Melvin McLeod: Could you share what current science tells us about how mindfulness affects our mind, brain, and overall well-being—and how that might benefit society?
Jon Kabat-Zinn: This is now a flourishing field of scientific research, including all sorts of fascinating studies I won’t go into here, looking at new and experienced meditators and how their brains and bodies are affected by their meditation practice. There are also studies exploring the prosocial dimensions of mindfulness that extend beyond physiological changes, individual health, and a sense of belonging.
As an example, over the years, there has been a running debate about whether mindfulness is distinct from compassion and whether training people in mindfulness yields the same benefits as training them in compassion-based practices. A 2013 study by a group of Boston-based researchers beautifully addressed this. The study involved individuals who had completed either an eight-week mindfulness-based program or an eight-week compassion-based program, or were in a nonintervention control group. To set it up, all participants were asked to take a seat in a waiting room with only three chairs, two of which were already occupied by confederates of the researchers. When someone else entered (also a confederate) who was on crutches and clearly showing signs of being in pain, the researchers clandestinely observed whether the subject in question would voluntarily offer their seat to that person within a two-minute period of time.
What they found was that after eight weeks of training, there was no significant difference between the mindfulness meditation group and the compassion meditation group. However, both groups were five times more likely to offer their seat to the person in obvious pain than those in the nonmeditation compassion control group, a staggering finding.
I was pleased to hear this because I’ve always maintained that mindfulness is not intrinsically separate from compassion. Sometimes they say in the Buddhist tradition, “Two wings, one bird”—namely, mindfulness and compassion. But it’s the one bird part that strikes me as essential to keep in mind as an embodied practice.
Photo by Dr. Peter Stockdale
There are infinite ways to approach meditation practice, but when you drop into it fully, the first thing you experience—when you learn to rest in and take up residency in awareness—is the direct, nonconceptual experience of interconnectedness and belonging. You are whole, and simultaneously part of a larger whole, nested in an even larger whole, and on and on endlessly. This direct experiencing of interconnectedness and nonseparation naturally evokes compassion and loving-kindness and a deep sense of intrinsic connection to others. The Boston study underscores this intrinsic human characteristic in a very elegant way.
Although there has always been a strong ethical component to Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), it is not an explicit element of the curriculum. This has sometimes led to our being criticized for not explicitly emphasizing sila (ethics), which is of course a foundational element of the dharma in all traditions. But as with compassion, our approach has always been to embody sila rather than just talk about it, especially in a context where people in an outpatient stress reduction program in a hospital may not immediately understand why ethics is relevant, and be turned off to the entire program and/or the meditation practice itself as a consequence.
When you intentionally align yourself in a deep way with an ethical stance such as the Hippocratic oath or the bodhisattva vow—a stance that is intrinsic to being an MBSR teacher—you naturally remember the potential harm you could cause if you fall into self-centeredness or attachment to an outcome, such as wanting others to like you or expecting a certain result from the meditation practice. That would not only be unwise, but unethical as well, and so, anathema to an authentic mindfulness teacher.
All these elements—ethics, compassion, and wisdom—converge in the MBSR curriculum, which can be seen as an ongoing koan for the instructor as to what is called for now. If you’re an MBSR teacher, rather than relying solely on a book or a set curriculum, the curriculum reveals itself to you when you ask yourself that question, look around the room, and attend deeply to your own heart. Then, you respond to what is called for in the present moment, out of your own practice as it intersects, of course, with the formal MBSR curriculum.
You’ve identified three key components of mindfulness that guide us to help others and contribute to the world’s future: wisdom, which helps us see the interconnected nature of reality; compassion, which motivates us to bring happiness and benefit to others and ourselves; and ethics, which guide us to act in ways that are truly beneficial.
When it comes to compassion, there’s a common understanding that mindfulness can be almost clinical, or emotionally neutral. But self-compassion seems essential for truly accepting our experiences—our struggles, our flaws, our humanity—with warmth and friendliness, just as we would for a close friend. So, how do people cultivate self-compassion through mindfulness practice?
One word: embodiment. The teacher embodies compassion naturally, not through contrivance or fabrication, but simply out of love. When you show up in this way, people naturally feel seen and accepted for who they are in their fullness, rather than just as their chief complaint, or even their story. Engaging in the practice itself can be seen as a radical act of both sanity and love. From this perspective, teachers don’t need to emphasize self-compassion, and within the MBSR context, it may not be maximally skillful to do so.
