Mindfulness, Your Health And Magical Thinking

If you believe in paradise, or future lives, then you'll also believe that body and mind are separable. How do you square this with the idea of an indivisible body-mind—the main subject of mindfulness?

Transcript

Back in the Middle Ages and before that,

Any questions that you had were answered by your priest or the Bible or your holy book,

Whatever it was,

But it was always dominated by religion,

By belief,

And systems,

All religious belief systems,

Do have this tendency to discriminate between body and mind and actually to separate them.

And there's an obvious reason for this is because if I'm going to go to paradise or hell after I die,

Then I am going to leave my body behind.

So obviously mind and body or self and body at least are different,

But there's this idea of two separate entities.

And this persisted also in medicine for many years and it was only in 1948 that the WHO,

The World Health Organization,

Decided that there was more to it than that,

That mental health was a factor and also now communal health and environmental health and healthy something is known as a healthy lifestyle,

Which today has become almost an obsession.

So health used to be simply the absence of disease,

But we soon discover that,

You know,

Disease is just a matter of time.

There are processes going on all the time.

They've learned that cancers are constantly developing in the body and being defeated at a cellular level.

It's only when they turn into masses they become so stubborn and so difficult to treat.

So disease is always happening and health is always happening.

They're happening side by side.

But the lifestyle we live today and the environment that we have today is very far from being healthy.

There are thousands of additives to our food and chemical additives to our environment,

Which are turning out to be quite harmful,

Causing all sorts of diseases,

Chronic diseases,

Especially cancers.

They say that one in every two people will suffer from cancer in their life now.

Chronic disease,

As we mentioned,

Is on the increase.

There's a huge amount.

A lot of it is supposedly caused by environment slash diet.

We eat a diet now.

If you eat from a supermarket,

Then you may eat entirely out of boxes.

A lot of people do.

And they drink entirely out of cans.

They don't drink fresh water.

They don't cut into a fresh vegetable from one week to the next.

Many people live like that.

Us,

Probably not.

You meditators,

I'm sure,

Are much more careful about your diet and your lifestyle habits.

And one of those lifestyle habits is the choice to practice mindfulness.

And that's not separate.

That's a part of your health because in order to be healthy,

You have to be aware of where you are,

How you feel,

What you're going through.

How many people do we hear about who were diagnosed with a disease which would have been curable if they'd gone to the doctor when they first felt the symptoms instead of waiting until it became unbearable?

It's very,

Very common.

We don't like to go to doctors.

We don't want to go through the hassle.

We just don't like hearing about disease.

But when you become mindful,

One of the things that it does to you,

One of the great powers of mindfulness is it teaches you acceptance.

It enables you to not turn away from those uncomfortable things.

The possibility that,

Oh,

That pain in my knee might be something serious or it might just be an ache,

But maybe it's a good idea to find out.

So mindfulness,

I think,

Does make us more careful and it does make us more aware.

And so it is in itself a health-provoking activity.

And since the 1990s,

When mindfulness became the darling of the medical research community,

There's been plenty of evidence to show that it has a direct effect.

The practice of mindfulness has a direct effect on your health outcome.

And it all started with Jon Kabat-Zinn's examination of psoriasis,

Psoriasis,

Which is a skin condition,

It's a skin inflammation,

Which can be quite nasty and make life very,

Very unpleasant.

And his research was into the use of mindfulness for people suffering from psoriasis.

And it was a huge success.

And it made people who normally,

Or before that,

Would never have considered mindfulness anything to do with medicine or biology or health.

It made them realize that it does,

It has a huge effect on it.

And this also sort of coincides with the realization of science now.

I mean,

It's quite well established that body and mind are not separate at all.

They're very,

Very closely connected.

And most scientists are willing to accept or they naturally accept that.

And so it makes it easier for them to accept the possibility that mindfulness can have an effect on your health,

But it's still relatively new.

Most people do think of body and mind as completely separate.

And if mindfulness can help me,

You know,

Get over my cold faster or recover from COVID or even defeat cancer,

Then well,

That's sort of miraculous,

Isn't it?

And that's very often how people treat meditation and mindfulness and these so-called spiritual practices.

It's sort of,

They don't really think there's an evident connection between those two.

They think it's more sort of,

You know,

If I'm good,

And if I practice,

If I become a better person,

Then I'll become more healthy,

That they don't see that the connection.

It's sort of a wishful thinking,

A hopeful thinking.

But it's something much more substantial than that.

The way we feel,

The way we respond to our feelings is all about the function of your body.

It's about the process of being alive.

And it's in that process that disease occurs,

And that health occurs.

And often at the same time,

We have both of these processes or dozens of these processes,

I should say,

Going on at the same time.

There are all sorts of potential diseases.

Your body is full of bacteria,

And all sorts of organisms and viruses which have been there for years and years,

Which don't really hurt you,

But they're there.

So all of these things going on.

And also the realization that your body,

Only a certain percentage of it,

Barely 50% of it,

Is actually your DNA.

That actually what you think of as your body is a community.

We are full of others.

And yet we have this great sense of individuality.

And it's good to probe this because this assumption that we have that I'm me and I'm here and this is,

It's not that simple.

And as you become mindful,

You become aware of that,

You become sensitive to yourself,

You become sensitive to the fact that you are vulnerable to your environment,

To your history,

To your diet,

To the air around you,

And to the people around you.

The people around us can create such stress in our lives that they make us sick.

So by becoming aware of that,

And by understanding what price we're paying for what we're doing,

We may actually take a very difficult step and change that environment,

Move away from that relationship or from that job or from whatever it is that's doing us that harm.

But when we're not very mindful,

When we're just sort of surviving from one day to the next,

Then we just sort of stay in that misery.

So mindfulness encourages you to be happy.

It encourages you to be healthy.

And the two are so closely connected.