The Mindfulness Movement

- [Announcer] This program is brought to you by.

(bright music) (bright music continues) - [Announcer] UMass Memorial Health, home to the Center for Mindfulness.

Offering evidence-based mindfulness instruction for over 40 years.

Learn about online courses at UMMHealth.org/pbs.

- [Announcer] Change begins with a single breath.

Learn about the art of mindful living at Mindfulness.com/PBS.

- [Announcer] And these individuals and organizations.

(relaxing music) A complete list of funders is available at TheMindfulnessMovement.com.

(gentle acoustic music) - Our lives are filled with distractions.

Email, Twitter, texting.

We're constantly connected to technology.

Rarely alone with just our thoughts.

Which is probably why there's a growing movement in America to train people to get around the stresses of daily life.

It's a practice called mindfulness.

(gentle acoustic music) - I believe that the entry point for living a more conscious life is mindfulness.

- What is your favorite thing about racing?

- I think the mindfulness of it is what I really enjoy the most because you really have to be focused on the here and the now.

- When this year's top buzzwords are compiled, mindfulness will surely be close to the top of the list.

- So, Angie, in the video, you talked a little bit about mindfulness.

So could you tell us a little bit more about what it is and how it works?

- And what we're talking about is called mindfulness meditation, and people who do it believe that it makes their brains healthier and fitter.

(gentle acoustic music fades) (somber music) - I grew up in Alaska.

My mom left when I was eight.

My dad took over raising my brothers and I, we moved to the homestead where my dad had been raised.

He was raised in an abusive household and went to Vietnam, picked up some more trauma, and he began drinking to try and medicate his anxiety.

And it didn't go well for him.

He became abusive and I ended up moving out at 15.

I knew when I moved out at 15 that statistically I should end up repeating the cycle.

As much as we get a genetic inheritance, we get an emotional inheritance.

And if you look at my family's emotional inheritance, it leads to substance abuse or alcoholism or physical abuse.

I didn't want that to be me.

I wanted to avoid being a statistic.

After I graduated high school, I ended up in San Diego where my mom was.

I went to take care of her.

I was working in a computer warehouse.

My boss took me aside to have a talk with me and I realized he was propositioning me and I turned him down.

And when I wouldn't have sex with him, he wouldn't give me my paycheck, and I wasn't able to make rent.

And so, my mom and I began living in our cars.

My car ended up getting stolen, I ended up being homeless for a year.

I was having panic attacks and stealing and wasn't doing well.

Somewhere between the age of 15 when I said I would never be a statistic, to 18, three short years later, I was a statistic, I was homeless and gonna end up in jail or dead.

I quit believing in myself.

And so I had to get very, very serious about my thoughts.

(somber music) (explosion booming) - [Personnel] 234, what is your position?

(gun popping) - [Personnel] Be aware of two IEDs near a house on the main road.

- The combat mission may technically be over, but for anyone who thinks the danger is over, consider that there have been 560 IED explosions in Iraq in just the past month.

I had spent a lot of time after nine 11 in war zones, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq, many times in Iraq.

Do you feel like the war is over?

- We're combat troops.

We're still here.

We've still got a job to do.

- And I had come home and gotten depressed and didn't, I was insufficiently self-aware to even know that I was depressed.

And I made this very dumb decision to self-medicate with recreational drugs, including cocaine, ecstasy.

Even though I hadn't been doing drugs every day or anything like that, it was enough to artificially raise the level of adrenaline in my brain to change my brain chemistry, and made it much more likely for me to have a panic attack.

(tense music) (uptempo music) Now, one of the world's most commonly prescribed medications may be providing a big bonus.

Researchers report, people who take cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins for at least five years may also lower their risk for cancer.

I was anchoring the news updates on Good Morning America.

That's that person who comes on at the top of the hour and delivers the headlines.

And just a few seconds into my spiel, I just lost it.

But it's too early to prescribe statins slowly for cancer production.

My heart was racing, my lungs seized up, my palms were sweating, my mind was racing.

I just, I actually just couldn't breathe, I couldn't speak anymore.

So I had to quit right in the middle and that was really embarrassing.

That does it for news.

We're gonna go back now to Robin and Charlie.

(somber music) - I loved to run whether it was cross-country, playing basketball and jump and just be engaged physically.

There's something magical about that, there's something magical while being in the flow where things are just happening and it's like you're not there.

But you're right in it.

You are it.

So when I was in college, I was actually rooming with Dr. J at the time, Julius Irving, back at UMass.

And we were, it was preseason just playing with the team and I got injured.

I had ankle injury and pretty much ended my career.

And I didn't really know who I was if I wasn't playing basketball because I was one of these quiet types that let my game do my talking for me.

