Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Mindfulness, Science, Buddhism & Bullsh*t"? with Mo Edjlali

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"Mindfulness, Science, Buddhism & Bullsh*t"? with Mo Edjlali · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  If you're anything like me, when you think about mindfulness meditation, you have your
• 0:13
  own uncomfortable conversation in your head, which goes something like, oh mindfulness,
• 0:18
  I should do that.
• 0:19
  I'd like to be more mindful.
• 0:20
  I'd like to be more attentive to the grass and the flowers and the trees and the butterflies
• 0:23
  and rather than so caught up in the torrent of my own thoughts, but every time I try
• 0:26
  to meditate, there are so many thoughts going on.
• 0:28
  Which is so boring, well, how do you find the time anyway to meditate in this crazy
• 0:31
  world?
• 0:32
  I'm not very good at it.
• 0:33
  I'm not type of person who's suited to meditation, but I really ought to.
• 0:35
  Maybe I should.
• 0:36
  Maybe I should do a class.
• 0:37
  Maybe I should get an app.
• 0:38
  Practitioners of mindfulness, of course, will tell you that that kind of chatter, the internal
• 0:43
  uncomfortable conversations are precisely what a mindful brain is capable of mastering,
• 0:49
  that mindfulness is a transformative practice for cultivating awareness.
• 0:55
  So when I heard about today's guest having written a new book that was critical of the
• 0:59
  woo-woo in mindfulness, my ears perked up.
• 1:03
  Mo Edge Lali is the founder and CEO of Mindful Leader, which is a global organization that
• 1:08
  focuses on bringing mindfulness-based stress reduction into workplaces and communities.
• 1:14
  MBSR is the most scientific and secular and non-woo-woo-y of the incarnations of mindfulness.
• 1:23
  And most new book is called Open MBSR, reimagining the future of mindfulness, which takes a swipe
• 1:29
  at some of the entanglement that the movement has in Buddhist origins, in woo-woo, in fantasy,
• 1:35
  in quasi-spirituality.
• 1:37
  He criticizes the rigid, sort of one-dimensional thinking that some of the movement has and
• 1:42
  how it's dominated by elitist power structures and quick fix apps.
• 1:47
  He wants to get back to the nuts and bolts.
• 1:48
  He's an engineer originally, he was a technology entrepreneur.
• 1:52
  And so he wants to get back to the nuts and bolts of what actually works.
• 1:57
  Now, rather than just read the book, I thought it would be good research for me to enroll
• 2:00
  in his eight-week MBSR class, which I am currently on my third week of, two and a half
• 2:06
  hours, ladies and gentle persons, on a live Zoom with 12 other participants and coach.
• 2:12
  And then we have to meditate for 45 minutes a day, that's just in the first week alone.
• 2:17
  I am throwing myself into this, like your sacrificial lamb, the human guinea pig zips,
• 2:23
  in order to better inform myself about Mo's work.
• 2:26
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did, the one I know only, Mo Ejlali.
• 2:35
  I've heard you get frustrated when people say, namaste, so I'll welcome you to show
• 2:39
  the namaste, namaste mode, namaste.
• 2:43
  Why does it bother you?
• 2:47
  Oh, so sometimes there is this kind of language that develops in circles that could fuel
• 2:57
  un-inviting, right?
• 2:58
  And so my background, I'm an engineer, a sort of sciencey guy.
• 3:03
  And if I'd step into an environment where suddenly people were speaking almost like
• 3:08
  this cognitive language, it could cause an instant, like to have a long, like what's
• 3:12
  going on here.
• 3:13
  And so that's one of the most immediate things for this, this can't we just say hello, can
• 3:18
  we just use like the normal language that we use?
• 3:22
  And then there's this element of it almost kind of infringing on other cultures, right?
• 3:29
  And so sometimes we've talked cultural appropriation, and I have mixed feelings about cultural
• 3:33
  appropriation.
• 3:35
  But it does feel like something that is a bit foreign and almost performative, and sometimes
• 3:43
  it could have like this different, almost like a spiritual meaning to it that could turn
• 3:49
  people off.
• 3:50
  Well, along with cultural appropriation, another buzzword of the past five years of culture
• 3:54
  wars is virtue signaling, and there's something a little bit virtue signaling about it to
• 3:59
  me.
• 4:00
  It's like, you know, I am enlightened enough to be able to use the language of this practice.
• 4:05
  So that's all, you know, come in.
• 4:07
  What's your, you just said you have issues with the concept of cultural appropriation?
• 4:10
  What are they?
• 4:11
  Well, I think that, you know, if you if you back up and you look at things, a lot of things
• 4:17
  are culturally appropriated, right?