In the context of a referral to MBSR, we only have eight weeks to hopefully set participants on a lifetime trajectory of formal and informal meditation practice and the recognition of intrinsic wakefulness and liberation in the present moment. From this point of view, the problem of introducing so-called self-compassion within the eight weeks of MBSR is the “self” part. Kindness and compassion—toward oneself and toward others—are intrinsic to mindfulness as both a formal practice and as a way of life. What we might do is encourage people to notice how lacking in compassion they may be toward themselves in certain instances. Here mindfulness and heartfulness converge, since they were never separate. If you are feeling compassionate in a particular moment, the invitation is to bring that into awareness, to locate it in the body, to be compassion in that moment, underneath thoughts of self or compassion. It’s infectious in a certain way. It also avoids falling into dualisms around self and other, and a reifying of the personal pronouns “I,” “me,” and “mine.” So, while we might very well inquire in the classes about how compassionate people are toward themselves, and listen deeply to what emerges, we are not teaching a technique or using an antidote to a particular arising. In fact, I never use the word “technique” in association with meditation practice. Self-compassion often gets framed as such, as if there’s a prescribed method, but these are practices, ways of being, and the language we use greatly affects whether people truly understand the invitation to drop underneath all the dualisms and the striving to attain something special, when what you are looking for is already here, and already yours.
Kabat-Zinn with Plum Village monastic Brother Phap Luu at the 2025 annual symposium for the Thich Nhat Hanh Center for Mindfulness in Public Health. Kabat-Zinn is a member of the center’s advisory board. Photo by Steve Gilbert, Courtesy of Thich Nhat Hanh Center for Mindfulness in Public Health / Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
How do people come to understand nonduality by practicing MBSR?
They won’t necessarily grasp it conceptually, and the term itself is not used explicitly within the MBSR curriculum. But hopefully, through skillful guidance within the meditation instructions, participants can be invited to recognize that in this moment we call now, no matter what is unfolding in their experience, there is no better or more preferable place to go, nothing to do, and no special “something” to attain, even in the face of unpleasant arisings, such as pain, boredom, impatience, attachment to outcome, longings, and the like. The invitation is to become aware of whatever sensations, emotions, and thoughts are present in this moment, and as best one can, for at least a brief moment, take a peek at it with total openness and discernment, without or underneath the story of me and my pain, my stress, my problems, and the like. That awareness becomes one’s home base, so to speak, a domicile or refuge in which one can take up residency and to which one can return over and over again whenever one gets pulled into the thought stream, or emotional reactivity, or revery. Dropping underneath thought, for instance, and residing in awareness doesn’t mean that the developmental arc of learning, growing, healing, and transforming stops, nor that responding appropriately to situations and circumstances is ignored or inhibited—on the contrary, those experiences unfold on their own when you learn to pay attention and rest in awareness of whatever is unfolding in the present moment in the spheres of body, mind, heart, and environment.
When you approach meditation practice with the mindset of needing to get somewhere else, to attain some kind of desirable special “state,” you might sit for thirty years, striving, hoping, idealizing, and never attain what you are reaching for. This happens when people chase after some future enlightenment, believing it’s some special state they have to achieve. But what you’re seeking is already here and already yours, although I hesitate to use that word because it’s possessive, and who is the possessor? Perhaps a better way to put it is that it’s already you. Awareness is truly a superpower, and everybody is born with it. That said, consistent access to awareness, familiarizing oneself with it, and inhabiting it more as one’s default mode, is not a given. It requires exercising the muscle of nondual attending and being the knowing (and the not knowing) that awareness already is and always has been. This approach also nurtures greater equanimity, as well as openhearted responsivity in the face of dysphoria, suffering, and injustice.
I’d like to talk about ethics because that seems to be the next step. If wisdom opens our hearts to caring for others and reducing suffering, then ethics is about understanding what truly helps in the world and acting accordingly. You’ve mentioned focusing on what is right with us instead of what’s wrong with us. Is that the key to helping society as a whole?
You bet. My starting MBSR was partly inspired by the 1979 Surgeon General’s report Healthy People. It said that, in 1979, people were dying from heart disease, cancer, smoking, et cetera. The report argued that no amount of money spent on disease treatment would shift the overall health of the American population; what was needed was a change in lifestyle. My metaphorical ears perked up, and I said, “Okay, let’s take a public-health perspective on this. Perhaps an outpatient clinic in the form of a course could, over time, if enough people took it on the recommendation of their doctors, move the bell curve of the entire society toward greater levels of health and well-being.”