Being an athlete all my life and loving to run and loving to compete, and having the camaraderie of being with a group of people that had a common purpose, that was very challenging for me to get away from all of that.

And that's when I started the pain medicine.

I started abusing that, then getting into drugs and alcohol.

(somber music) (melancholic music) - My parents split up when I was four.

My mother died when I was nine.

I lived with my father's parents after that, whom I hardly knew.

My father came back briefly, I hadn't seen him since I was four and by now I'm like 11 and he was like a different person, and took an overdose of sleeping pills and he didn't die but he spent the rest of his life in some mental health facility or another.

And I'd lived in five different family configurations and every one of them had been switched because of trauma or loss or something like that.

And so, I was terribly unhappy and afraid and angry, but I didn't quite know what was going on within me.

I just knew it didn't feel really good.

(melancholic music) (dramatic music) - [Narrator] The pace of life seems to be accelerating.

- [Reporter] First one, we've got that major accident, H1 eastbound.

It's after white model- - [Reporter] It's actually the most polluted city in America.

(baby crying, loud siren) - [Reporter] You can see the building (indistinct) to merge so, expect the delays on all first responders on the scene.

(electronic beeping) - [Narrator] We're more connected to information, but less connected to each other.

(dramatic music) (baby crying) (dramatic music) In these increasingly uncertain times, a growing number of people have discovered a surprisingly effective antidote.

(dramatic music) Mindfulness.

(waves crashing) (gentle music) Mindfulness comes in two forms.

One is a specific type of meditation, mindfulness meditation.

- Every time you put your mind on your breath and then it wanders, that's what the mind does, and you notice it wandered and then you bring it back, you're strengthening the neural circuitry for paying attention.

This is quite a parallel with going to the gym and lifting weights.

Every time you lift that weight, every repetition strengthens that muscle just a little bit more.

- Among novice practitioners, we saw changes in the brain after just two weeks of practice.

This was a kind of proof of concept study that underscored how quickly these changes can arise.

- [Narrator] Strengthening that mental muscle builds an ongoing quality of attention, simply known as mindfulness.

(gentle music) - The way I define mindfulness is paying attention to our present moment experiences with openness and curiosity, and a willingness to be with what is.

So it's a quality of attention that we can have at any moment whether we're walking down the street or talking to a friend or eating or brushing our teeth, we can bring that quality of awareness to our experience.

(gentle music) - We just start making better decisions for ourselves and others.

We start taking better care of ourselves.

We feel better about ourselves.

We generally feel better about other people.

We just become more relational, more empathic and so I think that's all good.

(gentle music) - When you're aware of a sensory experience while you're having it without the compulsive activity of the mind to define it is a very wonderful state to be in because it's a state of peace.

(gentle music) - And it offers us degrees of freedom so that we can navigate the inevitable ups and downs of life.

There's no moment that's not a wonderful moment for mindfulness.

(gentle upbeat music) - I'm a big believer in the growth of mindfulness, that mindfulness can change the world.

(gentle upbeat music) (1960s psychedelic music) - [Narrator] Some people still associate meditation and mindfulness with the 1960s, (uptempo music) during the rise of hippie culture and an influx of yogis and gurus from the east.

But in the 1970s, a small number of young scientists and other seekers began to explore different types of meditation in a more analytical way.

(dramatic music) - As I was studying to become a scientist at MIT in molecular biology, it also was very important to me to try to bring that other stream of my own meditation practice together with what I was understanding about science and the universe.

I did have an experience back in the late '70s of being on a two-week meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Center.

One day, at about the 10th day of this retreat, sitting alone in my room, meditating, I had a vision of what might be possible that had to do with bringing what I was learning and practicing at this retreat center, which was a very Buddhist place, into the mainstream of the world.

Since I happened to be already working in a laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, I thought, what a perfect place to do it.

Bring it into a hospital.

Nobody wants to go there unless they are really suffering beyond a certain point where they can't deny it anymore.

I started to seek out physicians, asking, "What percentage of your patients do you feel you actually help?"

And I was astonished by the answers that they would say, "Well, maybe 10%, maybe 15%."

And I would say, "My god, what happens to the rest?"

(gentle piano music) They said, "Well, they either get better on their own, but for the most part they just never get better."

- [Narrator] Jon found a few doctors willing to refer their chronic patients and the Stress Reduction Clinic was born.

- I would say, "Listen, from our point of view, as long as you're breathing, there's more right with you than wrong with you.

And what we're going to do is pour energy and attention into your experience in the form of mindfulness, in the form of wakefulness, in the form of present moment awareness, and see what happens over the course of eight weeks.

(uplifting music) You could see people transform.

