MANNY: Good afternoon my friends. My name is Manny and we are delighted today to have

my friend, Bob Stahl with us today. Bob is a--he's--so, Jon Kabat-Zinn is the founder

of MBSR calls Bob the go--the go-to person for MBSR in all the West Coast. Jon says this

if you need anything by MBSR, go to Bob because Bob is the man and I have a lot of respect

for Bob for this and other reasons and besides being jolly and wise and amazing. Bob founded

and directs the MBSR program in five medical centers in San Francisco Bay Area including

the El Camino Hospital in Mountain View and the O'Connor Hospital in San Jose. He lived

in the Buddhist monastery for eight and a half years and he is most recently the co-author

of this book, a "Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook," and it is available for

sale if you--if you want to--after this talk right over there and I think that's it. With

that, please welcome my friend and our friend, Bob Stahl.

>> STAHL: Thank you. You all hear me okay? So, very nice to be here and thank you for

making some time out of your work day to come and hear about mindfulness which is what I'll

be speaking about today. And maybe, I'll just start by sharing a little bit about my own

personal journey, how did I end up becoming a "Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction" teacher.

And my actual journey began quite young in life when I had an experience when I was four

years old. I was riding in the back seat of my parent's car and I had this realization

that I or anyone could die at any moment. It was a very powerful realization at four

years old and I brought this up to my mother and father and they said to me very lovingly,

"Don't worry, Bobby," I was called Bobby then, "Don't worry, Bobby, it's not going to happen

for a long, long, long, long time." And I actually could tell by the sound of their

voice that they were being very loving and they were trying to protect me but I knew

what I knew and what I knew was that they were not telling me the truth because what

I knew was that death could come at any moment to anyone. And that was a very shocking realization

at four years old to realize this and unfortunately to say by the time I was nine years old, I

lost a younger brother who died of a disease. My best friend, Ellen, who lived across the

street from me, I played with her everyday, went into a diabetic coma and passed away

one evening and downstairs, in the family house that I was living in, my grandfather

died of a heart attack. And so, growing up, I experienced a lot of confusion and despair.

What is this life and this also coincided with the--the 1960s and as, you know, the

times were a-changing and the Beatles grew their hair long and there was social unrest,

there was lots happening; I grew up outside of the Boston area. Well, after graduating

high school and my sole purpose was to get out of high school because school didn't make

any sense to me and I decided that I needed to do something after discovering that my

friends had all gone to college and thought "Well, maybe I should go to college." And

so, I ended up going to school in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, a small state college.

I was really into downhill skiing and I thought, "Well, this would be a good place to go,"

like, you know, ski area. And started school there and I was having a good all time partying

and after flunking out in my sophomore year and being [INDISTINCT] made it back on warning,

I decided "Well, maybe I should take a look at what's actually on the course catalog and

see if there is anything interesting there that I would like to take and for whatever

reason, very funny enough, there's this course called Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Zen.

I had never taken a class like this ever before in my life and I figured that I had nothing

to lose. I've had experiences growing up in Boston with the orient Chinese restaurants,

ironically enough and that was a very different feel there and I was alert to the East in

many ways not only with the food but with the art and so, I took this class, Hinduism,

Buddhism, Taoism and Zen and when I went into the class, I was shocked to discover that

my professor was sitting on top of his desk in a full lotus position. Now, I had never

seen a professor like this before. Most of them had suits, jackets and ties and they

were pretty straight and pretty uptight. But this guy was sitting on top of his desk in

a full lotus and he began talking. And when I--listening to him, I realized and sensed

that he knew something that I didn't know and I wanted to know what he knew. There was

something about him. I never met a person like him ever before. And we began studying

the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, a way of life and I just fell in love with the Tao and I

never realized that people thought about life in this way. My education thus far was about

reading and writing in arithmetic and it made really no sense to me because--and I've looked

back on this, I was really in a place of a lot of despair and confusion. I was very lost

and didn't even know that I was lost, that's how lost I was. Well, after reading the Tao

Te Ching and coming across epigram number 47, where he said "There's no need to look

outside your window, everything that you need to know is inside you." And when I read that,

it was this--almost like a redwood tree hit me over the head and woke me up and I recognized

that I've been spending most of my life looking outside of myself for answers and then if

I wanted to know anything, I needed to begin to look inside here and that really began

my journey of meditation which is now over 35 years ago and kind of amazing when I look

back at it at this point. That class began a journey, a spiritual journey if you will

for me and I ended up moving to San Francisco and--and getting--going to graduate school

in Counseling Psychology and getting introduced more formally to the pasana of mindfulness

mediation. And from there, that led me to studying with a teacher and she said "Why

don't you come with me to Burma and meet my teacher, Venerable Taungpulu Sayadaw who is

a Theravadan forest monk and Burma is now called Myanmar. And so on November 9th, 1980,

I embarked on a plane to Southeast Asia to Burma to become a forest monk for a temporary

period of time. Life was very different in Burma and the life of a forest monk is a lonely

life but it's a very powerful life of very intensive meditation practice and I really

loved that life at the time that I was there. Then we moved--we were invited to come back

to the United States and we brought our teacher, Taungpulu Sayadaw and we founded with a group

of us, a monastery in Boulder Creek right here in Santa Cruz County, not too far away

and started a monastery by Big Basin state park called Taungpulu Kaba Aye Monastery and

I ended up living there for over eight and a half years practicing very intensively.

