Adapted from Michael’s presentation at the DCMC Evening Communal Meditation – 8/21/25
Whether in casual conversations with acquaintances or in talks with patients I see in my work as a psychotherapist, I have frequently heard the statement – “I’m not religious, but I am spiritual.” Usually what this means is that there has been some dissatisfaction with religion as a formal set of beliefs expected to be embraced “just because” – “because this is what we believe.” Many have been discouraged by the emphasis on fear in these religions – “if you don’t . . . , then you will suffer consequences in this world or the next.” Other individuals find a tolerance for some of the shortcomings of organized religion because they benefit from a sense of community that is offered – but, even then, many feel a sense of something missing.
When we hear a reference to spirituality, it typically refers to having an experience of more meaning, more connection, more feeling and vitality that carries us beyond a weekly worship service. It is a longing for “more.” Often the search for this “more” is pursued by participating in mission trips or pilgrimages to holy places. It may be sought in an encounter with nature. It is looked for in self-help books. All of these endeavors reflect a desire for something real, something authentic that touches us at the level of the heart.
Frequently, this search implies that SOMETHING MORE is “out there” or “over there” that has to be gotten to, or attained. As Barabara Brown Taylor writes, “the last place most people look (for this SOMETHING MORE) is right under their feet, in the everyday activities, accidents, and encounters of their lives.” Looking right under our feet (and noses) for that SOMETHING MORE requires the willingness to imagine that we have everything we need, already, and that we can access an authentic spirituality by consenting to being right where we are – moment–by– moment. The premise here is that there is no heart-filled spirituality to be found apart from our embodied experience of being a human life on this earth. The “SOMETHING MORE” is Here and Now. “Here and now,” of course, is the core of mindfulness.
If you are reading this, you likely already have some awareness of the proliferation of mindfulness practices in our culture. Mindfulness practices have become widely known, having been embraced by healthcare and behavioral medicine, the business community, and our educational system. There are a number of different factors to account for this broad exposure that is rooted in the search for “SOMETHING MORE.” I want to mention just a couple of them.
First, at a time when participation in organized religion in the West began to wane, there was significant rise in interest in Eastern religions. A core attraction of Buddhism and Hinduism in particular is that there was less of an emphasis on belief and more emphasis on direct experience. The Buddha issued the invitation “EHI PASSIKO” which translates from the Pali as “come and see for yourself.” These teachings and practices offered a path to SOMETHING MORE, to a deeper dimension of life from the inside out – from inner experience rather than an outer-imposed doctrine. Teachers like Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, after doing extensive training in Southeast Asia, came back to the US and began to teach these practices.
Secondly, in 1979, a microbiologist by training and Zen practitioner, Jon Kabat Zinn established the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) clinic at the UMass Medical Center in Worcester. He solicited from various departments in the hospital the patients who were falling through the cracks – the patients who had achieved the maximum benefit conventional medicine had to offer but who were still dealing with a great deal of suffering. Cardiac, oncology, chronic pain, HIV patients went through the 8-week MBSR program in which they were taught various meditation practices that Jon adapted for the Western mentality. It did not cure cancer or heart disease. What it did do was enhance the quality of life of those individuals despite whatever illness they were navigating.
I have always found it so fitting that MBSR began as a response to suffering. This completely aligns with the origins of the great wisdom traditions. The Buddha was, earlier in his life, a sheltered Prince Siddhartha who was ignorant of suffering until he encountered sickness, old age, death. This led him to develop his own approach “The Noble 8-fold Path” as a way of working with these challenges that is the heart of Buddhism. Judaism’s central story is the Exodus where an immigrant people suffered forced labor, brutal beatings, and the murder of newborns in Egypt. The development of Islam began as Mohammed prayed to God for some solution to all the tribal warfare that was tearing his people apart. Jesus ministered to the suffering of an occupied people who were not only crushed by living as part of the Roman Empire, but by the religious establishment of the time. All of these religions begin with the experience of suffering. And so did MBSR. I am hardly suggesting that MBSR or mindfulness is a religion or a replacement for religion, but its emergence arose from this desire for SOMETHING MORE and as a response to human suffering.