The doctors would say, they'd say, "I don't know what you did with Mrs. so-and-so, but you were able to help her more in eight weeks than I've been able to help her in eight years."

And I would just smile and say, "Well, you know, actually I didn't do anything.

She did it herself."

- [Narrator] Jon called his eight-week course, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or MBSR.

(lively guitar music) Four decades later, MBSR courses are now offered in thousands of hospitals and other facilities around the world.

Hundreds of thousands of lives have been transformed.

- It's absolutely essential that it is understood that mindfulness is intrinsically an ethical practice.

How would you even know if you're doing harm?

Unless you're aware, unless you're awake, unless you're mindful of your impulses to control, you're engaging in the meditation practice for the sake of, as they say, all beings.

(somber music) - [Narrator] The retreat center where Jon had his epiphany for how to bring mindfulness into the mainstream was co-founded by the woman who grew up as a depressed, angry girl in Buffalo.

(somber music) - When I was a sophomore in college I took an Asian philosophy course.

I had a philosophy requirement and I just chose that one because it was convenient to my schedule.

And of course, the course completely changed my life.

It was in the context of the course.

I heard about the prospect of meditation practice.

I heard there were actual practical tools you could use that could change your mind, that could make you a lot happier.

And it was a question of finding them and actually practicing them.

The school had an independent study program.

I created a project.

I said, "I wanna go to India and study meditation."

And they approved it so off I went.

And I began my meditation practice in January of 1971.

(slow tempo Indian music) I'm somewhat famous for once having marched up to Goenka, my first teacher, and looking him in the eye and saying, "I never used to be an angry person before I started meditating."

Thereby laying blame exactly where I felt it belonged, which was on him of course.

There were sort of two parallel processes.

One was discovery.

What am I feeling?

What is the truth of my experience?

You know, layer under layer, under layer.

And the other part was being kind to myself and compassionate to myself rather than so judgmental in that discovery.

And it was only after that I think that the whole emphasis on kindness toward oneself broadened and became a real effort to understand the nature of kindness and the power of kindness toward others as well.

It still remains like the pivotal turning point of my life.

- [Narrator] Eventually, Sharon, Joseph Goldstein, and Jack Kornfield found a former Catholic seminary building in Barre, Massachusetts and scraped together money through fundraising and loans to create the Insight Meditation Society, America's first permanent retreat center started by Westerners.

(gentle music) - When I was a graduate student at Harvard, I got a traveling fellowship to go to India.

It's quite an interesting accident of history that the people I bumped into by accident have now become really the leaders of the mindfulness movement in America, like Jack Kornfield, and Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg, and maybe three or four other people who are now leading teachers of mindfulness.

- Please join me in welcoming Daniel Goleman.

(audience applauding) - I began to feel there's something very important going on here and it was off the map of psychology then.

As a clinical psychologist, I was learning how to meet someone and figure out what was wrong with them.

That was what clinical psych was about.

Here it was what could be right about people?

It was the upside of human potential.

So I was very excited and I went back to Harvard and I said, "Hey, guess what?

There's an upside to human potential and it all seems to have to do with meditation.

Isn't that great?"

"No, that's probably a career-ending move," they said.

And for me it was 'cause after coming back and teaching a bit, then I went into science journalism.

And one of the things I always wanted to write about was the scientific benefits of mindfulness and meditation.

- [Narrator] Daniel became a bestselling author starting with his 1995 paradigm shifting book, "Emotional Intelligence."

His book, "Altered Traits" co-authored with neuroscientist Richard Davidson examines the scientific evidence.

- When we started out way back, there were three articles that were published in the scientific literature on any kind of meditation that we could cite.

Now there are more than 6,000.

In the last five years, it's just been practically exponential growth.

Today there are more than a thousand a year.

Here's the good news, the circuitry for paying full attention and monitoring mind wandering gets stronger.

One of the other findings about beginning meditation is that you're triggered less, you recover more quickly.

And when you're triggered, you get less upset.

And there is some very good suggestive evidence from UCLA that meditation slows the aging of the brain.

People who we call long-term practitioners, if you do a day retreat like six to eight hours of meditation, something happens to your genes.

And what happens is that all of the genes that create, or hundreds or more genes that create inflammation in the body downregulate, they go quiet.

And this is really interesting medically because chronic inflammation is one of the at cause factors in a whole range of diseases from diabetes and arthritis to heart disease and so on.

So, after all these years, and despite what my professors at Harvard told me, I'm very happy that I've followed this and pursued mindfulness, pursued meditation, and I think that we've been vindicated by the evidence.

And thank you very much for coming tonight.

(audience applauding) Richie Davidson, however, was ready to listen to what I had to say and we've been lifelong friends since.

(gentle uptempo music) - After my second year of graduate school in 1974, I went off to India for the first time to get a taste of meditation practice.