• 4:19
  They're sort of the sharing, this mixing, and when it's done, and I don't want to kind
• 4:24
  of dive into the particular particulars of it, but if it's done with grace, it's a way
• 4:31
  of us getting closer, right?
• 4:33
  And so I feel like there's this fear that people create around it, and that fear creates
• 4:39
  separation, and that separation doesn't allow us to do what I think a lot of us want to
• 4:44
  do, which is to connect and grow and share and mingle.
• 4:48
  Right.
• 4:49
  Yes.
• 4:50
  And it's also a concept that I feel has become flattened in the sense that, yes, there
• 4:54
  was a history of powerful cultures, riping and pillaging less powerful ones, and expropriating
• 5:00
  that what was good about them and presenting it as their own, that doesn't necessarily
• 5:05
  mean that every high school girl with braids is like guilty of that same era, that same
• 5:12
  sin.
• 5:13
  I think that's absolutely fair.
• 5:15
  Yeah.
• 5:16
  So there's this sort of like guilt and shame, right, that just doesn't feel like progress
• 5:22
  or it just feels to me almost the opposite would have a lot of the people that are pushing
• 5:28
  for social justice and equality.
• 5:30
  It feels like the opposite of what you would think that they're aiming towards.
• 5:35
  This relates a bit to your critique of the mindfulness movement in terms of I can already
• 5:39
  detect your leaning towards open-heartedness and community over individualism, and sort
• 5:48
  of this is the way that we have to do things, because this is the way that it is prescribed
• 5:52
  to be done, and you will follow me to, you know, this particular goal that I have set
• 5:56
  for us all.
• 5:58
  Let's just talk about the promise of mindfulness as you see it.
• 6:00
  In fact, what is mindfulness?
• 6:01
  Like, I think everyone in my audience has probably, it probably feels somewhat guilty about
• 6:05
  the fact that they don't let us hate, and it is a bit confused about where the mindfulness
• 6:11
  is meditation, is secular Buddhism, you're like, what are we talking about here?
• 6:16
  Well, it's a fair question, right, because I think that there's a term called skunk
• 6:20
  when it word gets overused to a point that it starts to lose meaning.
• 6:25
  And there's people, I would say, in the mindfulness field and community that almost
• 6:30
  hesitate to say, you know, why do we need definitions like everything's connected, it's sort
• 6:34
  of always, you know, it lets us feel and write that away.
• 6:39
  But definitions are important, because it helps us know how to communicate, it helps
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  us know what we're talking about, and the way that we define mindfulness, the innate
• 6:47
  ability to pay attention to the present moment with openness, curiosity, and acceptance.
• 6:54
  The openness, curiosity, and acceptance, and really paying attention to the present moment.
• 6:59
  Why can't I just choose to do that outside of a practice?
• 7:02
  Like outside of sitting my ass on a cushion for 45 minutes a day?
• 7:07
  You can, you absolutely can.
• 7:09
  And so the practice is to help us be more likely to do that, right?
• 7:14
  Because we're so often distracted and overwhelmed and kind of hijacked by it with our emotions
• 7:19
  or reactive to situations, and there are moments that we all experience mindfulness
• 7:24
  throughout the day.
• 7:26
  And I think a lot of us could use a little more of that, because those moments where maybe
• 7:29
  we're not mindful is when we're not at our best, where we kind of snap, overreact, do
• 7:34
  something we might later regret.
• 7:36
  I mean, when you say there are moments where we're naturally mindful, even without cultivating
• 7:41
  a practice around it throughout the day, I do have a sense, maybe it's just that I'm
• 7:45
  in the kind of mid-life, middle-class phase of life that is very hectic, but I do get
• 7:50
  a sense that those moments have been shrinking.
• 7:52
  It may be social media, it may be podcasts, it may be digital devices, but like the number
• 7:58
  of minutes in a day when I am not the target of a barrage of external content that I'm dealing
• 8:05
  with is maybe when I'm in the shower.
• 8:08
  Yes.
• 8:09
  And Josh, I feel like we're both in mid-life, so we remember, I saw this hilarious clip
• 8:14
  where a guy was like, I don't need mindfulness, I remember rewinding the VHS tape, I remember
• 8:21
  like not being like on-demand 24-7, right?
• 8:24
  And so technology and I feel like in capitalism in some ways has just accelerated things, like
• 8:31
  the combination of those two things, like faster and faster and go, go, go, to a point
• 8:36
  that is overwhelming, and we're surrounded by it, so it's been normalized, and so we're
• 8:40
  all kind of going and going, had a conversation with someone earlier, actually about the importance
• 8:46
  of boredom, right?
