Jon Kabat-Zinn will be teaching during Wisdom & Wellbeing Week 5 | Multi-Faculty | January 30 – February 6, 2027 about the following topic:
Befriending the Full Catastrophe of the Human Condition
Through formal and informal meditative practices, deep inquiry, and dialogue, we will cultivate greater access to our innate and intrinsically boundless awareness as both an individual capacity and the final common pathway of our shared humanity. Experienced in this way, mindfulness/heartfulness is both liberative and healing in ways that can make a profound difference in the world and in our own lives and communities.
We have only moments to live. Yet, especially in hard times, we often lose our minds, metaphorically and sometimes literally, and succumb to emotional reactivity. This includes endemic “us-ing” and “them-ing,” and wanting things to be other than as they are, in ways that can prevent us from creating transformation and healing, whether on an individual, societal, or planetary level. All of these are intrinsically interconnected.
When we fall into dualisms of this kind, we have temporarily lost our minds by contracting around those very pronouns, and even more so, around “I,” “me,” and “mine.”
The cultivation of mindfulness and heartfulness, and learning to access our own innate and intrinsically boundless awareness, is both liberating and healing. It helps free us from these too-limiting identifiers in ways that can make a profound difference in our lives, in our communities, and in the world.
It amounts to what I sometimes refer to as an orthogonal rotation in consciousness. Everything is the same as the moment before, and yet nothing is the same, because you have shown up in your fullness and discovered how to inhabit an ever-present but usually hidden dimension of human experience: embodied wakefulness, intrinsically compassionate.
The mindfulness practices we will be exploring together, and their embodiment in everyday life, have been shown through more than 45 years of clinical experience and research into MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction) and other mindfulness-based practices in medicine, psychology, and public health to offer a wide range of profound and lasting benefits for health and wellbeing.
But the most profound effects of these practices are those that arise in each moment when the mind becomes willing to drop beneath the story of “me” and inhabit the larger question of “Who or what are we?” within an intrinsically connected world that is also at risk and in need of care.