When I returned from India, I came back with a conviction that meditation was something very important for Western psychology and neuroscience to embrace, and a fervent aspiration to pursue research in this area.

But it was made very clear to me that if I wanted a successful career in science, this was an absolutely terrible way to begin, and I had better find something else to study.

- [Narrator] For years, Richard stuck to basic research until one fateful meeting.

- When I first met the Dalai Lama in 1992, he challenged me and he said, "You've been using tools of modern neuroscience to investigate stress and anxiety and depression and adversity.

Why can't you use those same tools to study kindness and compassion?"

And that was a wake up call.

I didn't have a very good answer for him.

And he said, "I want you to take these practices out of their religious context, bring them into the laboratory, and if you find that they're valuable, disseminate them to the world."

And that was my assignment for the rest of my life.

- [Narrator] What Richard and others at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Healthy Minds have discovered is that meditation has the power to rewire and restructure the brain.

(upbeat music) - We first began to look at very long-term meditation practitioners.

These were individuals who spent years training their mind.

Sure enough, when we did those studies, we found that their brains were quite different from the brains of ordinary individuals.

- Okay, let's get started.

If you wanna lay down and be careful.

- What we envision is that we are providing people with lifelong skills that they'll continue to use over and over again.

And it's through continued practice that enduring change can occur.

(gentle music) - When you become aware that you're distracted then gently bring your awareness back to your breathing.

To be aware of a thought as it arises and falls or any other experience of perception, choice, sensation, all does the same thing.

You realize that you as a being are not a thought.

- [Narrator] Deepak Chopra began his professional life as a board-certified physician.

Then in 1985, just as Jon Kabat-Zinn, Daniel Goleman, and others had done, Deepak decided to focus more on what was right with people instead of what was wrong.

- As a medical doctor, I was always interested in healing.

And you can't do that by looking at the human body in a very fragmented way as a physical machine.

I just extended my understanding of healing, it's a natural progression.

- [Narrator] Deepak's insights on healing, wellbeing, and other topics have led to more than 80 books, as well as speaking engagements around the world.

- The word mindfulness in itself is a little misleading because it implies a full mind and awarefulness would be an awkward, clumsy word, so we'll keep the word, mindfulness.

But every experience that we have, this experience is illuminated by the light of awareness.

And then the compulsion to say, this is good, this is bad, to judge, to label, all of that increases the activity of the mind.

That restless activity of the mind ultimately is the cause of all stress.

But when you're embedded as awareness, as the loving presence in which all is happening, that's a state of perfect homeostasis, perfect equilibrium.

(relaxing music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - When we were little kids, my parents were heavily into yoga and meditation and contemplative practices, Ayurvedic cooking, and being vegan back then.

So, our dad would wake us up every morning and make us meditate before school.

- We thought it was weird as I don't know what.

And honestly, we kinda kept it in the house and we kinda called ourselves like closet meditators 'cause we had to like keep it secret from everybody else.

- [Narrator] During college, the Smith Brothers met a kindred spirit in Andres Gonzalez.

They returned to the crime and poverty of West Baltimore determined to provide children with positive life skills.

(upbeat music) - And having the two of them with me through this journey was extremely powerful because you know, we know we struggled a lot at the beginning, you know?

It is a good eight, nine years of doing this for free and a lot of judgment being passed on to us and people asking us, "What are you doing with yourselves?

Why don't you get a real job?"

We were presented with the opportunity to coach football for some fifth grade boys at an elementary school.

And we decided to do an afterschool yoga program and things kinda took on a life of their own from there.

- Touch your chin to your chest.

Touch to your chest.

- [Narrator] That success gradually led to other programs featuring yoga and mindfulness, both after school and during the school day.

- [Student] Inhale and push.

- Are we ready for our Mindful Moment?

- [Narrator] Now every day at Robert Coleman Elementary starts with a series of exercises known as the Mindful Moment.

- Your toes, any thoughts of the past come into mind, just let it go.

- [Narrator] And during the day, teachers can refer any kids who are struggling to the mindful moment room.

(uplifting music) - They're not going to the office, they're coming here.

And last year we had close to 1,300 referrals.

So that's 1,300 times that kids came to us and we were able to work with them and able to return them to class focused and ready to learn.

- [Narrator] On the other side of Baltimore at Patterson High School, Principal Vance Benton knows firsthand that the program works with older kids too.

- Being that we have a lot of students from other countries fleeing their village, they also experience the same things our Baltimore City students are experiencing in terms of death and violence.

I want the children to have something that they can always have with them beyond the school day.

- And once they love themselves, then they see it start to ripple out, we see them start to treat their friends differently, their teachers differently, their principal differently.