So MBSR and other mindfulness-based programs, of which there are now many, can help. And there’s no end to the possibilities, because the sources of suffering in the world are endless. This means that these practices can be brought to many different domains of life and society, including, importantly, especially given the state of the world, governance. The word dharma, for instance, carries the meaning of lawfulness. And government is all about creating and upholding laws that direct our social energies in positive ways that prevent or at least minimize and regulate greed, hatred, delusion in all its forms from dominating the social and planetary order. Of course, that’s questionable territory in capitalist societies because money does dominate to a very large degree, and money and power and corruption inevitably collaborate in the absence of strict adherence to adequate and just laws applied equitably, without prejudice or privilege. We are seeing that played out in American politics at the present moment to an enormous degree. Equanimity, clarity, compassion, dispassion, and engagement are absolutely essential at such times, enacted in whatever ways feel appropriate to the circumstances.
But the root value of wise governance is that everyone has an equal degree of freedom and opportunity to pursue whatever it is they love, within the bounds of the law. So, if nations and the social order require lawfulness to support freedom, what about a complementary lawfulness that governs our own minds, our bodies, and our hearts? That lawfulness is what we call dharma, articulated in a medical framework in the four noble truths: diagnosis, etiology, prognosis, and treatment plan. For instance, the fundamental law is that when you crave something, identify with it, cling to it, and strive for it in a self-centered way, you are creating the conditions for suffering. On the other hand, if you take a more spacious, generous, and non-self-centered orientation, you can be equally creative, imaginative, and productive, and—without the story of “me” being the central endpoint—be in a good position to make perhaps a small but nevertheless a profound, healing, and transformative contribution to the world, as well as to your own life.
Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy identified what he called an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation in the U.S. Can mindfulness help with the widespread experience of loneliness in modern society?
Mindfulness is very important in the new epidemic of loneliness that Vivek Murthy, who teaches mindfulness himself, warned us about. Social isolation has been known for decades to be a significant factor in ill health, both mental and physical. Interestingly enough, there are now at least a few studies showing that people who are referred to MBSR soon report feeling less lonely. I think that this may be in part because, over a period of eight weeks, they connect with other people who are suffering in similar ways, and they realize “I’m not alone.” This was shown for people attending MBSR in person. It would be interesting to know whether it is also the case for online MBSR programs and how long the effect endures.
But there’s another element worth looking at as well, namely the difference between feeling “lonely” and being “alone.” It could be that when you learn to be somewhat more comfortable in your own skin through practicing “just being,” then you’re more likely to feel okay being by and with yourself. At the same time, you realize that of course, you do need other people, and you’re potentially more amenable to finding solutions for your loneliness, such as cultivating connections through new or lapsed friendships, family, and community engagement/sangha.
So that’s another aspect of liberation: When you’re okay by yourself, you’re okay being alone in this moment—not forever, but in this moment. And all of a sudden, you’re tapping into energies that allow you to be in wise relationship with others in a way that can also be profoundly satisfying.
In the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program that Kabat-Zinn developed, hatha yoga is one of the main formal meditation techniques, along with a body scan and sitting meditation. Photo Courtesy of MasterClass
At a basic level, the dharma is about identifying the causes of suffering and doing our best to lessen them, and identifying the sources of happiness and doing our best to cultivate them. According to the view of the dharma, the causes of happiness already exist within us, and they don’t have to be created or developed. So, if we’re looking at how we can help the world going forward in a very fraught time for humanity, how do we acknowledge both the problems in society and the causes of happiness that we already possess?
One danger nowadays is social media driven by algorithms that prioritize engagement over ethical behavior. Facebook’s algorithms, for example, actually played a role in driving the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar, and the people carrying out that violence were Buddhists. So, it’s not as if Buddhism gets a free pass. Anything can be corrupted, even the dharma, if you lose your mind and heart in a certain way. That is why sila or ethical conduct is absolutely foundational to living mindfully.
What I think is needed right now is for us to find, celebrate, and nurture our extended sanghas. Of course, you have to be careful and discerning, especially online. But I’ll give you a personal example. In May 2024, I led a seven-day invitational retreat at Omega, the first large retreat of its kind that I’ve offered. I led a much smaller one five years ago, but this time I invited a little more than two hundred people, most of them MBSR or other MBI teachers and researchers whom I knew directly or who were colleagues of colleagues. Two hundred people came—half of them from twenty-six different countries. We practiced intensively together in a mix of silence and conversation, and by the end of the retreat, there was general consensus around the value of staying connected and developing new collaborations and projects going forward. Some people volunteered to create a website for sharing information and staying connected. That sangha is now called the Mindfulness World Community.
Initially, it was just for those two hundred people, but within four weeks, they opened it up so anyone with a serious commitment to mindfulness, mindfulness-based programs such as MBSR and MBCT, and to societal and planetary applications of mindfulness can join and contribute. Among the researchers who attended the retreat are scientists studying mindfulness in relation to climate change, sustainability, AI, and neuroscience, as well as others investigating the clinical and health benefits of mindfulness.
