my niece, Mila, just kills it.
There you go. Can't wait.
Thanks again for that, Chuck.
So let's get started.
Thank you for not passing judgment on that either way.
You're reseguing. Because passing judgment means I'm not being mindful because a big part of mindfulness is to not judge.
So it's like, this is one of those ones, you know, those episodes where we just start talking about the thing without defining it.
This is not going to be one of those episodes because I think it would be kind of rough otherwise, you know?
Yeah. And I guess if you're going to define mindfulness, you need to kind of go back in time.
I mean, I guess we could hop in the Wayback Machine.
We haven't done that in a while.
It's been a while. Let's pull the old cover off.
It's quite dusty in here.
And a little bit of mildew.
A little mildew. There's some old crystals boxes.
Those are yours. Remember you had them accidentally delivered to your house?
Right. And then we went back to the Old West to celebrate.
You're thinking of Back to the Future 3.
Oh, right. Right. I call Mary Steimbergen.
Meaning if we get to play her, not date her or anything.
I don't know about date Mary Steimbergen.
I was at a crush on her.
Isn't that, oh really?
That's Ted Danson's old squeeze, right?
It's his current squeeze.
Am I going to fight him for?
Are they still together?
Yeah, I think so. Gosh, they've been together for a while.
Yeah, good couple. Okay, great.
Good stuff. So who knew we were going to be talking about Ted Danson at the beginning of mindfulness?
Not me. I could have guessed Richard Gere, but Ted Danson's a big surprise.
If we get in the Wayback Machine and go back in time to sort of the beginning of Buddhism, you'd have to look at the language Pali and the word Sati.
Pali is P -A -L -I. Sati is S -A -T -I.
There are a lot of different words for mindfulness.
But the one that we kind of identify with, it's kind of been used most from Pali, which is a middle Indo -Aryan liturgical language from the early branches of Buddhism.
It's a lot to take in.
The reason that Pali is so important is because they say that it was the language of the Buddha.
And at the very least, it was the first language that the Buddha's words, which have been passed down orally, were written down in.
So it's like legit, old school Buddhist thinking and teachings.
And one of the basic parts of that is, like you said, Sati, which has been translated to mindfulness.
But it was translated by a British colonial administrator, wasn't it?
That's right. And it kind of more accurately is translated as memory of the present, which I think is really kind of a cool way to look at mindfulness.
Yeah, absolutely. It really kind of reveals what's going on, especially once you kind of learn a little more about it, you're like that actually works about as perfectly as can be.
But it got it got translated into the word mindfulness, Sati into mindfulness by a British colonial administrator in Ceylon, which is now Sri Lanka back in the 1880s.
So it was some British guy who said Sati means mindfulness and actually kind of gave it to us today, although there was a long period where it had been forgotten.
But I think you can't really talk about mindfulness, even though it's changed so dramatically, especially in the last decade or so without kind of describing what it it was originally meant to describe or what it still describes if you're a practicing Buddhist.
And that is that like you are not only like paying attention to the moment and like, like experiencing this moment without letting your thoughts wander to the past or the future or anything like that, but that whatever you're experiencing in the moment, no matter what it is, you're experiencing with equanimity,
which means that you're not passing judgment on it as good or bad or anything else.
It just is. And it sounds easy to describe, but if you've ever tried it, it's one of the hardest things a human being can ever set out to do.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's very, very natural for a human to seek out and contemplate and think about the things that feel good and please them and to try and stuff down and get rid of and avoid things that either hurt, literally hurt, or emotionally hurt or things that are painful or unpleasant.
And boy, that is a tough thing to overcome my friend.
Just the condition of being human makes that very difficult.
But yeah, and you just nailed it on the head.
Not once, but twice Chuck, when you said that it's a very human condition and part of Sati, the point of Sati, as far as like Buddhists are concerned, is that it's a step that you take on the path to enlightenment to free yourself from the cycle of like life and death and rebirth and to become like
a truly enlightened being that's freed from all of that.
And so you have to free yourself from that human condition.
And a big part of that is to free yourself from yearning, from wanting, because yearning and wanting or being repelled by something and wanting to get away from it.
They're two sides of the same coin, as far as Sati is concerned, which is you are wishing that something is different or was different than it actually is.
And that's the basis of suffering.
And suffering is the thing that keeps you in that cycle of life and death and rebirth.
