Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles >> 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