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How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering Jack Kornfield, PhD - TalkBack - pg. 1

How to Apply Mindfulness to

Your Life and Work

Shifting Focus through Mindfulness: How to Grow

Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering

a TalkBack Session with

Joan Borysenko, PhD; Ron Siegel, PsyD; and Ruth Buczynski, PhD


Table of Contents

(click to go to a page)

What Stood Out Most ........................................................................................... 3

The Importance of Mindfulness in Self-Care .......................................................... 5

How to Alleviate Our Over-Identification with Suffering......................................... 6

Practices to Help Recognize and Balance Difficult Emotions .................................. 8

Self-Compassion Practices to Address Self-Hatred and Unworthiness ................... 10

About the Speakers ............................................................................................... 12

A TalkBack Session: Shifting Focus through Mindfulness: How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering

with Ruth Buczynski, PhD; Joan Borysenko, PhD; and Ron Siegel, PsyD


with Ruth Buczynski, PhD; Joan Borysenko, PhD; and Ron Siegel, PsyD

Dr. Buczynski: That was quite a session. We are now going into our TalkBack segment.

This is unique to NICABM. We are going to bring in two experts to help you digest what we have just covered,

and we are going to get into a conversation about what was said and also how it can be applied.

To do that, I have my two colleagues, Drs. Joan Borysenko and Ronald Siegel.

Joan is a PhD, Harvard-trained, cell biologist as well as a licensed psychologist. She is the author of multiple

books and I will tell you one of them – Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive.

Ron Siegel is also a licensed psychologist; he is Assistant Clinical Professor at Harvard and is also the author of

several books, including The Mindfulness Solution.

So, welcome to you both – it is great to be back together and working with you on this session.

Let’s dive right in to the session with Jack, and let’s start out by asking: What stood out to you in the

webinar? Joan, let’s start with you.

What Stood Out Most

Dr. Borysenko: The first thing that really struck me about this talk was the incredible compassion and

humanity of Jack Kornfield.

Just being in his presence is a transmission in and of itself – where your

heart opens and your attention focuses. When he talks about the

healing presence of the practitioner, you really understand what that is

because he models it so beautifully.

Within psychotherapy today, there is a much greater understanding than there used to be of this very simple

fact: we are the medicine – and if we don't take care of ourselves, we become toxic instead of healing.

“We are the medicine –

and if we don't take care

of ourselves, we become

toxic instead of healing.”

A TalkBack Session: Shifting Focus through Mindfulness: How to Grow Love and Compassion out of the Seeds of Suffering


Jack was really very, very clear on that.

The second thing that really struck me about his presentation was the part where he is saying neuroscientists

have not been able to locate the sense of self within the brain and the nervous system because the sense of

self is really a contextual, moving target.

The way he discussed identity – how we form identities, how we maintain our

roles, and particularly the flexibility of our stories – is very, very important.

There is another great movement within both physical medicine and psychology today, which is called

narrative medicine, and that is about understanding how our story creates a sense of self.

This is how, in particular, we use mindfulness, to get in touch with a larger context for our stories so that we

are witnessing them rather than identifying with them. Jack just did a marvelous job bringing all of that to

clarity for us.

Dr. Buczynski: How about for you, Ron – what stood out to you?

Dr. Seigel: In some ways it was the same. I am always so moved listening to Jack. He was the first teacher I

had on a silent meditation retreat some thirty-five-odd years ago and his presence shone through then, when

we were both much younger – and I still feel it today.

I was also quite struck that he didn’t use the term anatta, which is the Pali term for “no self” and what he

was really talking about throughout much of this seminar. He looked at

anatta from many angles.

I am thinking of this quote from a Taoist philosopher – he is actually

British, but he writes under the pseudonym Wei Wu Wei – who says,

“Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think

and everything you do is about your self and there isn’t any.”

That was a theme that I heard throughout Jack’s talk – and I think this is going to play an increasingly

important role in healthcare, and particularly in mental healthcare as mental health practitioners begin to

take seriously how the self is constructed, as Joan was saying, and how it is constructed in each moment

through these various narratives, and how these narratives can constrict us.

When we identify with a particular story about ourselves, we lose psychological flexibility. To the extent that

“The sense of self

is a contextual,

moving target.”

