Disclaimer
The views expressed on Dead America podcast are the views of the person expressing themselves.
We are here for entertainment only for any Medical or Mental Health concerns you might have. We always recommend seeking local listings for a qualified provider in your area.
We will always consider other points of view on any subject. We do not necessarily agree with our guests all of the time. We value everyone. All of our guests deserve respect and a platform to voice concerns.
https://www.deadamerica.website
https://www.skillfulmeans.life
Transcript Download
Dr. William Jackson
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
meditation,
mindfulness, people, mind, life, meditating, develop, meditation practice,
psychologist, monk, psychotherapy, world, stages, practice, studied, skillful
means, talking, understand, experience, behavior
SPEAKERS
Dr. William
Jackson, Ed Watters
Ed Watters
00:00
Understanding
the world that we live in, can be very exhausting. It can make our minds do
unthinkable things. Today's guest Dr. William Jackson incorporates
psychotherapy, positive psychology, and the most accessible core methods of
meditation into his practices, with 7000 plus hours of total time in retreat.
While a monk, he practiced with an organized retreat of Buddhist teachers
around the world, including His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. He's here today to
help us understand his contemporary evidence-based meditation practices. Let's
not waste any more time and get into today's exciting episode.
Ed Watters 01:07
To
overcome, you must educate. Educate not only yourself but educate anyone
seeking to learn. We are all Dead America, we can all learn something. To
learn, we must challenge what we already understand. The way we do that is
through conversation. Sometimes we have conversations with others. However,
some of the best conversations happen with ourselves. Reach Out and challenge
yourself. Let's dive in and learn something right now. Dr. Jackson, could you
please introduce yourself and let the audience know, just a little bit more
about you and how you got to where you are today? Sure. My name is William
Jackson, I I'm a health psychologist and a former Buddhist monk. And what that
sort of means is, as a health psychologist, I help often people who have both a
chronic illness and something that they're dealing with psychologically. And I
found that sort of niche for myself, after being a Buddhist monk and deciding I
was going to take the robes off, I wanted to find a way that I could utilize
what I had learned in meditation to help people. And it just so happens that
mindfulness has found a niche in the chronic pain community, and then sort of
expanded into the rest of the medical community from there. So that's what sort
of brought me into doing the work that I'm doing now. And, you know, I'm sure
we'll get into it a little bit later. But there's certain types of practices
and certain structures of courses and learning meditation that are more helpful
than others. And I've sort of veered in the direction of these more comprehensive
meditation programs.
Ed Watters
04:10
Right
off when I saw you on Poddit, I saw that you were a former Buddhist monk. Yes,
that just fascinates me. Could you walk us through? What made you become a
Buddhist monk? And then why would you decide to walk away from that lifestyle?
Dr. William Jackson 04:30
Sure.
Yeah. So before I became a monk, I was actually an actor. So I started in my
junior year of high school acting because I wasn't doing so good academically
in my public high school, and, you know, getting into a little bit of trouble
here and there. But I had one teacher who saw me do a bunch of impressions and
characters and he really encouraged me so I went with a friend to this
Performing Arts, high school audition, they gave me a little bit of a
scholarship and things went from there. And then in college, I was studying
Shakespeare in England. And I was in a Christian missionary so that they had
just an open space that they rented out to the these acting groups. And I found
a book by the Dalai Lama. And the book was called How to practice the way to
meaningful life. And I had a lot of time on my hands, I started reading the
book, and it said, you know, enlightenment is when what is good for you and
other people happens to be what you want to be doing day in and day out, I
thought, okay, it's not too hard to believe in, or I don't have to believe in
too much, it's pretty evident, I can take that at face value. And then he said,
to develop a meditation practice, you should start by meditating 30 to 45
minutes a day, for three months. So I had a lot of time. And he had these cool
names for what you could develop, develop calm abiding, I thought, Well, that
sounds cool why don't I try it. So I started practicing 30 minutes a day. And
you know, within a month or so I really started to develop a comfortable space
in meditation, all these sort of magical things started to happen. But what was
most important for me is I started to understand my feelings. And my mind a
little bit more deeply, I started becoming familiar with the arc that feelings
had anger, frustration, and anxiety, I was able to watch it come and watch it
go. And I remember one specific moment, sitting across from one of the
actresses, and she was talking to her friend, and she said, Oh, I'm so jealous
of dah ta dah ta dah And when she said that, I thought, that's not what she
actually means, right? Her words don't match up, she's not actually jealous of
her friend, actually, she's really happy for her and wonder why people do that
we don't actually share how we're feeling we don't, we're not vulnerable with
each other in some way. Part of that is because often we don't feel safe to do
so or we're self-conscious, or whatever it is. And I started talking to her
about this, you know, out loud, and just, you know, pondering out loud. And
what I noticed is that the whole table had gotten quiet, and they started
listening, and they wanted in on the conversation, they found it to be
valuable. And for somebody who, you know, got in a lot of trouble when they're
younger, and had this sort of bad perception of themselves, to be offering
something to a table full of, you know, Christian missionaries, who are
listening and feel that there's value in what I'm saying, that came from a
meditation experience of mine. That was really meaningful to me and sort of
started to change my perception of myself. Started meditating more that got me
hooked. And then a monk came to our, to our college when I was back in the U.S.