It has to start within and it kind of just reverberates out and it starts to affect the entire community.

(slow tempo music) (intense orchestral music) - The Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA started in 2006.

So when we teach in institutions, we definitely do not want it being perceived as religious and it's not.

The teachings are rooted in Buddhism, but they're not Buddhist.

They're what it means to be human.

We have free drop-ins all over campus all the time, and we also go out to the public.

(melancholic music) Welcome, everyone, to our Thursday Mindful Awareness Meditation.

If we were to check into our mind at any point in the day, we would probably notice that we're in the past replaying things, wishing they hadn't happened, going over them, thinking I could have done them differently.

Or we're planning for the future.

What am I gonna be doing?

Obsessing about it, catastrophizing.

So mindfulness is this invitation to the here and now.

And people report that when they're more present, there's a sense of connection, of gratitude, of presence, of awareness that really begins to infiltrate their lives.

So what we're doing here really is a training ground for being mindful throughout the day.

I was hired originally to work on a grant, on a research study on mindfulness for ADHD.

When we did the study with ADHD, there was actually a statistical significance that mindfulness helped kids and adults pay attention so much so that the scientists who reviewed the data looked at it and said, "What medication did you put them on?"

And we said, "No, no, meditation."

One of the studies we did with insomnia, we had older adults with insomnia and there again, was pretty good results in terms of people's ability to fall asleep and less rumination, less depression.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Following his panic attack on live television and admitted drug use, ABC's Dan Harris was searching for help.

(gentle music) - My wife gave me a book about Buddhism and I was hooked.

I was really hooked and my problem at that point was, the Buddha, what he was recommending sounded utterly repellent and that was meditation.

Because I was of the view that meditation was for freaks and hippies, and people who are really into Enya and aromatherapy.

I describe myself as a fidgety skeptic.

I don't know where I came up with that, but it's true.

You know, I am...

It's hard for me to sit still and I was raised by secular scientists.

I'm married to a scientist.

I'm very skeptical of stuff that you can't prove.

When I started to see that there is the science that suggests that meditation is really good for you, that really began to change my attitude about it.

The other thing that really changed my mind is that it's simple.

You don't have to sit in a funny position.

You don't have to join a group.

You don't have to believe in anything.

It's simple and secular.

- [Narrator] Dan was also surprised to find himself becoming an advocate.

- One of my colleagues was saying essentially, "What's the matter with you?

You used to be cool.

Why are you meditating?"

And I was at a loss and I said, "Well, you know, it makes me about 10% happier."

And I could see the look on her face transformed from scorn to something approaching interest.

And I thought, that's my shtick.

I called the book that and that's grown into a podcast and an app and more books that has resulted from this wisecrack around the office.

I'm struck by the absurdity of it, but I think there's something there in that people were ready for a reasonable claim.

You should get marginally better at being awake and not on autopilot for the rest of your life.

Really to me it's about this meditation cliche of respond, not react.

You learn how to respond wisely to things instead of reacting blindly.

(somber music) (somber music continues) - [Narrator] Long before singer-songwriter Jewel had even heard the word mindfulness, she was a homeless teen suffering from panic attacks.

- I had to develop a lot of strategies while I was homeless to survive, how to rewire a lot of the self-defeating thoughts that I had.

What was I thinking?

Could you choose your thoughts?

And I began to look at curating my thoughts much more carefully than I cared about any other thing.

That put me in the driver's seat.

It meant I wasn't a victim of my brain.

- [Narrator] Another of Jewel's self-taught techniques led to one of her most successful songs after she was discovered by a record producer while playing in a coffee shop.

My hands are small, I know But they're not yours, they are my own They're not yours, they are my own We are never broken - I decided to start watching my hands because the hands are the servants of your thought.

By forcing myself to be observant in real time of my hands, I made myself present in the moment.

And when I did that, my anxiety calmed down.

Heartache came to visit me "Hands" really is one of my odes to mindfulness.

Pretty much all of my songs are about me learning to become a whole human, to live my life mindfully with presence being the driver of my life.

(guitar music) (audience applauding) Thank you.

(slow tempo music) - [Narrator] Following an injury, George Mumford went from playing basketball at the University of Massachusetts with future Hall of Famer Julius Irving, to being addicted to alcohol and drugs due to his chronic pain.

- How did I get motivated to go from being a substance abuser to being in recovery?

I was a financial analyst, so I was analyzing things and I realized that the mindfulness was telling me that I was really interested in what motivates people, especially myself.

I had to learn how to deal with my pain and mindfulness and just cultivating wisdom, understanding the mind-body process.

And so I got into it for survival and then it became not to survive, but to thrive, and I've been thriving ever since.

Originally when I started doing the mindfulness, I worked with people in recovery.