“We use mindfulness, to

get in touch with a larger

context for our stories so

that we are witnessing

them rather than

identifying with them.”


we can see these stories being constructed as practitioners, we become much more skillful.

Virtually every culture has some kind of model for multiple selves. We

see this most obviously in the Greek and Roman gods, for example, with

each one representing an aspect of the personality and we also see this

with the Bodhisattvas in Buddhist tradition.

As we start doing therapy from the perspective that there isn’t some

single, unified identity, but rather that there are always these shifting perspectives – these different parts of

us that are speaking at different moments.

That becomes quite useful, both in gaining perspective on our experience –so we don't identify so much with

a particular point of view – and in connecting to others.

If I am not so attached to, “I’ve got to be this way/that way,” then I can be with you however you are and we

can be much more connected and more together.

The Importance of Mindfulness in Self-Care

Dr. Buczynski: It is interesting how the two of you had similar perspectives on what stood out to you there.

Moving on, Joan, we briefly talked about the use of mindfulness in practitioners’ self-care. What would you

suggest for practitioners who are interested in this?

That’s probably not something only practitioners need to be thinking about – we could broaden that to

teachers and really anyone.

But go ahead and tell us how we can think about mindfulness and self-care and what you might suggest.

Dr. Borysenko I was truly delighted to hear Jack talk about self-care because it is so important. If we don't

take care of ourselves, then we really have much less to bring to the client

that we are working with.

In particular, I found myself smiling when he was talking about being with

Rachel Naomi Remen.

“When we identify with

a particular story about

ourselves, we lose

psychological flexibility.”

“If we don't take care

of ourselves, then we

really have much less

to bring to the client.”


She has done retreats for many, many years for healthcare

professionals so that they can relax a little bit, become present,

come back to their own lives.

I think we are all alike in this culture, in being too hurried, in being

too rushed, in having too many things to do and making too many commitments to too many people.

In an attempt to be compassionate, we end up doing exactly the opposite: we end up burning out.

It is very important for practitioners to have regular times of retreat

because without that, you tend to lose your perspective.

I think about going off on retreat in the same way that I might think about

doing a meditation during the day. When you meditate, you recover that “place of the witness.”

You are not so much identified with roles and “to dos” and all the rest. Going on retreat a couple of times a

year is a terrific thing to do for your self-care.

You could go on retreat with Jack Kornfield at the Insight

Meditation Society at Spirit Rock on the West Coast in California.

You could go to the East Coast with the teachers at the Insight

Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. There are many,

many places to go on retreat.

It is particularly wonderful to go on retreat with a fine teacher like Jack or with so many other fine teachers

because you get not only the silence, the reflective time of being by yourself, which is so important, but you

also get a direct transmission that inspires and refills your well.

When you come back to your practice, you have more to give and more of a capacity of presence to offer to

your clients.

How to Alleviate Our Over-Identification with Suffering

Dr. Buczynski: Thanks. Ron, Jack talked about what can be done when someone over-identifies with their

experience of suffering. What would you add to that?

“In an attempt to be

compassionate, we end up

doing exactly the opposite:

we end up burning out.”

“When you meditate,

you recover that

‘place of the witness.’”

“It is particularly wonderful to

go on retreat because you get

not only the silence, but also

a direct transmission that

inspires and refills your well.”


Dr. Seigel: This is a fascinating area because it is really about the clinical application of what Joan and I were

mentioning before, and it has been Jack’s theme – the idea of “no self” which is seeing our experience as

unfolding impersonal events rather than “all about me.”

My friend and colleague Paul Fulton has put forth this model to

understand psychological development, particularly in terms of spiritual

paths, but also generally as the shift from an experience of feeling like

“It’s about me” to more and more of an experience of feeling like it is

impersonal unfoldings.

This is like CBT on steroids – instead of replacing maladaptive, irrational thoughts with more adaptive,

rational ones, we are starting to see all of our thoughts as just these comings and goings of phenomena –

words basically appearing in the mind.

That brings us to practices that we can do to help us to realize this. The simple practice, which is done in

Vipassana Meditation, is the practice of noting.

We begin with simply noting when thoughts arise. When a thought comes

into the mind, we note it as thinking and that helps us not to identify so

much with the content of the thought.

We can refine that further by creating a few simple categories such as judging, planning, and remembering as

these different thoughts enter into the mind.