So meditating to become mindful and nonjudgmental about your present experience is one step toward relieving yourself of suffering and then freeing yourself from that shackle of being born and reborn and reborn again.
Well, you my friend have just spoken about the noble truths, in part, because craving is the cause of suffering, is the second noble truth.
And to cease that craving will bring about the ceasing of that suffering, which is the third noble truth.
And basically experiencing the moment without, and everything about the moment without judgment is sort of the goal.
And for modern, we're gonna talk a lot about sort of the beginnings of mindfulness and kind of how it's become kind of a hip thing to do here in the United States, starting in about the 1970s and on, especially today.
But we're kind of talking in American modern terms about stress and de -stressing.
And the Buddhists have a term for that, which is Dukkha, D -U -K -K -H -A.
And that is, you know, again, to avoid or destroy something that we don't like.
And what we usually don't like is something that's gonna put a stress on us.
Right, exactly. And they're saying like, dude, this is part of the point of life.
I'm reading this really amazing book by Thich Nhat Hanh right now.
I'm rereading it actually, it's one of those ones you just kind of go back and reread.
Very like easy, slim volume, it's called No Mud, No Lotus.
And it basically says like, without suffering, you can't have happiness and vice versa.
Pretty, pretty basic stuff.
But like, he really gets into explaining how to confront suffering and understand that it's just part of life.
And that's a huge part of the Buddhist approach to mindfulness.
It's not to get away from suffering, it's to recognize it as it is and also simultaneously not make a bigger deal out of it than it is.
Because suffering is enough, it's bad enough as it is.
But another part of the human condition is to make it way worse by anticipating it, worrying about it, like focusing on it after it happens.
There's a lot of stuff we do to our own suffering that explodes it.
And part of mindfulness training is to stop doing that as well too.
You ain't kidding. And the lack of judgment is a big, big part of all of this.
And we're going to talk quite a bit here and there about Jon Kabat -Zinn, who is always easy, far and away the sort of leader of the modern American mindfulness movement in a lot of different ways.
And we'll get to him in more detail later.
But he says that awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose, and that's another big part of it, it's a very purposeful practice, but not meditation, which we'll get to that as well.
Because meditation is a true physical practice that you in mental practice, whereas mindfulness is more of a state of being that you're trying to get to.
But he says on purpose in the present moment and nonjudgmentally, they always have to kind of hammer home the lack of judgment being a key part.
Right, exactly. And he's a proponent and kind of one of the founders of what you can refer to as secular mindfulness, which is this current incarnation of mindfulness that's sweeping the West.
It's like you said, hip, that's been kind of like removed deliberately, as we'll see removed from its Buddhist roots and Buddhist context to make it more palatable and scientific seeming.
Yeah, secular, secular, strip it of all the religion.
And maybe we can sell it to Americans.
Exactly. In an app.
But the yeah, the upshot of all this though, Chuck is that no matter who you are, where you're coming from, if you're talking about mindfulness, you're talking about paying attention to the present moment and doing the best you can at not judging anything that's going on in that present experience,
and just taking it on its face value and engaging in it fully.
That's mindfulness in a nutshell.
Yeah. And it's not anything that the Buddhists had a corner on, they just probably did it better because all different kinds of religions throughout antiquity had, you know, chanting or some kind of mindfulness practice, maybe prayers, or through songs or dance, you know, that kind of thing has been
around as long as people have been practicing religion.
So the Buddhists did not invent it, but I think they got it fairly right.
So let's talk a little more about how we got here today, historically speaking, after a break.
What do you think about that?
It sounds great. I'm going to breathe in the meantime.
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Hey, let me teach you something I've been using that tick not Han taught me not personally but through his writing in a book that was published that I purchased with Monty.
Smash your hand with a hammer.
Yeah. He said try to focus on anything else chump.
Right. There's a bunch of different mantras you can say and I don't know even sure that's the right word but one that I keep using is and it's just striking what taking a breath and deliberately focusing on that breath just breathing in once and breathing out once can do to like just suck you right out
of wherever your mind is in the past or the future.
It's really striking what how it can do that but his was it's a deep breathing in.
I notice that I'm alive and then breathing out.
I'm happy to be alive and just doing it once like immediately brings me back into the present moment.
It's really cool. I like it.
It's all very new for me but I think it's it's pretty cool.
Yeah, there's a lot of value there and you know you can like practice something like this and those breathing techniques it's not exclusive to mindfulness or meditation or buddhism.