At the time I was working at the Center for Mindfulness, back in the day it was called the Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program.

And Jon Kabat-Zinn was the founder and the director, and he had a relationship with Phil Jackson because they used to teach at Omega Institute.

'Cause they had just won their third NBA championship and the stress of all the people coming at them, of wanting things, Phil wanted someone to come in and help them deal with that 'cause he dealt with the whole person.

And then in the meantime, Michael Jordan's father got murdered and Michael retired.

So, when I got there in October of 1993, they were in full-blown crisis.

So I could talk to them about being in the zone and what it took to have that mental toughness and how to cultivate that, how to train for that.

So the mindfulness is the key because if your mind is not right, even though you have talent, even though you've done the training, you won't have access to it.

- [Narrator] With George's help and the return of Michael Jordan a year later, the Bulls went on to win three more NBA championships.

George then followed Phil Jackson to the Los Angeles Lakers where they helped Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal win another three championships.

(uplifting music) - I would say mindfulness makes us flow ready.

(uplifting music) That we need to have a little bit of complexity and we have to have this willingness to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

So we have to play in between comfort and discomfort and that's when we're getting, when we're moving, pushing the edges of our capacity, that's when we experience flow and that's why it doesn't last because the mind and body gets acclimated to it.

And so then we gotta push further.

(sirens wailing) - About 4 1/2 years ago, my life started to spiral out of control and I had heart pain.

I was stressed out, I was feeling depressed, and I tried traditional remedies such as therapy and exercise and nothing seemed to work.

I stumbled across mindfulness meditation at my darkest hour, I tried it and there was something about it that spoke to me immediately.

Then I came across Mindfulness-Based Resiliency Training that Lieutenant Goerling was doing in Oregon.

- And meeting our distractions without any judgment or elaboration.

- [Narrator] Today, Lieutenant Richard Goerling is leading officers and support staff from several departments through his specially designed mindful policing program.

- I started out on a quest in about 2003 to quite simply improve the police citizen encounter.

What I found in my own experience taking an MBSR class was that there was something there that was unlike any other training I'd ever experienced.

Some sort of deep internal awareness and skills that I cultivated in simply eight weeks of training.

Noticing the difference in sensation from the palm of your hand versus the backside of your hand.

Maybe there's some warmth or coolness there that isn't there in the palm of your hand.

Our longevity, we give up a minimum of 10 years of our life just simply for being in the profession.

We have the worst cardiovascular disease profile of any population.

We're twice as likely to be clinically depressed as a general population.

What we do with mindfulness training is we're building skills that disrupt these habituated ways of being that are driven by stress and trauma, and we're cultivating a whole new way of being.

And that way of being is maybe best framed as resiliency.

I will be in the middle of trauma and I will be there fully present.

I will be there skillfully and with a period of adjustment when it's over, I will emerge as strong as I was when I started or potentially even stronger.

(calm music) (calm music continues) - It makes us a little more human when we come into that call and it makes the people we're dealing with more human, and there can't be anything but success that comes from something like that.

(calm music) (tense music) (tense music continues) - Prisoners quite naturally try to protect themselves just usually with armoring up physically and psychologically and with anger and bitterness.

And so, it's very hard to connect with that genuine regret and remorse, which to me is what we have to get in touch with for that transformation to really begin to happen.

- Notice if you can bring a little more energy in or a little more softness in.

Just finding the balance there.

(slow tense music) Recalling that you have your breath as your ally.

(slow tense music) Your home base.

- So my name is Fleet Maul and I'm really happy to be here tonight.

I founded what we now call Prison Mindfulness Institute.

Used to be called Prison Dharma Network in 1989 while I was serving 14 years in a maximum security federal prison hospital in Southwest Missouri.

And how I got there is some things I have deep regrets about.

I ended up getting a big sentence for drug trafficking and it was cocaine.

It really took off once I got out when my colleague Kate Crisp got involved and we started building it into a national organization that today involves about 190 different meditation-based prison projects all around the world.

- Take a big breath in.

Stretch, stretch up.

And then exhale just softly.

(exhales softly) - Well, who do we want them to be when they get out?

Angry, bitter, full of shame, still caught up in all their victim mindset and victim thinking.

Or do we want them to come out as better human beings?

Well, if we want them to come out as better human beings, better neighbors, better citizens, then we better give them some opportunities to do some work on themselves.

- I just appreciate the fact you're here today and that you gave us some hope of us doing something positive in the future as well.

Thank you.

- You're on next week with aware of this moment.

- I'll be- - Maybe we're gonna fly with you.

- Yeah.

- We're gonna fly there.

Ready to fly- - You're ready to roll, huh?

- Thanks then.

- Okay, yeah.