• 8:48
  It's like boredom has become like a bad word, but even if a person is just alone with their
• 8:55
  thoughts, right?
• 8:56
  Do you remember when you get a song stuck in your head?
• 8:58
  Yeah.
• 8:59
  You don't get song stuck in our heads because we're always listening to something, right?
• 9:02
  It's a new song, yeah.
• 9:05
  Well I get song stuck in my heads because I have kids in the back of the car who insist
• 9:09
  on listening to the Taylor Swift album on repeat, so then that saves movie for the rest
• 9:13
  of the day.
• 9:14
  But I know what you mean.
• 9:15
  So is the boredom, I'm a big fan of boredom, I love imposing boredom on my elementary
• 9:20
  school kids, but is the, so when we grew up and we were teenagers and we didn't have
• 9:26
  phones and we organized to go to the movies with friends and they were late and we stood
• 9:34
  outside the movie theater and there was nothing to do.
• 9:37
  You couldn't pull a supercomputer out of your pocket and see what other people were arguing
• 9:41
  about or how much better their lives were than you.
• 9:44
  You just had to stay in there and like look at passes by and there was no way to check
• 9:48
  in on whether your friends were on their way.
• 9:50
  Eventually you would just like give up and wander off and that was that.
• 9:55
  Is that a form of mindfulness?
• 9:58
  Well, I wouldn't say that that's necessarily a form of mindfulness.
• 10:03
  However, we're more likely to be able to be in the moment when we don't have those
• 10:08
  instant reactions, right?
• 10:10
  And so you're more likely to be mindful in that situation where you're kind of paying
• 10:13
  attention to things, maybe your mind isn't wandering, you're kind of there.
• 10:17
  You notice someone walk by and you're like, hey, maybe I could strike a conversation
• 10:21
  with that person or you're engaged in the moment, right?
• 10:24
  You might notice like another movie poster and you're like, oh, what's that movie about?
• 10:28
  You're there, right?
• 10:29
  You're in the moment.
• 10:31
  You're open and curious and not sort of swept away in loss and thought or distraction.
• 10:39
  Right.
• 10:40
  You're seeing and so is daydreaming not mindful?
• 10:44
  I think daydreaming is fantastic and I tend to let my mind wander, but that's not being
• 10:49
  mindful, right?
• 10:50
  So we're kind of lost in thought and I have a lot of fun sometimes just letting those
• 10:53
  thoughts go and seeing where they lead me and kind of getting lost in that way.
• 10:58
  But mindfulness is training that muscle, that ability to kind of say, all right, you
• 11:03
  know what?
• 11:04
  I really need to be in the moment.
• 11:05
  I want to come back to the moment and having a choice so we don't feel like we have a
• 11:10
  choice.
• 11:11
  Mo, it sounds to me like there's in my brain, which is not as refined as yours is in
• 11:15
  understanding the distinctions between these different strands of tradition.
• 11:21
  There's just a big cloud and in that cloud is Dan Harris and Sam Harris and John Kabat
• 11:30
  Zinn and also Eckhart Tollay and also the landmark forum and Est and Deepak Chopra and
• 11:39
  Stoicism and secular Buddhism and they all basically to my naive mind preach the same
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  very useful insight, which is that your brain is a meaning-making machine, which without
• 11:55
  if you don't pay attention, we'll just constantly ruminate, regret the past, plan the future,
• 12:02
  fret about the future and do anything except actually notice the experience of life and
• 12:07
  that the irony is that life is only ever the now.
• 12:12
  And so you will find peace and serenity and self-mastery and maybe even transcendence
• 12:18
  in cultivating the ability to be in the now rather than be lost in thought.
• 12:25
  Is that a correct sort of summation of what we're talking about and if so, what makes
• 12:29
  mindfulness and your style of mindfulness different?
• 12:33
  That is fair and in each of the folks that you mentioned have done some extraordinary
• 12:36
  work and there's things that I like about what they've done in some of these are areas
• 12:40
  where I might have so critique and essentially it all comes down to the same thing and so
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  mindfulness is an innate human ability.
• 12:50
  The Buddhists were able to cultivate these really wonderful practices that we've now adopted
• 12:55
  and that we use in different ways, but it could also be argued that in Sufism and
• 13:02
  Christianity, Judaism and Hindu, like across the board there's been these components of
• 13:09
  really learning how to tune into the present moment given that we have that natural capacity
• 13:14
  and we know how often we could get pulled away.
• 13:18
  So it's an innate human ability and all those folks have talked to this in different ways.