I you know that's a great technique if you have kids.
I found that you know with if my daughter is having a bad time just kind of get her to slow down and take a couple of good deep breaths.
Oh yeah. Always a good thing to do.
Yeah. And Emily who you know someone who has a lot of anxieties in her life as a struggling small business owner we will do this thing where we have a hug breathing where I will go up to her and we will have a good tight bear hug embrace and we'll breathe in together and it sort of like doubles the power
of it. Wow that's neat Chuck.
Is that your own? Did you come up with that?
Yeah I mean I'm sure I mean I didn't get it from anywhere but I'm sure I didn't invent that.
It sounds like a Viking mindfulness.
Like Hell's Angels?
Sure yeah. It's the Hell's Angels technique you came up with.
You can call it whatever you want.
It's your invention.
It's a good one. Yeah there's something about breathing together that close physically.
It's pretty powerful.
So if you went back a few hundred years, a couple hundred years even, and you spoke to any Buddhist around the world and said hey how often do you do mindfulness meditation?
They would look at you like they had no idea what you're talking about and if you said Sati, they'd say oh that's not for us.
That's for the monks and the nuns up in the caves and the mountains.
We don't do that kind of stuff.
We're Buddhist. We care about morality and we worship local deities and all that stuff.
But that's kind of advanced.
That's more than the average Buddhist does and it wasn't until I think the late 19th century in Burma that that was finally kind of broken up and meditation and mindfulness together were kind of introduced for the first time to lay Buddhists like just the normal everyday average Buddhist living their life.
Yeah this is pretty cool.
I know we love it when we can kind of pinpoint when things happen or when things change.
And this is one of them on November 28th in 1885.
This is when the British imperial army conquered Burma and said King, we're going to mispronounce some of these, Thilval maybe.
I think that's right.
You're out of here and that king was promoting mindfulness and promoting Buddhist institutions throughout the nation.
The Brits of course said nah we're not going to really do that.
So it fell to the lay people to get organized, to find new places to meet, to find their own gathering grounds.
And a lot of times these were monasteries and it would go through it.
I don't want to say state -sponsored but kind of state -sponsored.
Yeah or state -supported or something like that.
So rather than being like oh I don't know who I guess we're not Buddhists anymore.
They took it by the horns and they did something with it but one of the outcroppings of that was that these monks who used to just go meditate out in the mountains or the hills or in the woods now had audiences of everyday people who were practicing Buddhists that they were teaching this stuff too.
And it was one of these guys, Ledi Sayedow, who was a Buddhist monk who said you know what this isn't just for us.
This is for everybody.
And closely in Ledi Sayedow's footsteps came Mingen Seyow.
S -A -Y -A -W. Seyow. I think that's right.
And that monk was the first one to actually teach mindfulness and meditation to regular people I think around 1911.
Yeah I mean it's cool stuff.
Like I love the idea that Ledi Sayedow kind of put forth which was you don't have to go to a monastery even.
Like we've set these up for you and you can.
You don't have to retreat to a cave.
You don't even have to go into a deep meditative state or anything.
Like just momentary bits of mindfulness are very helpful.
And that's a good way to reach regular lay people.
And I think through practice is when Seyow came along and said hey that all sounds great and buddy I'm going to teach it.
Right. So the people in what is now Myanmar are the ones who kind of broke mindfulness meditation out of its little...
Slumber? Sure, cage or something like that.
And democratized it a little bit.
But it was as far as the people in the west are concerned it was the Japanese and their development of Zen Buddhism that we have to thank.
Because this is you can pretty much trace a direct line between the mindfulness and the meditation and the approach to Buddhism in the west today back to the 20th century Japan.
And specifically a guy named Daesetsu Teitaro, D .T.
Suzuki. So D .T. Suzuki was kind of a what's called a Buddhist modernist thinker who said there's different things we can do with this but let's approach this a little more rationally a little less dogmatically and open it up to people like our friends in what's soon to be Myanmar.
And not only that let's start relating to the west a little more and D .T.
Suzuki actually kind of carried this message this idea of Zen Buddhism with him over to America and Europe and it just started to catch on like wildfire.
Yeah I think it's really interesting too that it was another act of war that led to you know that helped give rise to someone like Suzuki just like when the Brits overthrew Burma.
