Conscious Choice Seattle: Take a Walk in Beauty

February 2004 | Omega Wisdom

Take a Walk in Beauty

This issue marks the debut of “Omega Wisdom” as a bi-monthly column in Evergreen Monthly. It will offer insights from some of the top mind-body-spirit practitioners who teach workshop and do other work associated with the renowned Omega Institute in upstate New York.

Since 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., and his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center have used mindfulness meditation to help thousands of patients cope with problems ranging from cancer and AIDS to high blood pressure, panic attacks and chronic pain. He has trained groups as diverse as judges, Catholic Priests, prison inmates, Olympic athletes, health professionals and business leaders in mindfulness practices like meditation and yoga. He is the author of “Full Catastrophe Living” and Wherever You Go, There You Are.”

Omega: What do you think is the most important way for people to cultivate compassion and peace in our modern world?

Jon Kabat-Zinn: I would say, first love yourself. First trust your own goodness and beauty. Most people say, “What are you talking about? Who are you talking about? Loving myself? Trusting myself? My own goodness? My own Beauty?” We don’t have any experience of that.

We would prefer to trust someone else, project out and love somebody else’s beauty. But it’s very hard to see somebody else’s beauty unless you realize that it is also a reflection of your own beauty.

So when the Navajos say, “Walk in beauty” It doesn’t mean to walk in a pretty landscape. It means walk in the beauty of being a human being on the face of the earth and capable of standing up tall in your life and then relating to other beings with respect for being part of the same family. If you are willing to accept the notion that we are all deeply interconnected then compassion naturally arises.

Omega: How do you develop that awareness of being interconnected to the rest of the world?

JKZ: All of us have deep-seated in-born feelings for each other. It’s part of our inheritance. It is a genetic trait that we can feel empathy and compassion for another.

In fact, there are neurons in the brain, which are called mirror neurons, which are like empathy neurons. They are activated when you feel empathy for someone else’s experience.

Research with monkeys confirms this. When a female monkey is watching another monkey nursing her baby, the motor neurons of the female who is watching will be firing exactly like the neurons in the brain of the monkey who is actually nursing the baby. This is empathy. We have that deeply built into our hearts and into our bodies and minds.

Omega: Is there a way to stimulate our empathy neurons?

JKZ: What has worked well for me, and for thousands of people who have come to the Stress Reduction Clinic [at UMass] and taken my retreats, is the practice of mindfulness—through meditation, through yoga and through all sorts of spiritual practice. It is important to remember that meditation is not a completely cerebral practice, where a person will think it but won’t feel it.

In meditation practice you could spend a lot of time trying to meditate but not getting anywhere near what meditation is all about. As the Tibetans like to say, “The real meditation is non-meditation", because everything else is trying. It’s not about trying; it’s about being with what already is.

In a sense, it is actually asking us to feel the compassion that is already in our hearts. It’s not uni-directional it’s omni-directional. We begin to feel compassion and loving kindness for ourselves as well as other people. It is not about me fixing my life or me improving my lot, but really experiencing the deep imbeddedness in the matrix of life that for a very short amount of time we get to participate in.

Omega Institute is located in Rhinebeck, N.Y., two hours north of New York City. It is the country’s largest holistic workshop, retreat and professional training center. For almost 30 years—through workshops and conferences with some of the leading thinkers, authors, and teachers of our times—we have been on the forefront of education and exploration in the fields of health, wellness, psychology, spirituality, yoga, bodywork and cross-cultural arts. Visit www. omega.org or call 800-944-1001

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