One thing led to another, I asked him if I could come and do a meditation
retreat at his monastery, he said, through a translator, oh, you can't become a
monk. That easy. And I said, No, no, no, I don't want to be a monk. And then he
said, okay, you can come. And three months meditation retreat turned to five.
And after six months, I had a shaved head and was wearing a robe. The first
couple years was really difficult because you have to let go of all your
coping mechanisms and find new ways to deal with stress, which I had all sorts
of bad habits that were sort of propping me up. And when I let go, those I was
anxious and stressed and everything for the first couple years, but as my
meditation developed, I found new ways to cope and more healthy ways to relate
to myself and to the world. I continued
with my meditation practice, I got deeper and deeper, I ended up studying more
than Tera vada tradition going into the forest in Burma. And there was a
meditation that I was in, in Burma after a couple months in meditation retreat,
where you're meditating 10-14 hours a day, in a hut, in the woods, and I was in
one of those meditations. And I had this realization that my mind was changing.
I was becoming a different person in meditation. I was really crafting my mind
day in and day out for well being. And I thought about my family and friends
and thought, like, what are they crafting their mind for? And like, you know,
just everybody in the world? What are you doing with your mind every day?
Because what you do changes your mind. And are you using your mind in a way
that's going to lead to more well being? And it was just this sort of deep, You
know, you can understand it intellectually, but the experience of it was this
profound thing. And I realized in that moment that I wanted to come back to the
United States. I wanted to share what I learned in meditation with other
people. And to do that I really needed To develop the language to express what
I had learned, I couldn't just share it with somebody, they had to go through
the experience themselves and learn it. So that was 10 years ago where I had
that realization, or 12 years ago now.
It's taken me a good, it took me about a good 10 years to develop
system, meditation practice that I feel like, was in like a common language,
that people could understand that I tested it out going step by step and could
take people along this sort of journey with me and experience something similar
to what I've experienced, in terms of my greatest well being. And part of
coming out of that, and realizing, you know, what's important to me, I wanted
to have a family that was important to me, I wanted to have a group that I felt
a part of, and that was of like-minded people. And I wanted to go back to
school because I found science would be a really helpful way to express what I
had learned. And I had sort of a respected tradition that sort of took me out
of the meditation, life, or rather the monastic life, and brought me into being
a professional psychologist did some collaborations, first with scientists and
meditation, and then that brought me into going back to school for
psychotherapy. So as a clinical health psychologist, I think about psychology
fitting in the meditation and mindfulness system. So psychology helps you to
practice meditation better, rather than how maybe most psychologists think of
mindfulness as just an addition to the world of psychotherapy. So that's sort
of just my my journey in brief of how I went from being the bourbon punk to a
monk and back.
Ed Watters
11:51
I love
that. Yeah, that's good. You know, you talked about the arc of change there.
And earlier, I listened to a video that you did, it was called, I could use a
drink. Can you talk about the stages of change in that? Could you walk our
audience through the stages of change?