When the US Navy attacked Tokyo Harbor in 1853 there was you know basically Japan was like you know we gotta we gotta start relating to the west a little bit more and sort of modernize and this was known as the Meiji restoration and part of that was saying hey Shinto is going to be our religion our
main religion and not Buddhism which led the Buddhists to say hey maybe we should modernize our religion as well to you know so we don't get left by the wayside and that gave rise to someone like D .T.
Suzuki. Right so it was from that modernization that Buddhist modernism came about and it's basically what you would recognize as Buddhism today like very thoughtful very interior dwelling the idea that the universe is all connected all these were like Buddhist thoughts before but it was it was Buddhism
allowing itself to be influenced by modernism and by other groups like the Romantics and the Transcendentalists right so they jumped on it big time it was pretty it was like a confluence of perfect timing as far as coming to the United States and like the counterculture ready for this but in a weird
way it was like the United States unbeknownst to the counterculture beats and then later the hippies that their predecessors like the Transcendentalists had had pre -influenced what was coming back to them so it was already in a very palatable form for Americans who were open to the idea of like mind
expansion and taking acid and you know and meditating and were just open to the ideas of other cultures of becoming like more in tune with the universe it was they were just waiting for it and it came to them in the in the briefcase I guess of D .T.
Suzuki and it just kind of took off from there so the idea everything we understand about mindfulness and meditation you can trace back to like D .T.
Suzuki and those beats.
Absolutely and there were three people in particular in the 70s and 60s and 70s practicing this Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzburg who were not together but they studied separately meditation and Burma and then in the same time they became sort of the center of the vipassana meditation movement
here in the United States and they're still around they're still doing their thing.
Right so it was from that same group there was actually a time where John Cabot Zinn the guy we mentioned earlier.
Z -I by the way not Z -E -N that would be too far on the nose.
Oh wait what? If his name was spelled Z -E -N.
Oh I got you. Boy I was not paying attention to the the current experience very well I'm sorry.
Oh that's okay that'd be like a boxer being named boxer.
Yeah it would be but spelled differently.
Right I was for some reason I was going more toward the Cabernet Zinn play on words.
Well because you're putting that eyes in there.
Yeah so he's known as the godfather of modern mindfulness according to The Guardian at least which is a pretty legit newspaper.
And by the way thank you also to Olivia for helping us out with this one Chuck.
This was a tough one to wrangle.
Very she did she did but John Cabot Zinn was among those people Jack Kornfield great name, Sharon Salzburg and Joseph Goldstein he actually taught at their Insight Meditation Society and he was a big -time practitioner of Zinn Buddhism and he was on like I guess a meditation retreat and he had a bit
of insight well I guess an epiphany is probably what you'd call it that he was meant to help apply Buddhist techniques to help people who are in pain.
He had either a microbiology or molecular biology degree and he ended up applying it to medicine and figuring out how to join Buddhist practices in medicine to help people in the 70s and it really started to take off from there.
Yeah I mean he sort of had the same idea as previous cultures which was hey if we want to and not sell for money but if we want to popularize this we should get a little bit away from the religion part the sort of hippy dippy new -agey part and he really wanted to start talking in concrete terms about things
that everyone worried about which was stress and like if you want to make your life less stressful here's a way to do it and more on mindfulness and less on meditation which was still a tough sell to mainstream America and still is today I think.
Yeah but it's gotten less and less I feel like he finally overcame the threshold that was you know keeping it back in the last like 5 -10 years and achieved what he was looking for.
I mean think about mindfulness is everywhere today and it is almost totally divorced from any kind of religious connotations.
It seems like a neuroscience tool more than anything the way that it's treated in the West and that was his goal.
He was trying to get it to the most people possible study it scientifically and then apply it to help people and specifically again he was initially looking at how it can help people with pain and he came up with mindfulness -based stress reduction MBSR which is still very much in use today and then
there was an offshoot too Chuck mindfulness -based cognitive therapy and that's that takes CBT which is a proven type of talk therapy used extensively in psychology and applies John Cabot Zinn's approach to mindfulness to it right.
Yeah and I think one of the big tenants here is to interrupt automatic thoughts and the automatic thoughts that can lead to an automatic behavior so the automatic thought might just be your propensity to feel that stress and reach for a drink immediately and not even think like oh boy I need a drink
because I'm stressed out and that'll help out.
Right. It becomes this automatic thing and he was all about and the practice of mindfulness is all about disruption and disrupting that flow without judgment.