Great, thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you, thank you.

- If you're comfortable closing your eyes, that just helps avoid distraction.

And if you wanna just focus on a book on the table, that's fine.

I was appalled to find from 15 to 22 veterans a day in this country taking their own lives.

After working with a number of veteran service organizations, I saw too many people still falling through the cracks.

I really have to offer this 'cause I know the power of mindfulness and I know it can really have an immediate and long-term effect.

And then very specifically, bring our attention to our toes, wiggling our toes, noticing the mobility that we have, the distance between our toes and our shoes.

- [Narrator] The nonprofit Mindful Veteran Project founded by Gail Soffer, provides veterans, active duty military, their families and caregivers in the Los Angeles area with mindfulness exercises to help cope with post-traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks, and other ailments.

(tense music) - This is our situational awareness of our own bodies and we're not trying to fix or change anything, just noticing what's happening.

Some veterans can feel like hey, I'm already too mindful.

I'm aware of everything and I'm on red alert and I'm scanning, scanning, scanning, scanning.

I don't need to do more of that.

There's a difference between being hypervigilant and vigilant with openness and curiosity, and not assuming a threat.

That's a huge difference 'cause in mindfulness, when you suspend judgment, you're suspending assumptions, you're not jumping to conclusions, you're really exploring.

- It helps me have less anxiety and if I do have an anxiety attack, it helps me to be able to have more control of what's going on in my life.

- I use it to make sure that I don't go back into the dark places that I was going to with my PTSD.

(bright piano music) - What I'm gonna do is hand you an object and you may or may not have seen this object before.

I can promise you it's edible, but that's all I'm going to promise.

The Center for Mindfulness has really been the leader in the fields around developing gold standard treatments like mindfulness-based stress reduction to help people manage their stress, for example.

We developed a program called Eat Right Now that helps people change their relationship to emotional and stress eating so they can break that addictive cycle.

And seeing what that tastes like without even biting.

(bright music) And then really paying attention as we take one bite through this thing feeling the texture, feeling the taste that might be released.

Our brains are set up to form habits.

The problem is when we get so caught up in these habits, they no longer serve us.

If we start eating because we're stressed out, so we're stressed, we eat some chocolate and we feel a little bit better, we're not eating because we're hungry, we're eating because we are stressed out.

And that stress can kind of perpetuate eating because we're stressed.

Here, we can hack that system.

So if we get stressed out and we get curious, we bring some mindful curious awareness to that situation, there's a different reward that comes from that.

We don't have to eat something to feel better.

We can naturally drop into our awareness and curiosity and that in itself is joyful.

With our Eat Right Now program, we had 40% reduction in craving related eating.

That's pretty good.

From a behavioral standpoint, we get five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment with our smoking cessation program.

On a regular basis, I get folks telling me that they've quit smoking, this has saved their life and things like that and that's really rewarding.

(calm music) (melancholic music) - If we ever wanna solve our health crisis, we have to address the issues of healthy living because unhealthy lifestyles are causing 50 to 70% of all healthcare costs.

So instead of looking for the cure, we need to cure inside ourself.

As we incorporate mindfulness into an integral part of our health programs, I think it's our best shot at improving the overall health of the American people.

Around 40 years ago, I was leading a very stress-filled life.

I was trying to ramp up the microwave oven business at Litton Industries and my wife dragged me kicking and screaming to a meditation seminar.

Then they said, "20 minutes twice a day."

I said, "Oh really?"

So I've been meditating 20 minutes twice a day ever since.

42 years now and it's been the best thing that ever happened to me.

'Cause at that time I had high blood pressure and it's come way down.

My most creative ideas come out of meditation because you clear away all the clutter and all of a sudden you can see things clearly.

Over the years, student interest has grown tremendously.

I'm teaching executives now.

We offer a special course in meditation and it's way oversold.

And so, it's nice to see how much interest there is.

I find among CEOs, there's tremendous amount of interest today.

That never existed 10, 20 years ago.

(somber music) (somber music continues) - It's about developing the art of friendship toward oneself and toward others, toward all of life actually.

And these days I tend to use connection as a term.

- [Narrator] In addition to mindfulness, Sharon has become one of the leading teachers of a related practice called Metta or Loving Kindness.

- And just intuitively, I understood that in a way, love was what I was seeking and that, and for me and for many others, that some greater degree of love or loving kindness is the secret ingredient in mindfulness.

In a very different way.

To really have an open mind means an open heart.

And the way we change how we pay attention is through the silent repetition of certain phrases.

The phrases are the conduit for the heart's energy.

They're the vehicle that is going to allow us to be different with ourselves and with others.

May I be safe, be happy, be healthy.

Live with ease.