Dr. William Jackson 12:19
Sure,
sure, there's a system in psychotherapy or some research that was done on how
people actually make change in their life. This is Prochaska and DiClemente,
his work on the stages of change. And this was originally used in working with
people who were working through alcoholism, being an alcoholic, and trying to
reduce that negative behavior and adopt new healthy behaviors. And there's
really a couple stages that people go through. So the first one is called pre-contemplation. So pre-contemplation is that there's no problem, you know, that
drinking is fine, it doesn't really bother me, you know, it's not really
affecting my life. And then the next stage is contemplation. And contemplation
is, Hmm, I think something's wrong. There might be something, there might be
something to this, everybody's telling me that I should stop drinking, and I'm
a different person when I'm drinking, like, maybe I should do something about
it. But I'm not really I'm not really sure about it, I'm still thinking about
it, then there's planning. And usually, people jump to action, but the planning
stage is well, okay, now I know I want to do this, I want to take some action
on reducing drinking and that sort of thing. Let me plan out the best way, I'll
get rid of all the alcohol in the house, I'll tell everybody that I care about
that I'm doing this so they can support me, I'll get a psychologist. So I can
meet weekly with somebody I'll join a group. This is these are the plans that
somebody will make to make sure that successful action. Usually, people jump to
action without that planning it out really well. Then there's action, you take
the action, you stop drinking, you get rid of all the alcohol, you tell people,
you join a group, you get a therapist, whatever it is, and you try to sustain
this. So the next stage is maintenance. And often, maintenance takes a
different energy than action does. So maintenance is what are the ongoing
things that I need to do to keep this good behavior? Well, that might mean
like, well, now I'm going to take up running, and I'm going to get into a
relationship with somebody who also doesn't drink, and all these other
supports or I make friends with people who don't drink, right, and then you're
changing your life to keep this new way of being as new way of being going to
enhance your well being. And then sorry, the last piece is relapse. So we screw
up. And then we go back to planning. Right? And it's not about oh, I screwed
up, let's throw the baby out with the bathwater, that Forget it. It's knowing
that that's part of the process it's a normal part. Because we're human beings,
we're not robots. So we go back to the beginning, we plan a little bit better
this time. And then we take the action we create a system. That's a little bit
more comprehensive to make sure that we can kind of get through it. So you can
apply this to anything, adopting a new healthy behavior, whether you're trying
to learn how to meditate, or whether you are trying to let go of overeating or
eating too much sugar or smoking or whatever it happens to be, you can use this
process to create new healthy behavior. And I think when I'm teaching
meditation, I'm helping people to do this too not just to develop meditation,
but to change their life to look at the areas of well being in their life, the
things that mean the most to them, and to take action on those. And for me,
meditation is a really key piece, because the exercise is the part of your
brain that allows you to make that executive decision that helps you to stay motivated
to stay on task to catch your mind when it drifts off where you don't want it
going. And bring it back on the wagon. So yeah, those are the sort of the
stages stages of change adopting a new healthy behavior.
Ed Watters
16:00
Yeah,
that's interesting, because we all go through that curve in life, somewhere
somehow, that's where meditation kind of comes in to help us when we learn to
meditate. And I'm just learning to understand meditation, I'm diving in to
understand how to calm our minds down. Meditation is a big part of that
maintenance part, is it not?
Dr. William Jackson 16:31
Oh,
absolutely. And you know, it can also help you build that energy, that
momentum, that motivation to actually take action. Because it can be a really
soft beginning. So you can, you know, just start being mindful in your day to
day and be more aware of what you're doing with your body more aware of your
speech, more aware of some of your thought habits and how that's affecting your
day to day. And that starts exercising that muscle. And then if you develop a
sitting meditation, something like focusing on the breath, we are noticing,
when your mind drifts away, come back, mind drifts away, come back, mind drifts away, to wake up in the moment,
that's going to help you to wake up in your day to day as well and recognize,
whoa, I'm acting in a way I don't want to be acting, I my value is to be kind.