And after leaving the monastery, entering into the advanced practice, getting married,

having two children makes the monastery look easy. I needed to get a job and I was fortunate

enough to get a job working at the Cabrillo College Stroke Center in Santa Cruz, working

with people with strokes and Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, other orthopedic and neurological

conditions and my job being hired there as a counselor was to teach meditation, relaxation

as well as interviewing prospective new students and so forth, assessing students. And I began

to teach mindfulness at the stroke center and I used to get feedback from various students

saying "This mindfulness is really helping me." And I remember this one old lady saying

"Yeah, this mindfulness is really keeping me out of a nursing home," and I said "What

do you mean?" she said "Look at me, I'm an old lady, I got to pee in the middle of the

night, you know, and every night I have to get up and I have to walk to the toilet and

so when I walk to the toilet, I'm mindful lifting my foot up, moving it forward, placing

it down. I'm being mindful of each step because if I'm not mindful, I'm going to end falling

and breaking my hip and ending up in a nursing home." She had had a stroke, so she was very

unsure on her feet. And I would hear many other very practical aspects of mindfulness

bringing it into one's life or health and well-being. While I was at the stroke center,

I was sharing some of my work with an ex-monk friend of mine that sent me eventually a book

called "Full Catastrophe Living" by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn and I read this book and I said

"I can't believe that somebody has created a whole program based on mindfulness and working

with stress, pain and illness, I want to do this." And I wrote Jon a letter, this was

back in 1990 and a couple of weeks later, Jon called me on the phone and thanked me

for writing him the letter and then inviting me to come to UMass Medical Center to meet

with him and see the center and as my family is from the Massachusetts's area, it was actually

in a couple of moths later I was--I came to the UMass Medical Center. This was all before

Jon became much more famous in 1993, "When Healing of The Mind" was featured with Bill

Moyers. He's got very busy since then. But it was wonderful to meet Jon back in the early

1990s and he was very supportive with me starting a program and so, I was very fortunate when

I came back to Santa Cruz that I began a program in 1991 at the Cabrillo College Stroke Center

and then later at El Camino Hospital here in Mountain View in Santa Cruz Medical Foundation

where we actually involved in starting the first Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programs

in California and I've been teaching at these medical centers and more ever since. So, I

feel very grateful to Jon Kabat-Zinn and this work of mindfulness and bringing it into mainstream

America and I really appreciate the genius of--of this practice in how we can--here I

am now at Google speaking about something that I went off to Asia far and many years

ago and--and how that mindfulness has proliferated in our culture and it's so amazing that when

we hear about mindfulness, its effects with as we search in neuroscience, in education,

in psychology, mindfulness is spreading its wings in many different areas and it's currently--well,

it's kind of a hot item, mindfulness. I understand that mindfulness is also offered here at Google.

I'm very happy to hear about that. I understand there's a new eight-week class starting this

Thursday with my colleague, Renee Burgard and I understand the class is full, in a waiting

list but don't worry there's going to be more classes. So if you're interested, you can--you'll

hear about them. But as a working definition, I want to--maybe just speak a little bit about

mindfulness, what is it? How does it relate to stress reduction? And I'd also would like

to do some practice and I think that this is a perfect place to do practice, right here

in the midst of the work day. But first I'll just begin with what is mindfulness and so,

we've heard of this word a lot and I trust if I--how many of us here are familiar with

mindfulness practice. So there's a quite a number of hands up. This is wonderful, if

I asked this question about 15 years ago, I might find one person. So, this is very

wonderful. And so, perhaps some of this will be a--you will hear some of what I have said

before but may you take it as in a new way because mindfulness really teaches us about

beginner's mind, seeing things fresh and new and in the moment. And when we speak of mindfulness,

we're really speaking about learning to be more present in our moment to moment, day-to-day

life and when you consider the only moment that we actually ever really live in is the

present moment which is right now, you're listening to me, we're here in this room,

this is what's happening. Yet at times, and I trust that we'll would probably see in the

workings of our own mind that it's difficult to actually stay present and we might be thinking

"I really hope this guy gets done at 2 o'clock because I got to go back to work and I got

to do this and that or maybe he's thinking about what happened earlier in the morning.

Maybe, it's no coincidence that John Lennon once said "Life is what happens while you're

busy making other plans." It's a very funny wonderful statement but sometimes if we take

a look at the workings of our mind, we see that it's often occupied in future thinking

in past memories and often missing what's happening in the moment. A psychologist friend

of mine once remarked after beginning his mindfulness training that her mind often worked

in two modes of operation and I said, "What do you mean?" Because, yeah, my mind is either

rehearsing or it's rehashing. Rehashing or rehearsing? I love that. And when you think

about all of the energy that we put into rehearsing about future, rehashing about the past, we

could actually bottle them as an energy source. We would have no energy crisis. We are so

much of the time living somewhere else other than this present moment. So, in mindfulness

training we're training ourselves to be more present in our moment to moment, day-to-day

life. For those of us whose sort of a perfectionist you can forget about it right now about being

mindful every single moment. And if you approach it that way, it would probably be maddening

and you'll probably end up quitting. But if we can bring more mindfulness into the moments

that we have and make it a practice, we'll find that our mindfulness will begin to grow.

Mindfulness, again, is this quality of being present. There's actually two types of practices

in mindfulness. But even before, the two practices we would say it's a way of life. But it can

be practiced formally or informally. Formally is taking time out whether it's five, fifteen,

twenty, forty-five minutes of doing a very formal practice; the mindfulness of breathing

or a body scan meditation or a sitting meditation that spans the field of awareness to listening

to sounds, body sensations, mind states. These are formal practices of mindfulness where

we're still and we're really going into the body and mind. The informal practices of mindfulness

is learning how to be more mindful in our everyday life. There's so many moments that

we, you know, different activities today that you're living that we're dealing everyday

that are often doing unmindfully. So for example, like when we're eating, let's be mindful that

we're chewing and tasting and swallowing; when we're showering or sitting on the toilet,

let's be present to that; when we're having conversation with someone, why not actually

really be there and listen to what it is that they're saying; and if we're walking down