As we do this, we start to identify with them a lot less; we start to see

them much more as passing phenomena.

The other thing that we can do is to simply notice when we are

identifying with a particular role. Jack did a marvelous job when he

was talking about the policewoman – when she is being a

policewoman, she is in the role of a policewoman, and when she is being a mom, she is in the role of a mom.

When Shakespeare famously said, “The whole world is a stage and we are actors on it,” that is really true –

when we start to see the various roles that we are playing as simply roles that we are adopting, we become

much freer and much less identified with them.

“The idea of ‘no self’ is

seeing our experience

as unfolding impersonal

events rather than ‘all

about me.’”

“We are starting to see

all of our thoughts as

just these comings and

goings of phenomena.”

“When we see the various

roles that we are playing

as simply roles that we

are adopting, we become

much freer and much less


All of these approaches have significant implications for us in psychotherapy. We can actually talk to our

patients about the roles that they are playing – what feels good about them, what feels bad about them, and

when they might be able to lay them aside.

Practices to Help Recognize and Balance Difficult Emotions

Dr. Buczynski: Joan, Jack talks about the importance of recognizing and balancing difficult emotions. Do you

have any thoughts on exercises or practices that would be helpful for that?

Dr. Borysenko: I do. First of all, though, Ron just talked about the importance of really naming what your

experience is, just in terms of how the mind works – thinking or judging, for example.

It is the same with emotions: to be able to stop for a moment and

notice, “This is sadness that is coming up from me.”

I am going to give you an example of that. I live in Boulder, Colorado

and we recently had a big flood. Right here in the Boulder area, four

or five people died in that flood and 290 people lost their homes. It is

really unbelievable, and sometimes it is hard to feel feelings like that for some time.

I was giving a presentation elsewhere, and all of a sudden I found that I burst into tears because I had not

come into balance with my emotions. I was so sad, so terribly sad.

For some of the people, their homes had burned down in the 2010 fire; they had rebuilt, but now were

washed away in the flood.

I was so just dealing with the emergency of the moment, trying to get to the airport and fly out to where I

was giving a presentation, that I hadn’t named my own feelings. I hadn’t named that sadness.

So that is the first thing – to come into emotional balance. I got to where I was going and I felt absolutely

overwhelmed and out of balance.

What happens with the overwhelm is that you have become so identified with the emotion, it is just like

acting out that emotion in yourself and acting it out in your behavior.

“It is the same with

emotions: to be able to

stop for a moment and

notice, ‘This is sadness that

is coming up from me.’”


To get back some distance, first you have to name that emotion – in this case sadness – and then it is a little

bit easier to have compassion for yourself when you have an emotion that is difficult.

So often, we don't invoke self-compassion when we are having a difficult emotion.

Jack speaks so beautifully about the end of self-hatred and how we can be compassionate toward ourselves.

Then, of course, mindfulness practice is so oriented toward seeing what the emotion is but not identifying

with it.

Jack was very clear on that. He had – let’s see if I can find it – a great

quote. He said, “You need mindfulness to identify what you are feeling

but not to identify with the feeling.”

In other words, as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross used to say, “All feelings are great because they give you

information, but they are not so great if you marinate in them.”

Emotional balance is that capacity to draw back – to realize that all people have these emotions at some

time. It is not a permanent state. It comes, and it goes.

But what can you do, for example, if you are sad when people have lost their homes in the flood?

That gives you information – you want to be of service and you want to be useful. Maybe you need to do a

little bit of volunteering or give money to the Red Cross. You can decide what you can do.

This shows you that your heart is leading you toward some action. You

take the information and are compassionate that the emotion is there,

without becoming so overwhelmed by it.

Jack is such a very good teacher of how to deal with the balance of

emotions.

Dr. Buczynski: Thanks, Joan, and I am so sorry that you had to go through that.

D. Borysenko: Yes. Thank you, Ruth.

“So often, we don't

invoke self-compassion

when we are having a

difficult emotion.”

“Emotional balance is

that capacity to draw

back – to realize that all

people have these

emotions at some time.”


Self-Compassion Practices to Address Self-Hatred and Unworthiness

Dr. Buczynski: Ron, Joan briefly alluded to the self-hatred that Jack had been referring to and I would like to

follow up on that a little more.