And here I am getting upset. I'm yelling at somebody who doesn't deserve it,
or, you know, waking up in the middle of eating a piece of chocolate cake and
you're like, Wait a second, I'm working on my health. What am I doing? Like,
I'm just following my desire. And I got lost in the moment. And that's natural,
that that's who we are. As human beings, we get caught up in those things, we
get taken away by a distraction from the outside or from the inside. So it
really is almost going against the grain going upstream, so to speak, to wake
up out of those out of the default mode way of thinking and being in the world.
Ed Watters 18:01
With
that, I was just finishing up your interview with Andrew Wood. He talked about
the don't know mind is, is that really the purpose of meditation to, you know,
introduce this I don't know mindset?
Dr. William Jackson 18:23
Yeah, so
Andrew Wood who's a he's a psychologist in the Boston area, and he's studied
psychoanalysis, and which is like a Freudian approach to psychotherapy. And he
also studied with Seung Sahn who was a Korean Zen master. So Jon Kabat-Zinn,
who's a big mindfulness guy, he also studied with Seung Sahn in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, in Boston, he would have a lot of Harvard students come into
Harvard and MIT students were bright kids, right? They would come into some of
his meditation classes, and they'd be expounding philosophy and being very
analytical with him. And he would just yell,
don't know, don't know my
friends. And, you know, which is sort of shocked people. But that was his
intention was, you might know a lot of things you might logically think your
way through something. But how do you actually feel? You might be able to
logically reason out why you made a particular decision. But is that truly
honestly, where you are what you want out of your life, right? So reason
doesn't necessarily we're not always reasonable. Or if you if you come into
meditation, saying that you already know what meditation is, you're gonna miss
the experience. And this is sort of the core of mindfulness is we're letting go
of our previous conceptions. And we're just staying with the bare experience.
As simple as something like when I say I am angry, or I'm anxious. We use these
words to communicate with each other. And when I say I'm anxious, you might
think you know what I mean, because you have an experience of anxiety. But
actually, how it happens in my mind, it might be a racing mind where you might
think it's an unpleasant feeling in your stomach. Or I might think it's my
hands get sweaty, and you might think that you feel paralyzed, right? So it's a
different experience. And so we often think we know what somebody else is
talking about, or, you know, any any type of concept like that. And mindfulness
is letting go of our preconceptions and just being present. What is actually in
front of me? And can I keep the mind that I don't actually know what is in
front of me yet, I'm going to perceive it, I'm going to let it in. And that
allows you to actually be present for your life present for who's sitting in
front of you, rather than thinking you know who they are. Even if it's somebody
that you've lived with, with for 20 years, they might something might have
happened to them today, where they're a different person where they've changed.
And that will allow you to actually be there, or your feelings about what you
want to do, or what kind of job that you want, or what direction you want to
move in your life might have actually changed overnight. And if you're present
with yourself, you can actually be more authentic, you can be more grounded in
who you are. Because we are changing all the time. And I think that sort of
don't know mind, as that Korean Zen tradition sort of talks about is the core
of mindfulness, which allows you to be grounded present in your life and and be present for your life.
Ed Watters
21:45
Yeah, I
found that very enlightening, because we all kind of need to get to that point
where we wipe it all away. It's a baby step thing. On your sheet you sent me.
It says, What is the difference between mindfulness, meditation, and
concentration? And why develop those?
Dr. William Jackson 22:11
Yeah, yeah. So mindfulness is a state of mind.
It's something that we have been sort of pointing to in our discussion already, which is this non-judgmental,
open sort of connected to your heart present moment awareness, where you're letting
go of your conceptions about the world. And as one monk, Fanta Gunaratana wrote
a book called Mindfulness in plain English, which is free people can just find
the PDF online. Well, he says, mindfulness is what happens before we clamp down
section off our experience of the world. Right? This this sort of continual
stream of awareness. It's just taking in all the sensory input and feelings and
everything. And then we put it into words, right, which is words are never
quite perfectly describing the experience. So mindfulness is what happens
before words, but what is your experience before you just start to describe it.