Yeah because one of the big things in cognitive behavioral therapy is that you have a thought your thought leads to a feeling and your feeling leads to a behavior and oftentimes it's like you said it's very destructive and you don't even realize it's going on until your life is kind of falling apart
or it's certainly not as good as it could be and it doesn't even have to be a drink it could be a doughnut it could be yelling at a cashier at a you know a grocery store like all sorts of different things and you are totally out of control of it.
The idea behind this mindfulness adding mindfulness to cognitive behavioral therapy is that you are training yourself to detach yourself from all thoughts and emotions so that you can evaluate them clearly so that none of them can jump out of nowhere pounce on you and the next thing you know you've
eaten a dozen donuts and had six scotches and you have no idea why you do have the idea why and you probably haven't gotten to that point because you've stopped the whole process by recognizing it the moment it began ideally theoretically on paper that's the the purpose of using mindfulness to help
especially with with mental health.
Yeah there's a journalist named Robert Wright and he kind of put it in a way that I kind of like which was to think of your thoughts and emotions as transient so it's not like that kind of goes back to the no judgment thing you can have these bad feelings and bad emotions and bad tendencies but if you
allow if you allow them to just flow through you they become transient they don't stick around the same sort of ideas that you you can't why worry about things that you can't control right but not in a an office poster kind of way you know what I mean sure it runs a bit deeper than that it's not like
a Pollyanna thing no and as a matter of fact like if you want to trace it all the way back to its original Buddhist roots it's that like we have very little if any control over life and that recognizing that will free us from all of our desires and the idea that like we have to have things and we want
to hang on to it like it just lets you let things flow by and you can enjoy them and experience them as they come rather than hoping for the next one needing the next donut or fearing the next loss you just experience life as it comes that's kind of the point of that of understanding that everything
is transient and impermanent including your own your own life like you're going to die one day there's ultimately the big like you know like bingo number yeah like that's ultimately what it's leading to is you're you yourself are impermanent and so understanding that through getting there through meditation daily
meditative practice is kind of the goal yeah and it's interesting they found that it's even though something like mbsr is more rooted in that sort of neuroscience thing and not spirituality or religion they found it's sort of a chicken and the egg deal where once you do participate in mbsr you may become
more spiritual as a result even though you weren't going in but i think the reason why is because even if these people don't know it even if they're at a corporate mindfulness retreat they're engaging in a deeply spiritual practice yeah that that it's they're kind of doing it wrong as we'll see but there's
still it's still you know part of this very long established tradition that's that actually has like legs it's not it's not mumbo jumbo like it actually has a pronounced effect on on the human brain the human psyche the outlook that we have on life and so depending on the context you're doing it and it
can be very useful it can be harmful or it can be totally useless in some cases too but it is a spiritual act so it makes sense that it would make you more interested in spirituality well i say we take our second break if that's good okay and uh because we're stuff you should know we have to talk about whether
or not this works and if there have been studies that tell us one way or the other so we'll get into that right after this if you're driving right now look around i'll wait all those cars you see they're all probably on autotrader .com that's right that's because autotrader has the largest selection of new
cars use cars electric cars even flying cars well actually not flying cars yet but as soon as those get invented they'll be on autotrader.