• 13:23
  With what we advocate is MBSR, which is the program that John Capison started and then
• 13:29
  we try to take it even a step further.
• 13:31
  MBSR stands for mindfulness-based stress reduction.
• 13:35
  And so John Capison started in 1979 when he was at the University of Massachusetts and
• 13:42
  the approach was let's take these practices and really create them in a way that scientific
• 13:47
  evidence-based secular and could reach people in all sorts of, initially it was a healthcare
• 13:53
  setting, but eventually all sorts of settings.
• 13:56
  Got it.
• 13:57
  And where in what, I loved your article which was entitled something like, please shut
• 14:02
  up, your guided meditations are doing harm, which is not what I expected to read from somebody
• 14:09
  who founded a mindfulness-based stress reduction clinic.
• 14:13
  What is the gist of that article and what is your argument?
• 14:17
  Well, I think we both might like to provoke a little bit to be here with you.
• 14:26
  Don't back away from it now, Mo, I mean, you got a phone, baby, I don't know.
• 14:29
  Oh, I've completely owned it.
• 14:30
  So the idea of the article is really to challenge what the whole field has drifted into.
• 14:36
  And we've kind of drifted into this space where people are essentially wearing floaties,
• 14:43
  right?
• 14:44
  And floaties and swimming pool, people were those inflatable things that kind of hold them.
• 14:48
  I don't know if they're chasley-toothed.
• 14:49
  Yeah, we are great swimmers.
• 14:53
  So yeah.
• 14:55
  So imagine you go to the pool and you look across the pool and everyone's wearing floaties.
• 15:01
  And then you look at the swim instructor and the swim instructor's wearing floaties.
• 15:05
  And you ask yourself, is anyone truly learning how to swim?
• 15:09
  And that's the question that I'm trying to get folks to consider.
• 15:13
  Often these guided meditations which have become a way to monetize services and there's
• 15:19
  different platforms out there that do that different folks out there that do that some
• 15:22
  of the folks that you mentioned earlier where suddenly they kind of hook you in to listen
• 15:28
  into their guidance without teaching you how to meditate on your own.
• 15:34
  And for me, I'm, you know, I'm in the US, we're rugged individuals, you guys are pretty
• 15:38
  rugged too.
• 15:39
  And my thought is, why can't we teach people how to do this on their own?
• 15:43
  So there isn't a dependency in that they could actually dive and go deeper, right?
• 15:49
  And so that that was meant to really just get people thinking about how we're approaching
• 15:53
  things.
• 15:54
  Are we teaching people how to meditate on their own without us?
• 15:58
  Or are we creating sort of this endless floaty situation where they need us?
• 16:04
  And from a capitalistic perspective, I mean, you know, we all want followers, subscribers
• 16:08
  and recurrent revenue dot, dot, dot, you know, keeps going on.
• 16:12
  But does that actually serve the whole promise of mindfulness?
• 16:18
  Are we creating just another kind of crutch for folks?
• 16:21
  I mean, to answer that question, you would need to know whether or not the swimmers are
• 16:25
  going to swim without the floaties, right?
• 16:27
  Whether they're going to choose to.
• 16:30
  And it may be the case that the market for people who want to sit down by themselves
• 16:35
  for an hour a day and be still with their own thoughts is a lot smaller than the number
• 16:40
  of people who want to have a guruish sounding, peaceful, English accented person talking
• 16:48
  to them in an app, making them calm for 15 minutes a day.
• 16:53
  So what if there is a, what if there are just more people who want us to swim with floaties
• 16:57
  and the alternative is not that they would ditch the floaties, but that they'd get out
• 17:00
  of the pool altogether?
• 17:02
  That's a fair point.
• 17:03
  So it's very important to meet people where they are and to help them progress, right?
• 17:08
  And so in our training, we do start with guidance, but when we start with guidance, we
• 17:12
  started off by saying, this guidance is meant to help you learn how to guide yourself.
• 17:17
  So you could have people wear floaties, but at the same time, just like when people
• 17:21
  are learning to swim, like get them moving and getting more comfortable towards not wearing
• 17:25
  floaties.
• 17:27
  And I think just the bigger kind of problem I see is people are confusing wearing floaties
• 17:34
  with swimming.
• 17:35
  So suddenly, you know, mindfulness, probably meditation automatically folks think that
• 17:39
  they're supposed to do it alone, listening to their favorite person.
• 17:43
  And then they don't even think that they could go beyond that.
• 17:47
  And so what I've found is that often the people who do go beyond that kind of have that
• 17:51
  deep conviction because they have much more profound results.
