My name is Aimee Christiansen and I'm working on climate

change for google.org.

And my good friend Mang asked me to do the introduction to

Jon Kabat-Zinn, and I'm honored to have the

opportunity to do so.

But I first wanted to thank Mang for

organizing this event.

It's such a special occasion, and I thought that Mang title

was especially appropriate given that he's known as Jolly

Good Fellow here at Google.

It best captures John's teachings.

So just a little bit of background on his bio.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is a scientist, writer, and meditation teacher

engaged in bringing mindfulness into the

mainstream of medicine and society.

He's professor of medicine emeritus at University of

Massachusetts Medical School where he was founding

executive director of the Center for Mindfulness in

Medicine, Health Care, and Society, as well as founder

and former director of its world renowned stress

reduction clinic, which, I don't know about you guys, but

I could use a little bit of that now.

I'm looking forward to this.

He's authored many books, including Full Catastrophe

Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face

Stress, Pain, and Illness, as well as Wherever You Go, There

You Are, the book that introduced me to him.

Dr. Kabat-Zinn's work has contributed to a growing

movement of mindfulness into mainstream institutions in our

society, including medicine, health care, schools,

corporations, and perhaps even here at Google.

Dr. Kabat-Zinn received his Ph.D. in molecular biology

from MIT in 1971, and his research focused on mind-body

interactions with healing and various clinical applications

of mindless meditation, training for people with

chronic pain and stress related disorders.

We're hoping that his teachings will help all of us

to not only optimize our mental output for Google but

also optimize our quality of life wherever we are.

So welcome, John.

Thank you.

JON KABAT-ZINN: Well, thank you for that very sweet

introduction.

And it's wonderful for me to be here.

I've never been here before and it does feel like an

interesting planet to be on.

I'm just feeling my way.

But I, too, want to express my gratitude to Mang

for inviting me.

And I understand that I'm part of a much larger

scheme in his mind.

How many of you heard Alan Wallace talk when he was here

some time ago?

Not that many.

So we're covering a very broad spectrum because I'm sure a

lot of people showed up for his talk.

And then Paul Ekman is going to come in May, I'm told.

And Paul Ekman is also involved in this kind of work

in another way, some of which I'll explain to you when I get

to the slides.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JON KABAT-ZINN: What's that?

And Matthieu Ricard, whose face you'll see in some of the

photographs I'll be showing, is coming next week, and I

highly recommend you to see him.

We have sort of a parallel background in that I was a

student of Salvador Luria's at MIT, who won the Nobel Prize

early on in the history of molecular biology.

And he was a graduate student at the same time at the

Pasteur institute in Paris, France with Francois Jacob,

who was a close friend of Luria's.

And then he happened to go off to Nepal and was so struck by

what he felt from the Tibetan meditation teachers that he

met there that he gave up molecular biology and has been

a monk for 40 years.

But now, as you'll see, he's been engaged in a larger

enterprise to do science on meditative experience and look

at the neuroscience of what happens in the brain when

people have been meditating for very long periods of time

and with tremendous motivation and intensity.

So it sounds like there's something of a sequence of

speakers coming to Google that are in some way all pointing

to some hidden dimension of reality that's in some way

hidden to us, in other ways completely self-evident.

But when it isn't self-evident,

it is really opaque.

And I like to think of it as an orthogonal dimension--

that is, rotated 90 degrees in relationship to

conventional reality--

but one that allows in quantum mechanics, for instance, as I

understand it, an orthogonal relationship allows, actually,

two different entities to occupy the same

space at the same time.

And in the mind, that is a very, very useful feature to

actually bring online as opposed to

leave just as potential.

So I'm going to be talking from a number

of different angles.

I entitled the talk, after talking with Mang about it,

Mindfulness, Stress Reduction, and Healing, because that's

what a huge amount of our work in the past 28 at the UMass

Medical Center has been about.

But there's another parallel element to it, and it partly

depends on how you feel about stress and stress reduction.

But when we use the word stress reduction, we're not

talking about some kind of dime store relaxation attempts

to calm people down and just make them feel a little bit

better so that they can work a little bit harder.

We're talking about, actually, a transformation in the way in

which we relate to our lives, to our bodies, to our calling,

to our loves, to our ambition, and so forth, so that we can

live lives of balance and fundamental, profound

satisfaction.

And I believe that's true for human beings,

that that is possible.