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these headphones yeah man you sound like rory cochran and dixon confused what was his new man what was his name uh slater was he slater hey maybe are you happy give me drugs man yeah it's slater you're right i don't know get some from your mother man it's funny i've seen him and he's been in a bunch
of stuff since then and it's it's always impossible to see him as anyone other than slater i mean have you he was on csi miami i think for years and years and years and you're just waiting for him to whip out a doobie yes and he's all clean cut and everything and you still can't not see it i totally
agree with he's not fooling anybody uh all right so does this stuff work there have been plenty of studies of course and there is a lot of evidence that mindfulness programs can help people through emotional problems through mental problems they've done controlled trials of nbsr programs and clinical
settings and non -clinical settings and they generally found that they do and this is self -reported stuff obviously but they reduce self -reported anxiety depression uh and stress and increase well -being as opposed to people who got no treatment at all yeah so yes i mean it does seem to be effective um
there's also especially with self -reporting chuck that seems to be like the big one that if you if you look at studies where they're using self -reporting like it has the most pronounced effect um objective tests there does seem to register some sort of effect like on the objective experience of say
like pain or something like that right but social psychology has jumped all over this it's like we're going to study this um and there's this one study from 2021 which i have to give a hat tip to yumi because she turned this one up um but it it was a study of white people who some of whom received mindfulness
training and a control group who received sham mindfulness training which is hilarious and the effect that it had on their willingness to help black people that they saw who they saw in need um and not like in need like you know homeless or something like that like they would be they would be subjected
to a test unwittingly where they'd be in a room and like a black person would come in and like drop their papers right their willingness to help that person pick up the papers or if a black person entered the room and they were on crutches their willingness to give up their seat and apparently black
people tend to help black people more white people tend to help white people more or Hispanic people tend to help Hispanic people more they people help their ingroup more but this mindfulness group um actually kind of crossed lines way more than than was expected right yeah i mean i think that kind
of says it all you you do help your ingroup more but the people that receive the real mindfulness training were definitely far and away more willing to step outside their ingroup and help someone of another race yeah it's you know there's something to be said for that yeah and i mean it was significant
three times more is really significant statistically speaking for a study and it seems like it was a pretty good study like the fact that they had sham mindfulness training ruled out the possibility that the group that got mindfulness training was behaving a certain way because they they thought like
that's what was going to be the result of it almost like a placebo effect so the group that received sham training thought they were getting mindfulness training what was that like they still that's what i want to know i would love to know what sham mindfulness right it's like breathe in really concentrate
on all the anger really feel it they or they'd let him in like uh lemaz breathing where there's like you're like i don't think that's right that doesn't feel right they start to float away that's really funny and shout out to cal state san marcos uh and professor daniel berry and i guess yumi for all
that yeah sure the the trifecta yeah sure what what's uh cal state san marcos' mascot oh jeez i'm gonna bet five dollars on the lobos that sounds good okay let's go with that all right los lobos even yeah that's the the bandless lobos is their mascot all right and not coincidentally they're half -time
entertainment as well um but we do need to say that uh there's another school of thought and it's not a a competing school of thought it's just a hey be aware that it it's not always great for everyone uh they there's this one article you sent about people that experience uh trauma in their lives that have buried
it and it sits in their body as unconscious trauma that mindfulness practices and meditation practices can dredge that stuff up yeah and so they found that when these people they're studying them and they're doing these mindfulness practice they're experiencing like rage and anxiety and it's like whoa whoa whoa this is the opposite
of where we're supposed to be headed here and i think they have figured out in a lot of these cases it's people that are uncovering these buried traumas yeah and here's where we reach like the first initial part where the west has kind of screwed this up because it is unexpected when somebody in america goes
to a meditation retreat and tries to become more mindful and they're confronted with trauma or they're confronted with rage or self -hatred or something like that and they're not expecting it if you went and talked to like an actual like buddhist monk they'd be like well somebody probably should have told
you that that's a real possibility right that you're not this isn't all this isn't like you know it's like an acid trip it's not always like flowers and sunshine sometimes it's like the darkest thing you'll ever be confronted with kind of thing same thing the good thing about mindfulness meditation is that you
can stop immediately but supposedly in some some retreats in some situations they're like no you gotta press through you gotta press through and people are kind of um enticed or forced into staying in really uncomfortable trauma experiences um way beyond their comfort zone and it can actually be damaging
and it's very rare from what i can tell for there to be like like lasting harm but there are reports of people having to go to therapy for years after having gone on basically a bad trip at a meditation retreat for years through years of therapy um so it can happen and i guess i like i think chuck there's
