Picture a remote mountaintop in Northern California, a weekend retreat, and a room of neuroscientists, business leaders and Silicon Valley executives who have just surrendered their last link to the outside world. Their laptops and phones go into a basket. There is no television, no internet, not even an alarm clock. Then they sit, and mostly they stay sitting, for three days of silence broken only by occasional instructions. That is the scene at the center of a 60 Minutes segment on mindfulness, the one Lani Muelrath, author of The Mindful Vegan: A 30 Day Plan for Finding Health, Balance, Happiness, and Peace, says she closes her live presentations with. The segment is a sharp, accessible overview of what mindfulness meditation is, where it came from, who has taken it up, and what researchers are beginning to see in the brain when people practice it. It is worth understanding on its own terms, because the practice it describes is simple to state and very hard to do.
The segment's central figure is Jon Kabat-Zinn, an MIT-trained scientist who has practiced mindfulness for 47 years. In 1979 he began teaching mindfulness through meditation to people suffering from chronic pain and illness. That program, the segment notes, is now used in more than 700 hospitals worldwide. The arc matters. Mindfulness did not begin as a lifestyle trend or a Silicon Valley perk. It began as a clinical tool for people whose bodies hurt and whose lives had narrowed around that pain.
The segment defines the practice in plain terms: being aware of your thoughts, physical sensations and surroundings. Kabat-Zinn's framing, as the piece presents it, is that mindfulness is being present. The narrator sets that against the way most of us actually live. Email, Twitter and texting keep us constantly connected, and we are rarely alone with our own thoughts. One of the most striking moments in the segment is a woman's admission that she does not feel very present in any moment. She is either planning for what is coming down the road or replaying what has already passed. Kabat-Zinn's point is that we are only alive now, and most of us spend very little of our now in it.
The segment makes its case through the most ordinary moments of a day. When the alarm goes off, you can either be pulled straight out of bed by your calendar, already mentally at the first meeting, or you can take a moment to lie there, feel your body breathing and remember that it is a new day and you are still alive. From there you can get up with awareness, brush your teeth with awareness, and take a shower with awareness. The segment's wry aside is that you may not be in the shower at all. You may be in your first meeting, with fifty people in the room with you.
This is the heart of the practice, and it is why the segment keeps returning to small things. Mindfulness is not a special state reserved for the cushion. It is the quality of attention you bring to whatever you are already doing, and the retreat is simply a place to train that attention without the usual distractions.
The retreat scene is the segment's most honest moment, because it shows how difficult the basic instruction is. Participants were asked to settle into an erect and dignified posture and simply know that they are sitting. That sounds simple. The segment's correspondent discovers it is not. Kabat-Zinn pointed participants toward the breath, asking them to ride with full awareness on its waves, at the belly, at the nostrils, in the chest, and then rest in awareness. The correspondent tried, found it was not restful at all, and worried she was doing it wrong, her mind returning again and again to work.
Kabat-Zinn's answer, as the segment presents it, reframes the whole problem. He describes meditation as a mental workout. The mind wanders away from the breath, and you gently and without judgment bring it back. The wandering is not the failure. Returning is the exercise. He compares the mind to the Pacific Ocean, always producing waves of thought. Mindfulness, in his telling, is the practice of going below the agitation on the surface and settling into the breath deeply enough to find calm. After hours of sitting in 30-minute sessions, the segment notes, it does get easier. The waves are still there, but you are less carried off by them.
The segment also covers the rest of the retreat's daily life. Participants relearned how to eat, and eating a meal in complete silence feels a little awkward without conversation or a screen to fill the gap. The surprise is that you taste more and eat less. Walking meditation asks you to be aware of each movement and feeling in your feet. It sounds ridiculous, the segment concedes, but it changes how you experience walking. The lesson, in the retreat's own phrasing, is that when you are walking, just walk. That turns out to be the hardest thing of all, and eating just to eat, without the television or the newspaper, turns out to be huge.
One of the segment's most unexpected threads is politics. Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan attended his first meditation retreat in 2008, just days after winning a grueling reelection campaign. He describes his body clenching up in the Budget Committee when someone says something he knows is wrong, and his impulse to catch a colleague in a lie. His practice is to notice that clench and calm down, so that when it is his turn he makes his point without the reflex to attack. Ryan hosts weekly meditation sessions open to members and staff of both parties. He has written a book about mindfulness, and he has secured a million dollars in federal funding to teach it to school children in his Ohio district.
Ryan's case is that mindfulness can change how a legislature talks to itself. In the segment he says he has seen it transform classrooms, heal veterans and help people with very high chronic stress levels heal their bodies. He is also candid that the room is not fully converted. Asked whether he has brought any Republican congressman in to meditate with him, he says they are working on it. The segment, which is aired by a network that rarely does gentle features, treats that exchange with a light touch, and it is one of the moments that makes the practice feel less like a retreat and more like a civic experiment.
The segment's final movement moves from testimony to laboratory. Judson Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Massachusetts, uses mindfulness to treat addiction. He is trying to understand how mindfulness alters the brain's functioning, and he uses a cap lined with 128 electrodes that pick up electrical signals from the top of the head. The electrodes read activity in the posterior cingulate, part of a brain network linked to memory and emotion.
Brewer frames it in terms any athlete would recognize. The physical side of exercise is well understood, he suggests, and the next generation is about working out how to train the mind.
"This is just the next generation of exercise. We've got the physical, you know, exercise components down, and now it's about working out how we can actually train our minds."
— Judson Brewer, in 60 Minutes segment on mindfulness
The correspondent, who had been meditating daily since the retreat, sits for the test. When she thinks of something stressful, the cells in her posterior cingulate begin responding immediately. The excerpt that circulates ends as the readings are getting underway, before the results are explained, so it would be inaccurate to claim more than the segment shows. What it does show is a method: measure the brain during a stressor, then compare it with the brain after a period of training.
The segment is short, roughly thirteen minutes, and it is the kind of primer that rewards a second viewing. Start with the morning scene. Notice, on your next alarm, whether you are already in your first meeting. Then try Kabat-Zinn's workout in small doses: sit with the breath, notice when the mind wanders, and bring it back without self-criticism. Eat one meal in silence. Walk one stretch with attention on your feet. Those are the exercises the segment describes, and they are where the practice begins. For more context on the speakers, Kabat-Zinn's work with chronic pain and Brewer's neuroscience are the two threads most worth following into longer sources, and the segment's own account of Ryan's Budget Committee experience is a useful reminder that the practice is not only a private refuge.
