BILL MOYER: MIND BODY TRANSCRIPT
The following is an excerpt from a transcript I made while I was a student at the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine. At that time, the library had tapes of interviews. Since I was most interested in learning about mind body medicine, I listened to this lecture from Bill Moyer. The words that follow can be credited to him.
When you take a deep breath it sends an electrical signal to the brain to relax all the muscles in your body. Each thought we think has a biochemical effect. When we are more aware of what we are doing with our thoughts we can increase endorphins. The hormones in the brain associated with relaxation, such as serotonin, are increased - so we are going to our local, closest pharmacy – the drug store in our brain and changing the brain chemicals to achieve a more relaxed state. When the mind begins to calm down an individual can experience an inner sense of peace, contentment and well being.
Our first meditation will be an eating meditation – I will pass around some raisins and the instructions are to take same raisins in your hand and look at them as if you have never seen them before, as if you have just landed here from Mars. People carry a lot of baggage about what they think meditation is and we want to dispel those notions right away. The first meditation isn’t breathing, sitting in the full lotus position or standing on your head or some crazy thing – we are just going to eat one raisin mindfully with awareness.
- Notice how the body knows how to position the raisin in your mouth.
- Just start chewing very slowly and don’t swallow.
- Let yourself experience the effects of chewing which we call tasting.
- You begin to taste the raisin which we automatically eat too quickly.
- We are often onto the next handful when we haven’t finished chewing, let alone tasting, the first one.
People have the realization that they haven’t actually tasted the raisin – they are so busy eating that they realize that they aren’t actually tasting them.
Most of us, when we eat, are doing so many different things (ie watching TV, reading the newspaper or talking) and we are also eating so fast that we aren’t experiencing it and we are out of touch with it completely. Slowing down allows you to bring eating into the present moment. It is special to eat. Why should eating your dinner be any less of a viable, vital moment than when you are talking with your children, driving in your car, making love, etc. If this is really it why not own the whole thing. When you are eating, really eat; when you are walking, really walk and be in your body and when you are driving, really drive. Once we do the raisin exercise, people realize there isn’t anything magical about meditation or mindfulness. Its just simply when you are eating, really eat and taste your food.
Then we transfer this to the breath. Getting people in touch with the breath, feeling the breath moving into your body and out of your body. The same thing comes true for people, they didn’t realize that breathing is such a rich experience. I focus on the breath moving into and out of my body, it’s a feeling, not thinking about breathing or what breathing is doing, but feeling it. Then I ask myself to stay with the breath, to ride the breath like I was riding in a boat on the waves and feeling the rising and falling of the waves. It helps stabilize and calm the thinking process – just ride the breath on the inhale and exhale.
Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness Based Stress reduction program has allowed me to go from just existing to living. After the first week, he checks in with everyone to see how they found meditation (they were to practise for 45 min/d). Bill Moyer said “My mind was a monkey, it was leaping from tree to tree.”
Jon said to me “Let me ask you a question: was this news to you or were you aware of this before? This is an important observation because very often we go through life on automatic pilot. We aren’t aware that there are all sorts of thoughts going on. They aren’t subliminal but they are there, slightly beneath the surface of awareness, but they actually drive many of our actions and behaviours.”
When you are lying on the couch taking it easy relaxing– if you actually watch what is going on in your mind and body, you may discover that it is far from relaxing, that there is a lot of thinking going on in the mind and you may be daydreaming, worrying or whatever. Some minds are constantly chattering and this is what meditation is about – to recognize that the mind is constantly chattering and most people don’t even know that.
And yet, that chatter winds up being the force that drives us much of the day. What meditation is about is looking deeply into the chatter of the mind and becoming more aware of the patterns.
Let’s say your mind goes off – can you share one place that it went this morning during the meditation?
- Person A says “when is this going to be over”.
- “Okay, so the thought comes up and you may look at the clock, feel others seem to be doing this no problem. So when you notice, for that moment your mind is not actually feeling your breathe. The idea is to notice that “when is this going to be over” is actually just a thought so you look at it and you gently bring the mind back to the breathe. And then the next thought will come, say, “I don’t want to be here, to hell with this”…and you just notice “Oh that’s one too” and come back to the breath. And it takes a certain amount of work to do that. The willingness to come back to the breath – if your mind wanders a million times, you bring it back a million times.”
Jon Kabat Zinn gets people who are in chronic pain into his stress reduction program. By the third week he likes to get them to do yoga on the ground and they have to feel the pain, to see if they can ride the waves of the sensation and you watch the sensations come and go and very often they will change.
Noticing that you can uncouple the sensation from your thoughts about them, ie “this is killing me, there is nothing I can do about it, its going to last forever” and you learn to free yourself from those thoughts and realize those are just thoughts. And then it turns out that there is an inner stillness and peace right within some of the most difficult sensations.
See if you can stay with the breath and let the pain do whatever it does. If you can learn to be comfortable within the pain or the anxiety it will change it completely. You are not trying to make it go away – this is a fundamental point. People think they will come here and it will make all their stress go away and we are not doing that at all. We are saying move into the stress and begin to look at it, look at the pain, look at what the minds reactions are and ask yourself: is this killing me right now in this very moment….and the answer is very often it is not. The idea is to be in the present moment and just flow with this and over a period of time people actually learn to relate differently to their pain. The people we see have been down the route of taking a magic pill to make their pain go away and they haven’t got any satisfaction.
The only time any of us has to grow, change, feel or learn anything is in the present moment. Most of us are continually missing the present moment almost wilfully by not paying attention – what I’m suggesting is maybe its time to stop and tune in to what we have.
Meditation is not a band-aid but a way of being. It is like weaving a parachute – you don’t want to start weaving the parachute when you are about to jump out of the plane – you want to have been weaving the parachute morning, noon and night, day in and day out so that when you need it, it might actually hold you. So the way we practise meditation is to do it everyday, to carve out some time everyday that is just your time for being.
If you hope to really grow in strength and wisdom and bring healing into your life, you have to at some point, come to the realization that this moment is precious – and not only precious, but its wonderful, even if you are in pain in this moment. That takes a certain amount of courage. It is a statement of taking control of your life, being assertive in yourself rather than being passive and saying: “Well if there is no surgeon to cut it out of me, I may as well curl up and feel hopeless.” See these little things aren’t so little –that is one of the points that I really want you to ponder – is that the little things and the little moments aren’t little, they are your life.
There are very few people that I know on the planet that couldn’t benefit more from a greater dose of awareness. With awareness, almost everything that we do would become more vivid and more alive. We would probably be a lot happier if we were more in touch with the present moment. It seems like in North America there is only one day that you are supposed to stop and be thankful for what it is that you actually have and the other 364 days you run around desperately trying to get more of what you don’t have and push away what you don’t want.
What I’m suggesting is we reverse that and start to tune into the miraculous qualities of being alive and instead of being on automatic pilot, see what is possible if you kindle the flame of being alive.
A place to start with meditation: “focus on the sounds and just hearing the sounds near and far, in the room and beyond without trying to name them or think about them and simply be aware of hearing the sounds.” Try that as your prescription today – for as little as 12 seconds. Build from there.
With love,
Dr. Chris.Nd