And I think that a lot of time, the society entrains us,

if we don't do it ourselves, into severe imbalances that

can sometimes be unbelievably addictive, intoxicating, and

wonderful on one level, and on the other hand, maybe actually

draining your life's blood on another level or killing you.

And so, in a certain way, metaphorically speaking, I

would say that in this society, we seem to more and

more be dying for some authentic door into ourselves

in a way that's bigger than just what usually defines us.

And that's not to deny the beauty of what we often do,

how creative we can be, how important it is to--

I mean, at a place like this where you're basically

redefining the world and the universe in ways that

potentially are tremendously healing for the planet.

But to have this be, in some sense or other, held in a kind

of awareness that ordinarily, we're just not taught in

school and that requires a certain kind of intimacy in

cultivation in order to be able to have

it more at our disposal.

So if we're going to start with stress and stress

reduction--

periodically, Time magazine and Newsweek and so forth put

stress right up there on front because--

I mean, I started the stress reduction clinic in 1979.

And when I think back to 1979, I say to myself, 1979--

what stress?

Because of you folks and people like you, I can get

more work done in a day than I used to be able to get done in

a month, and it's far better work.

But it still has a cost. Do you know what I'm saying?

Because then the expectation is-- not just from other

people but from myself--

that I will just be--

so the digital revolution already has catapulted us into

a condition where increasingly, there's no end

to the work day.

There's no end to the work week.

And so there's a way in which work can encroach all of life.

And if you love work more than anything else in the world,

hey, no problem with that.

And there have always been people

like that on the planet--

scientists, musicians--

where it's all that.

But there's also potential costs to pay in terms of

burnout, in terms of addiction, in terms of

overdosing, so that you're not actually tapping into the

creativity that maybe you once were.

And it requires more and more effort to get the certain kind

of return, as opposed to less effort, more dance.

But for 20 or 25 years, there has been a lot of research

being done epidemiologically, what the effects of various

kinds of risk factors on human health, mentally and

physically?

Everybody knows smoking is a big thing in this society, to

actually demonstrate that cigarette smoking is not good

for your health.

And in 1964, the Surgeon General's report actually came

out and said that.

So there's that and there's high blood pressure and

there's high cholesterol and all sorts of risk factors for

coronary disease, for cancer and so forth.

But stress was always considered not measuring up to

a bona fide risk factor.

But a couple years ago at UCSF, in the laboratory of Liz

Blackburn, Elissa Epel, who actually happens to be a

mindfulness teacher but is a young assistant professor at

UCSF, did a study looking at the rate at which the repeat

subunits at the ends of all of our chromosomes, which are

called telomeres and which are required for every cell

division in every cell in our body that divides, that it

turns out that long-term chronic stress can accelerate

the rate of telomere degradation enormously.

And so if you have ever heard the words coming out of your

mouth after a particularly horrific experience, "god,

that one just took years off my life," it

turns out it's true.

Because the telomeres, once they degrade, the cells can't

divide any more.

So if stress increases the rate of telomere degradation,

I mean, you can't get more somatic and molecular than

that in terms of evidence that stress has, potentially, if

it's not mitigated, the consequence of basically

increasing aging.

And I'm not going to go into the study in any great detail.

It was published in the PNAS--

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science-- in 2004.

But just to say that they did this study on parents of

children with chronic medical problems that are basically

not going to get better.

So it just doesn't get any more stressful than

that kind of thing.

It's not like, well, at a certain point, I'll get to go

on vacation or this will evolve in some way.

No, that's just going to be the way it is for life.

But they actually took parents who didn't have chronically

ill children, which are the blue points, and what they

found was that they were also showing telomere degradation.

And what really mattered was how much stress they thought

they were under.

They were under a lot less stress than the other parents,

objectively speaking.

But if you think you're under absolutely intolerable levels

of stress, you create that reality.

But that's a very positive finding because it says, if

you change your relationship to your perception of the

stress, then you could actually, potentially, reduce

the rate of telomere degradation.

And now, every study on meditation has thrown in the

telomerase assay and so forth now, and we don't know any

results yet.

But looking to see whether training in a course of

meditation over a period of time might actually slow or

restore to normal, say, the rate of telomere degradation.

So I just want to throw that out to you because there's so

many exciting things going on in the field nowadays about

that kind of thing.

But I want to make some pretty fundamental points here.

If you stare at that word for too long, it doesn't mean

anything, as you know.

But I want to make a distinction between how much

doing we know we do and-- what's that?

AUDIENCE: Doing.

JON KABAT-ZINN: Doing.