Live with ease means in the things of day-to-day life like livelihood and family, may it not be such a struggle.

May I live with ease, may I be safe, be happy, be healthy.

Live with ease.

This is like the song of the heart.

(calm music) This profound knowing that our lives have something to do with one another and the implication of that is that everybody counts and everybody matters.

Not everyone's gonna be my best friend but everybody matters.

And so, what would it be like to have a day like that where we really approached ourselves and others in that way?

It's kind of a nice thing to do in the middle of the day, isn't it?

(chuckles) - [Team Captain] BUFA pride on three.

One, two, three.

- [Team] BUFA pride!

(relaxing music) - And allow things to come and go so that we are actually recovering energy, we are cultivating calm.

(relaxing music) - [Narrator] After helping the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers win NBA championships, George Mumford still works with a variety of athletes and teams.

- This is what we've been training for.

Manage the moment.

You manage this moment, the next moment's gonna be fine, then you get into a rhythm, you get into a flow.

- [Narrator] The wisdom George shares also applies to much more than sports.

- I worked from people from Yale to jail, locker room to boardroom.

For me, you got to be in pain or you got to be seeking pursuit of excellence, either one of those.

There has to be a sense of urgency.

And if you don't know how your mind-body process works, then you have very little chance of living to your potential.

That is the real essence of this practice is to be done full engagement, full-on, full joy, full wonder.

And when we can get to that point, that's what it's all about.

- Rock?

- Yes.

- You know and sometimes and it's like this one is.

(rhythmic music) (rhythmic music continues) - I'd love to do a check-in today on a couple things.

One is the app.

And also, we like the kids to prove to themselves that they can do everything because that gives them an intrinsic sense of self-worth.

- [Narrator] When Jewel was a homeless teenager, she created her own mindfulness techniques to survive.

Now she works with at-risk teens through her Jewel Never Broken program at the Inspiring Children Foundation in Las Vegas, co-founded by Ryan Wolfington.

- We actually give them opportunities to struggle.

(chuckles) Do you guys wanna give an update on the app?

- Sure.

Yeah.

So, we have- - They run the foundation, they run the website, they do the fundraising.

They do the video editing, they do the marketing.

We teach them and guide them but really they're given the task of problem solving and proving to themselves that they can creatively problem solve.

And when they are resilient, when they're tenacious, when they stay with it, that there's tremendous reward.

- Just like being good enough.

- On top of project-driven learning, we give them a psychology for life to be the observer of their thoughts.

To understand that not all thoughts and feelings are facts.

To check them.

That they can choose which thoughts and feelings to engage in.

To live mindfully.

- Just focusing on- - To live with vulnerability.

- Doing what's right for me now.

- To live their values.

To notice when they're not.

And to adjust and to self-correct with kindness.

These kids live with a lot of courage.

It's inspiring to see.

- [Narrator] Graduates of the Jewel Never Broken program have gone on to top universities, including Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard.

K through 12 schools are also adopting the program.

(uplifting music) - Mindfulness is a kind of invitation to savor the present moment, not to exchange it for some better moment.

And the more you are living in this moment, the more the next moment is colored differently because you've shown up for this one.

So that could actually change the future and in fact, it's the only way to change the future is by changing how willing you'll be, you are to be in the present moment.

(uplifting music) - So I'd say mindfulness isn't just to get relaxed, and to be calm.

It's really about cultivating wisdom so that we eradicate or alleviate suffering.

- This is how social change happens when we start being more compassionate and kind, connected to ourselves, more self-aware, these changes will impact every single thing we're part of, and in this way, society can change.

(uplifting music) - I think a critical mass of people who are living in awareness and where they're aware of the choices they make will automatically create a better world.

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) My hands are small, I know But they're not yours, they are my own They're not yours, they are my own We are never broken Poverty stole your golden shoes It didn't steal your laughter Heartache came to visit me But I knew it wasn't ever after We will fight Not out of spite Just 'cause someone must stand up for what's right 'Cause where there's a man who has no voice There ours shall go singing - [Announcer] This program is brought to you by.

(bright music) (bright music continues) - [Announcer] UMass Memorial Health, home to the Center for Mindfulness, offering evidence-based mindfulness instruction for over 40 years.

Learn about online courses at UMMHealth.org/pbs.

- [Announcer] Change begins with a single breath.

Learn about the art of mindful living at Mindfulness.com/PBS.

- [Announcer] And these individuals and organizations.

(relaxing music) (relaxing music continues) A complete list of funders is available at TheMindfulnessMovement.com.

- [Announcer] Visit TheMindfulnessMovement.com/store to order a DVD or a digital version of the film, including an extended one hour and 40-minute version, or to purchase a group viewing license to show the film in your school, business, conference, or retreat.