Self-hatred and unworthiness is felt by a lot of people. Would you add any further thoughts to the practices

of self-compassion that Jack discussed?

Dr. Seigel: I thought Jack’s contributions were wonderful – and I would add to that some of the work done

by my friends Kristin Neff and Chris Germer.

They have done a lot of work in looking at exactly which

practices are helpful for us when we are filled with a lot of

negativity towards ourselves. Kristin has outlined three things

that happen whenever we face disappointment, and in

particular, when we are being harsh with ourselves.

When we experience self-criticism, we start to get involved in narratives about “All the things that are wrong

with me / How foolish I was that I did what I did / How inadequate I am.”

We get involved in self-isolation. We tend to pull back from others when we feel bad about ourselves; we

start to lick our wounds in private.

We get involved in self-absorption, basically spending an awful lot of time focused on the first two – on how

bad I am and how nobody would want to be with me.

We can specifically tackle each of those three with antidotes. The antidote to self-criticism is self-kindness.

Most of our listeners are probably familiar with loving-kindness

practices in which people will often put their hands over the heart,

as I am doing, and repeat, “May I be safe – May I be healthy – May I

live with ease – May I be free from suffering – May I be happy” et cetera – and those are helpful.

One can write a self-compassion letter. This is a great method where we simply imagine that a friend who

loves us is observing our circumstance and is writing a letter to us about that circumstance.

Another practice that helps a lot with the self-isolation is the sense of common humanity – and we get this in

“Whenever we face

disappointment we experience

self-criticism, we get involved

in self-isolation, and we get

involved in self-absorption.”

“We can tackle each of

those three with antidotes.”


different ways.

Joan pointed out how volunteering and being involved in the community can do it.

Parables also work. There is this famous story of the mustard seed that is used in Buddhist psychological

teaching which is basically a story of a woman who has lost her only son and she is just grief-stricken. She

goes to the Buddha for advice and he asks her to go and get a mustard seed from a neighbor – but she has to

get that from a neighbor who hasn’t suffered from some kind of painful loss.

As she goes around from neighbor to neighbor, she hears more and more stories of the commonality of

painful loss, and that becomes healing.

Finally, I just want to say a word about something I read recently. There is a

philosopher, Alain de Botton, who has written about status anxiety, which is

a phenomenon that happens in our current developed cultures where there

is social mobility.

In the old days – this sounds like it is a tangent but it is very connected – if you were born a peasant, you

stayed a peasant. If you were born a noble, you stayed a noble. If you were born into a certain role in the

caste system, you stayed in that role.

But now that we have so much opportunity for social mobility, if we are not at the top of the pack, we are

filled with all these self-critical narratives about other people who are ahead of us – and that’s probably

made worse by the Internet and Facebook.

People see what all of their peers are up to, and there’s this terrible feeling of inadequacy from not being an

Olympic gold medalist or a celebrity – we’re just an “ordinary” human being.

All this means that we need even more self-compassion because we don't all live in Lake Wobegon where all

the women are beautiful and all of the children are above average! Half the time we are going to lose in

these comparisons and we have to be kind to ourselves around this.

Dr. Buczynski: This wraps up our TalkBack segment for this session.

“Now that we have

so much opportunity

for social mobility

we need even more

self-compassion.”


About the speakers . . .

Joan Borysenko, PhD has been described as a

respected scientist, gifted therapist, and unabashed

mystic. Trained at Harvard Medical School, she was

an instructor in medicine until 1988.

Currently the President of Mind/Body Health Scienc-

es, Inc., she is an internationally known speaker and

consultant in women’s health and spirituality, inte-

grative medicine and the mind/body connection.

Joan also has a regular 2 to 3 page column she

writes in Prevention every month. She is the author

of nine books, including New York Times bestsellers.

Ron Siegel, PsyD is an Assistant Clinical

Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School,

where he has taught for over 20 years. He is a long

time student of mindfulness mediation and serves

on the Board of Directors and faculty for the

Institute for Medication and Therapy.

Dr. Siegel teachers nationally about mindfulness and

psychotherapy and mind/body treatment, while

maintaining a private practice in Lincoln, MA.

He is co-editor of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy

and co-author of Back Sense: A Revolutionary

Approach to Halting the Cycle of Chronic Back Pain.

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