• 17:56
  And so, you know, and then just like if you met a swimming, like it's a lot more fun
• 18:00
  to take the floaties off, but you'll never get there.
• 18:03
  If no one even tells you that that's possible, right.
• 18:06
  And what does having the floaties off look like in mindfulness silence, so learning to
• 18:12
  practice in silence?
• 18:16
  It sounds terrifyingly boring.
• 18:19
  See, this is talking about boredom earlier.
• 18:24
  I know a lot of people and I may be including myself in this category of people who have
• 18:30
  dabbled in mindfulness and concluded, I'm sure wrongly, but nonetheless, self convincingly,
• 18:38
  that they're just not the type of people whose minds are hardwired for this stuff.
• 18:42
  They find it too distract, they're too distractible, their minds are racing at a million miles
• 18:46
  an hour.
• 18:47
  They find it, they feel it's torture to be sitting there constantly receiving a thought
• 18:52
  that their brain is coughing up and then gently pushing it away and coming back to the
• 18:55
  breath, it feels futile, it feels like their hamsters on a treadmill and after doing it
• 19:01
  for a few weeks, they're like, what am I doing this whole thing for anyway?
• 19:04
  I've got shit to do.
• 19:05
  Like why is it more, why is the best use of the next 30 minutes, not to have the conversation
• 19:13
  I need to have with my spouse, pitch the new project that I need to pitch to my boss,
• 19:18
  you know, book in the car for the service that needs to be serviced, send that email
• 19:23
  to my accountant that I know needs to be sent, you know, why is it to just sit there
• 19:28
  and focus on my breath being annoyed at the fact that I can't focus on my breath?
• 19:33
  That's a fair question.
• 19:37
  What I would want to know is how, you know, do these people like their life?
• 19:43
  How's that going?
• 19:45
  How's it going?
• 19:46
  How's it going?
• 19:47
  How's it going?
• 19:48
  How's it going?
• 19:50
  How's it going?
• 19:52
  I don't keep doing that, but what I found is when I'm in that state, because I'm human,
• 19:56
  I've certainly been there, and I find that I make mistakes, I find that I can get very
• 20:03
  reactive, I find that I don't feel as good, and I'm just racing and I, you know, sometimes
• 20:10
  I could be very, I have tunnel vision where I don't even see what's happening around,
• 20:17
  but when I do the practice, and I try to create these spaces, that suddenly it's almost
• 20:22
  like, you know, we give our body a rest, like it's like giving my mind a rest, like giving
• 20:27
  my mind the space to like assimilate all the stuff that's been fed into it.
• 20:35
  And I found that through deep meditation practice, the deep ride dig, there's stuff hidden
• 20:41
  in the corners of our minds that are hidden for a reason, right?
• 20:46
  And so the more time we have, it's almost like that swimming analogy, the deeper we're
• 20:50
  going into these sort of regions of our minds where things are buried, and there's some
• 20:55
  things that aren't very pleasant, and there's some things that are the treasures, like
• 20:59
  some of the best ideas, some of the greatest creativity I've discovered there, and also
• 21:03
  some areas where things I need to address, like pain and trauma.
• 21:07
  And so being able to examine those things and just shed light on them, not even try
• 21:13
  to fix them or change them, but just see them and say, oh, I see you, helps to provide
• 21:20
  more clarity and focus and creativity and better communication and compassion.
• 21:27
  So my understanding of the practice of mindfulness is that the thoughts that arise are really
• 21:33
  extraneous to the project, that the project is flexing the muscle of noticing the thought
• 21:40
  and returning to the present moment anyway.
• 21:44
  But you're saying that some of the thoughts that arise due to the practice are really
• 21:48
  useful, that there are depths that were locked away, that there are things that came up,
• 21:53
  that there are creative inspirations.
• 21:55
  Yeah.
• 21:56
  Am I supposed to validate the thoughts, or am I supposed to notice the thoughts, set
• 22:00
  them aside?
• 22:01
  Because what do I do with the creative thing that emerges, if I've still got 45 minutes
• 22:05
  left on the meditation, and I can't write it down, I'm worried that I'm going to forget
• 22:09
  it.
• 22:10
  Is the breath more important, or is the thought more important?
• 22:12
  Well, it's a great question, the best of it.
• 22:14
  Get a human, as well, if you've listened to this much of the episode, then you must enjoy
• 22:19
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• 22:22
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• 22:24
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  That is what you're voting for when you vote for uncomfortable conversations by going
• 23:26
  into your Apple podcasts and clicking subscribe.
• 23:30
  I love you, if you don't do that, that's fine, and I'll see you the next free episode,
• 23:34
  I guess.
• 23:35
  Take care.