Now, let’s say you’re feeling isolated; you don’t have a vibrant dharma community around you. On this website, you can find like-minded people who care deeply about practice, even if they’re halfway around the world. Though it’s only been up for a few months, I’m hopeful that it will provide one additional avenue for deepening and ripening the fruits of practice for the benefit of all and hopefully, for the well-being of the planet as well—not just by sitting on our cushions, but by connecting with others who understand why it matters to sit on our cushions every day.
Here you point to an important next step in the mindfulness universe. If there are three components to a successful movement, one is a philosophy or wisdom, which is clearly present here. The second is leaders and teachers such as yourself. And the third element, which is still lacking for the millions of mindfulness practitioners, is a true sense of community.
Sangha.
Online connections are great, but we need to be able to get together in person. I actually feel like there needs to be physical spaces.
Yes, absolutely! About six years ago, I led that smaller invitational retreat I mentioned at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. There were thirty-six of us, because that’s all the center could accommodate.
It was so profound to meditate together with such intentionality with people from around the world. It’s not about fabricating a sangha; sangha is as natural as awareness itself. We are already connected through our love of practice. And when we nurture this kind of sangha—allowing our doing to come out of being—it’s astonishingly powerful. This can happen in any interest area, whether it’s public health, mindfulness and sustainability, climate change, AI, food, the arts, or anything else. The levels of generativity and creativity that come from the human heart and mind, especially in community, are phenomenal.
I feel very strongly that, as a species, we have to move toward interacting in ways that foster generativity, creativity, and selflessness, and we need to keep in mind that the algorithms on social media work exactly in the opposite direction. These systems are designed to foster a sense of inadequacy—convincing people that they’ll never look right or be enough. This is especially harmful for preteens and teenagers, who often feel they have to present a false version of themselves to be liked or accepted. Many struggle with self-worth, fixating on the number of likes they do or don’t receive, leading to depression or suicidal thoughts. This social media–driven crisis is a modern disease in need of deep healing. These algorithms, created by huge corporate entities, thrive on our data, on our suffering, on our dukkha. Social media as currently constituted presents one major challenge. Understanding and attenuating as best we can the tyranny of autocracy in the U.S. and globally also appears to be a critical koan for humanity at this particular juncture.
Concluding this series of three conversations, what’s your final message to mindfulness practitioners?
Keep up the one great work of embodied wakefulness and kindness. What we need in the U.S., at least, is what I sometimes refer to as Democracy 2.0. Democracy is under threat, and something new, perhaps a major upgrade, is needed for this new moment on planet Earth. So, we need to expand our understanding of lawfulness and create new laws to enact wise governance for the sake of all beings, laws that protect everyone within the democracy from exploitation and harm. How do you do that in such a divided country where it’s questionable whether democracy itself is even going to survive going forward? We don’t know. So, it is quite a pressing koan at this moment in time.
We’re experiencing on a global level Zorba’s full catastrophe of the human condition. The improbable experiment of human life—along with a lot of other life forms, plant, animal, plankton, bacteria, et cetera, to which we are inexorably linked on planet Earth and which, in many cases, we barely understand—is up for grabs. The cockroaches will thrive no matter what transpires, as will microorganisms. But the world we love and cherish, depend on and belong to may very well be harmed beyond recognition if we don’t wake up and come to know our own minds and hearts in a much less self-centered way.
Kabat-Zinn teaching mindfulness meditation at the 2015 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Photo courtesy of WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM / Benedikt von Loebell
Paraphrasing Einstein, the mindset that creates a problem isn’t usually capable of solving the problem. We need a new mind, a mind of nonharming, a mind predisposed to deep insight, selflessness, and compassion. And the dharma in its most universal expression offers immediate access to that new mind and its ongoing cultivation because, in many ways, it is already here. Is it simple? Yes. Is it easy? No, it seems to be just about the hardest work in the world for us humans to wake up and set wakefulness as our default mode.
My hope is that we can wake up to the name that biologist and physician Linnaeus gave us, homo sapiens sapiens—which means the species that is aware and is aware that it is aware—and embody that as best we can, as a practice, in every aspect of our being. Let’s instantiate it in our laws, in our governance. Is a more compassionate and just Democracy 2.0 an ideology? I don’t think so. Nor is it a prescription. It’s an aspiration that can develop and mature over time as more and more people engage with and embody this kind of universal dharma understanding based on embodied wakefulness, and come to see taking one’s seat, both metaphorically and literally, alone and together, as a radical act of sanity and love, of selflessness and wisdom and belonging.
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