a 2019 study that found like 20 to 25 percent of people who meditate reported experiencing unwanted effects right like negative effects that they they were not planning for and that's that's the big problem there's no there's no or very little warnings about this stuff it's all treated in a very polyannish
naive manner as if like you know america and europe got its hands on unlike the the secret the cube from hell razor is just like this is awesome let's figure out how to be more productive using this thing that's kind of what's going on yeah and i think another thing that can happen is uh it can lead
to a spiral of anxiety if you're not able to get to that place that you think you should be getting to by practicing it yeah so it becomes like this cycle where you know you're thinking like when practicing this meditation it doesn't seem to be doing anything for me why can i not even do this right
and all of a sudden that is building upon itself and creating anxieties because you feel like you're supposed to reach this sort of moment of like float floaty bliss that is i mean that's really hard to maintain yes yeah i mean not maintain but like even touch even reach sure and it's been packaged
like that it's been marketed as something that you will just reach some floaty bliss with and yeah i can totally see being stressed out because you don't reach it because it hasn't been explained to you even what you're doing right so um there's a it's a it's a good little short read it's called mindfulness
meditation and trauma proceed with caution i found it on goodtherapy .org and it it doesn't say like don't do this even if you know you have trauma don't meditate don't try to become mindful it says some you know make sure you find like a good coach a good guide a good teacher who understands how to
deal with trauma and can prepare you for it and can pull you back and be like don't forget life's actually good you're good now let's try a little more and just kind of little by little expose yourself to it rather than like you know ripping your shirt off and standing in front of like the baseball
pitching machine there's when it comes to physical pain that's a pretty interesting area as far as the studies have been concerned uh like the idea that can it actually help reduce physical pain or at least the subjective experience of pain and you know in some studies in some cases the people who practice
meditation do report lower subjective experience of pain uh or what they call pain unpleasantness so this might be a little bit of a mind over matter like the actual pain is still there but i've gotten my mind to in such a place that the unpleasantness or the anticipation of that unpleasantness isn't
as great as it would be if i weren't able to practice that mindfulness yeah as which ties very closely into a buddhist tenet of the first arrow of suffering which is where everyone has to experience that let's say you're bitten by an ant it's not a very pleasant sensation and everybody's going to experience
it roughly the same but there's also a second arrow where you can be worried about being bitten by an ant and it makes the actual it makes the first arrow 10 times worse not just twice as bad but 10 times worse and the idea is that if you're mindful uh if you practice um sati you won't really experience
the second arrow just the first arrow and that's the best you can hope for in this life that's right message for you sir what that's from uh i always just crack up when i every time i think of an arrow hitting a human body i only think of monty python when that guy takes the arrow message for you so there
was one study though in 2019 a review of studies actually they found that nbsr can reduce severity of chronic pain or improve daily functioning and depression about like associated with that pain which is you know that's there's something to be said for that like i don't think it should only be looked
at as some sort of uh hippy dippy thing like if you have real physical pain it could possibly help yes and yeah for sure i mean i think that's kind of like one of the outcomes of it being exposed to westernization is that it's being studied and it's actually holding up in studies and boy is it being
exposed because if you work for a big corporation if you especially work in silicon valley chances are there are mindfulness retreats maybe mindfulness rooms in the offices where they say hey we know we work you to death and it's not fair why don't we set up this little uh room that used to be uh a room
for um you know for your kids to come to work but we don't let that happen anymore right it used to be the nursery but we'll put you in here and you can zen out and be cool and here's one of the criticisms as long as you come back and you get all that work done we think it's a great tool for you right
exactly and not just corporations but the military is using mindfulness um schools little kids are being taught mindfulness and to meditate uh prisons um and there's there's an enormous amount of like out just out there in in the culture it's it's gotten really popular i guess in 2012 just over four
percent of americans meditated five years later it was up to 14 percent that's a pretty big increase in just five years and i would propose it's probably more than that now in 2022 um so it's everywhere but it's also really kind of um lost its way i guess once it hit america and corporate america in particular
mindfulness kind of got perverted i think is a way you could put it yeah i mean that critique is is really valid like it's great that a company might take mindfulness into consideration as something beneficial for their employees but to ignore the root cause which is you're working too many hours a week
and you're overworked and you can't possibly get done what you should get done and that's where this anxiety is rooted um here's a mindfulness room so you can help correct all that like it totally puts the onus on the employee to sort of self -adjust to what's probably way too much work instead of saying
hey maybe people wouldn't be in this position to begin with if they you know didn't have to work 60 hours in a week right and and the same thing goes for social movements as well like some people say hey you know how like a lot of us are mentally ill these days that's because society's screwed up so rather
than putting the onus again on the individual person just kind of suck it up and deal with it in a mindful manner why don't we focus instead on these social problems that are causing all these other social problems so we don't have to do that um and those are really uh valid uh criticisms of westernized