MBSR continues to be taught all around the world and the format is really the same one that Jon designed in 1979. The broader topic of mindfulness is one of the most researched topics today. In 2002, there were 10 papers published with the word mindfulness in the title and in 2022 there were 1440 papers published. The SOMETHING MORE that mindfulness helps people connect with has also been embraced by science and academia. In 2023, Harvard University established the Thich Nhat Hanh center for Mindfulness in its school of Public Health – right where it belongs – because mindfulness practices are now seen as vital to individual and communal well-being.
Today, so many of the mindfulness practices are part of our culture that it is easy to lose a sense of appreciation for the truly revolutionary shift MBSR sparked. After all, consider what a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course actually looks like. A non-participating observer of an MBSR class, aware that the participants are dealing with some significant, often life-threatening suffering are doing what? Sitting in a chair doing nothing. Lying on the floor paying attention in a systematic way to different parts of the body. Moving their bodies into poses that, on the surface, appear to have very little functional value. Walking VERY slowly. Taking 10 minutes to have five bites of food. This is going to help cancer? Cardiovascular disease? Chronic pain? It looks absolutely silly – and it seems utterly crazy to think that any of this would help anything much less those challenging forms of infirmity. What Jon and his colleagues embodied, however, was a profound trust in the power of these practices and, quite specifically, the medicinal power of these practices. They believed they were offering up the special sauce. And the last 45 years have shown they were right.
The words “medicine” and “meditation” sound very similar and they are most certainly connected. The etymological root of the word medicine means “to cure.” However, the Indo-European root of the word means “to measure.” Medicine is the right restoring of an inward measure and meditation effects the direct realization of that inward measure. So, one of the first messages that is delivered in the MBSR program and is implicit in any mindfulness practice is that there’s more right with you than wrong with you. No matter what you are dealing with. The messaging is that you are already whole and that the practices are meant to help us recover, restore and live from an awareness of that wholeness.
MBSR embodies a paradigm shift in medicine that has not yet been fully realized, but has become more and more integrated. This is a shift from the model where the doctor is an expert mechanic and the patient comes in with their body as if it is a car engine and the doctor does something to diagnose and fix it and off we go. MBSR reflects a different view that has come to be called “participatory medicine.” This is not to take the place of expert physicians. But, this view opens us to the awareness that we can actually actively recruit and mobilize resources within ourselves as a powerful complement to whatever conventional medicine offers. We don’t have to just pull our cars into the mechanic’s bay.
Human beings have two superpowers that distinguish us from most other forms of life (as best we know). Those superpowers are thinking and awareness. Meditation practices are not “anti-thinking.” There is nothing wrong with thinking. Thinking is the basis for the advances we have in all aspects of our life. Thinking has offered us many opportunities for our lives to be easier. It creates amazing things that, if related to in a balanced way, help us live more efficiently and productively. Thinking, however, can have some serious side effects when it is overused. One of these is that, lost in thought, we actually can spend a great deal of our time not being where we actually are. Thinking inclines the mind to the past or the future. The human organism learned to rely heavily on thinking in order to survive so it is not something that we can simply extinguish because it is too much a part of our evolutionary endowment. But, when we’re lost or absorbed in thought, we can end up sleepwalking through much of our lives.
Ironically, another side effect of too much thinking is that while we sleepwalk through life, we don’t sleep well. When we are “supposed to be asleep” planning and thinking and ruminating continue to go on and we miss the important healthy effect of a good night’s sleep.
Another side effect of thinking too much is that we end up at the mercy of what has come to be known as the default mode network. This is a series of structures along the midline of the brain that is activated when we are not attending to the present moment – when we’re not absorbed in what is here and now. The default usually goes to all kinds of stories about its favorite hero – me, myself, and mine. How I’m doing, how I could/should be doing better. What good things used to happen to me that don’t anymore. What bad things are certainly going to happen. This preoccupation reinforces the sense that we are a separate, isolated self that must look for ways to control reality to its liking. This is really the root of all the divisiveness we see in our times. When we are preoccupied with me, it’s a short jump to become preoccupied with an “us” that affirms our preferred view of me. And when we identify with an us, we then need or look for a “them” and perceive that they are a threat. This takes us far away from the reality that all of human existence is a seamless whole.
I have just returned from an amazing visit to Kenya. The very gracious Kenyan people looked different, had different customs and rituals. They had their own language. But when you speak to them about their lives – they want their children to be safe and happy. They want to live lives with purpose. They want the suffering in their country to be alleviated – just like us and, really, everyone else.