mindfulness in 20 the 2020s and there's actually a term for it that a guy named miles neil coined and another guy named ronald perser wrote a book using that name it's perfect mick mindfulness yeah i love that word and they're basically saying like hey you guys have so completely detached this from ethics
and morals and religion and and kind of co -opted something that had its roots there that yeah you've you've there needs to be a term for that you've mick micked it yeah you've screwed it up you've screwed it up exactly you've micked it i like that uh and that you know you can't ignore the theological
roots uh and have it be the the same thing and hr reps across the country say oh yes we can and look what happens we're really screwing people up so that's right um there's a there's a uh like a couple of quotes i found that i really feel like kind of get to the heart of what happened when mindfulness
came over here and got got picked up by corporate america and the military and just other surprising groups and maybe put to not the best uses um there's a really good new york times article from back in 2015 that was kind of a meditation on the idea of mindfulness or the word mindfulness and what it
what it means by virginia heffernan um and she says that um what commercial mindfulness may have lost from the most rigorous buddhist tenants that it replaced is the implication that suffering cannot be escaped but must be faced and that's that's that mispackaging that miss marketing that we talked
about that the idea that if you meditate and you're mindful it's going to free you from all your problems make you less stressed and more productive and just happier and that's not necessarily the case because we in the west tend to really like to like you said um avoid all of the stuff that that really
stinks and just get as much of the stuff that we like and that's not what that's meant for yeah this uh i think it's from the same article about mindful fracking uh could that be next putting a neuroscience halo around a byword for both uppers productivity and downers relaxation to ensure a more compliant
workforce in a more prosperous c -suite right there it is and there's another one too um the dali lama apparently pointed out that um even a suicide bomber would likely have to cultivate some sort of mindfulness that it's not it's not inherently ethical and if it's not inherently ethical then that means
that you could conceivably use it to nefarious ends and the way that buddhist for thousands of years kept it from being used to nefarious ends is by encasing it in wholesomeness like mindfulness specifically what's called right mindfulness by the buddhist is it's a wholesome approach and separating
wholesome thoughts from unwholesome thoughts and if you just take the mindfulness practice out of that context you have a problem um you want to read that quote from andrew olinzky true mindfulness is deeply and inextricably embedded in the notion of wholesomeness just as a tree removed from the forest
is no longer a tree but a piece of lumber so also the caring attentiveness of mindfulness extracted from its matrix of wholesome co -erasing factors denigrates into mere attention yeah attention that's the best you can hope for is it just denigrates into mere attention and not something harmful you know
so yeah i think it's great i think it's i think it's wonderful that people want this and they're seeking it out and they're trying it i think the people who are selling it to everybody need to just package it more transparently and explain the true purpose of it and stop using it for productivity agreed
uh if you want to know more about mindfulness go um go research it and see if it's for you and give it a shot and go into it with right eyes right vision i can't remember uh and since i said i can't remember of course that means it's time for listener mail uh i'm gonna call this tribute to ziggy bombach
from his son michael uh we got a great email that uh and i've been conversing with michael for the past couple of weeks on this good dude and his dad was a good dude uh hey guys long time listener i recently lost my father and i've been going through a great deal of grief my dad was at high risk for catching
covid so i made sure it was my priority to keep him safe and since being social was an option over the past couple of years we turned in nature during the pandemic and rekindled our love for the great outdoors uh though he never had to rekindle his he was born in poland and immigrated to the states
in the 60s and was only ever comfortable in his gardener in the woods he was a simple but passionate man so he started driving out to western north new jersey to stokes forest to get spring water and go fishing uh it's a gorgeous part of the state it was about 50 minutes each way perfect to introduce
him to my favorite podcast stuff you should know even though i had to describe to him what a podcast was he was instantly enthralled and i can still hear him quietly asking in the car if chuck and josh were going to be broadcasting today it's just adorable uh like me he adored your uh ability to convey
something complex and tough information such a sweetened conversation away he would always come home and tell my mom what he had learned was so much isolation the past two years it was warming to hear him happy about all these new subjects that he was learning about you gave him that happiness and made
his life that much better over the last couple of years of his life i can't thank you enough for everything that you continue to do there's so much bad in this world right now and people are hardly operating at their best but you continue to do something uh worthwhile and worth making something worth
learning so thank you for making the life of ziggy bombach a little brighter towards his end and that is from mike and he sent me a picture of ziggy and i read the obituary i looked it up and uh ziggy seemed like a great great guy and uh i had to zen out to reading this so i wouldn't cry i cried every
time that's a really amazing email thank you so much that i did it's impossible to not pass judgment on that one i'm going to say i feel very proud chuck that's right in this case great judgment and uh rip ziggy you sound like a great guy yep rip ziggy and thank you mike i'm glad we could uh help bring
you and your dad together that's pretty amazing stuff if you want to be like mike and get in touch with us and write us the email of the century we are willing to read it you can send it to us at stuff podcasts at iheartradio .com stuff you should know is a production of iheart radio for more podcasts
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