Awareness is our other superpower and it is the counterbalance to thinking and the means to neutralize the activity of the default mode network. Awareness is given – it doesn’t have to be sought or developed or found. It is made real by intention – the intention to live wakefully. Human beings are classified as Homo sapiens sapiens – the being that knows that it knows. This knowing is not an intellectual or cognitive process. It would almost be more appropriate to say that human beings are the beings that know that they taste. Let’s take for example a fruit, say a banana. We can learn where bananas grow, how they are safely transported, what nutrients they offer the body. We can learn that if you carefully place your finger into the tip of a banana and trace it through, the banana will reveal “longitudinal symmetry” and divide into three equal parts. (Bet you didn’t know that!). And with all of that you would know about bananas. The only way to really know the banana is to taste it with awareness. This is the real knowing. It’s knowing with the whole body. It’s visceral. Awareness allows for experience to touch the heart. In the East, the word for mind and heart is the same and so if you don’t experience mindfulness as “heartfulness” you’ll still be missing that “SOMETHING MORE.”
Because the knowing that comes through thinking has been given a privileged status particularly in our educational system, we are not trained to exercise the superpower of awareness – but this is starting to change. This is why formal meditation practice is so important and powerful. We take our seat with the intention of simply being awake to whatever arises in our experience. We are practicing being awake and aware. There isn’t some special meditative state that were supposed to get to. We practice falling awake in the span of 10 or 20 or 30 minutes to cultivate another habit – the habit of inhabiting awareness. Living from awareness. The formal practice is vital because we are hard-wired for thinking which keeps us forgetting where we actually are. The root meaning of mindfulness in the original Pali language means “remember to remember.” Remember that this is where you are. Remember this is what you are engaged with now. Whatever we experience in any moment of meditation practice – contentment, peace, wanting to control, restlessness, boredom, physical discomfort surprise, challenge – all of these are parts of the curriculum. We learn to encounter these with a sense of engagement without getting lost in them. And so we practice not as just another thing to check off our to-do list for the day. We practice on the cushion so that we take the intent to be awake and aware into the remainder of our day and evening where we will also encounter contentment, peace, wanting to control, boredom, restlessness, discomfort, surprise, challenge. This is the curriculum of our very lives.
When we bring curiosity to our experience – this moves us into the dimension of awareness. Through this lens of awareness, any encounter or experience or perception can become “holy,” a sacrament that is an outward and visible sign of SOMETHING MORE – a spiritual, heartful connection. Making the bed, when done with awareness, becomes not just another chore to be done, but a reminder that another day has been gifted to us that is not to be taken for granted. Living with awareness, we become more comfortable in our own skin as we become less driven by a destination to get to and more enthralled with the adventure of walking through the mystery of our lives unfolding. When life is surprising, when we are lost, awareness allows us to consider other opportunities not previously visible or considered instead of seeing failure or disappointment. Living in awareness, we can be more clear-sighted about our relationships with others – about what they can and cannot give us. Awareness allows us to say no to the firehose of busyness- so that we leave room to simply be. From within spacious awareness, we touch the capacity in all of us to be generous, kind, and grateful even in the midst of our own suffering. These are significant potentials to be realized – a big payoff for that 10, 15, 20 minutes on the cushion.
With all the acrimony and divisiveness in places around the world causing incredible suffering, many people feel a sense of urgency , a feeling that we have to do something, but also a sense that our options for actions are limited. We might bask in the wisdom of an African proverb which simply states “the times are urgent, slow down.” This is one of the most powerful ways that we can engage in these difficult times. And, by taking our seat, awareness can inform and even inspire action we might wish to take off the cushion. The vision of MBSR came to Jon while he was on a retreat. So, meditation can be the foundation of taking wise, skillful action.
The teachers at DCMC plan to offer an evening communal meditation each month. We hope you will consider attending. There is something very compelling about meditating in a community. Whatever else might move you to attend, gathering to meditate together reflects a “shared intention” to live life to the fullest, to be awake to the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows, and to cultivate kindness and equanimity in all that we meet in our lives.
Alone and together, we practice as if there is nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to attain. In doing so, we discover again and again that life is the meditation practice and the more awake we are, the more we come to realize that NOTHING MORE is needed. It has already been given.
Come sit with us.
Michael LaValle
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