And if you return to that state of mind, again, and again, you'll gain a deeper
understanding of the world that is deeper than an understanding that's just
through words, because words ultimately are just pointing at an experience. And
mindfulness is continually trying to be with that experience, whether it's with
another person, whether it's with yourself, your mind, your feelings, your body,
whatever it happens to be, you're getting more information than words can can
describe. So this is the mindfulness state of mind. And this is a mind that can
be brought about, and it's actually pretty well researched, they know sort of
what parts of the brain are involved in being mindful. And they also know how
to bring that state about. So bringing that state about, again and again, is
meditation. So mindfulness-based meditation is the practice of bringing about
that state of mind, again, and again, sort of in bouts. And then you start to
keep that state of mind over time, so you can be mindful of something. So in
mindfulness of the breath, so Anapanasati meditation is one of the most common
meditation techniques. So you are staying with the sensation of breathing. So
you might feel a sensation of breathing around the nose, and you're mindful of
that sensation over time. And that is sort of concentration. So developing
mindfulness of one thing over time, and eventually, you can watch it change. You
can watch as the sensations of the breath change, they come in, they go out,
they're cold, they're warm sensation around your nose or your upper lip, you
watch it stay present with that continuous unfolding of the sensation. And the
concentration is not focusing really hard it's concentration, like a good
tomato sauce, right? So you put it the simmer on low And slowly, it
concentrates into a nice, delicious, flavorful sauce. In the same way, when we
are concentrating our mind, it's not focusing really hard like in your third-grade teacher says, concentrate, it's different. It's overtime, slowly, gentle
persistence, the mind starts to concentrate starts to come together and get
powerful. And it gets rich, and it gets deep. And so when you come out of
meditation, where you develop concentration, your mind is vibrant, it's clear,
it's clean, it's refined, and concentrated. So that's sort of the difference
between those those three.
Ed Watters
25:40
Talk to
us about your skillful means program, what is it? And how will it help people?
Dr. William Jackson 25:47
Sure, so
I've taken a number of mindfulness courses like Mindfulness-Based Stress
Reduction, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, mindfulness training for
primary care clinicians, and you know, there's lots of fantastic these are all
great programs, those are in the medical field. And, you know, the Benson-Henry
Institute of Mass General Hospital, the Center for Mindfulness Compassion in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, these are beautiful centers, they're doing great
work. And then I also have taken, you know, training with, you know, Zen
Buddhism, Vietnamese, and Burmese Tera vada, some Tibetan traditions of practice
in all these different traditions, and they're all great, they're great
approaches, but I feel like they had they were missing something, and at least
missing something for me. And I think, for some other people as well. One is,
they have a clear meditation technique, I think that's great. But they're
missing a couple other things that I think psychotherapy actually can help
people with. So one is motivation to practice. So a lot of people will learn a
technique, and then they kind of lose the motivation to keep practicing. One
thing that I found is really helpful to keep that going, is clarifying your
picture of well being so why are you meditating? What are you trying to move
towards in your life? What is the motivator for you? So in my skillful means,
skillful means program, I have people identify the domains of their life that
are really important to them, that will help bring them closer to well being.
So for somebody that might be physical health, or somebody might want to lose
weight, somebody's trying to exercise more to feel stronger. Another person
might want to develop relationships with their family, another person might be
working on career. And in all of these, as we were talking about earlier, they
all involve behavior change, they all involve letting go of some bad habits,
and accepting and building some new, some new positive habits. So in this
meditation course, it's not just sitting on a cushion, we're identifying your
domains of well being, we're helping you to move towards those, we're helping
you to develop a systematic meditation practice, to build those muscles to make
that adoption of a new behavior easier, quicker, and more sustainable. In the
meditation, you're also managing anxiety, depressive feelings, all of those
sort of benefits that you get from meditation, better concentration, memory,
sleep, all that stuff. And then we help you actually integrate it. And I think
this was another thing that was missing in a lot of meditation programs is they
teach you the technique, and then they say bye, bye. So in my program, we also
take you through step by step and have you apply these meditation techniques in
the domains of well-being in the areas of your life that are important to you.
And there's partners there's accountability partners, as a group that you meet
with every week, where people are supporting you, and sharing insights about
how they've applied meditation in their life. And this is over 12 weeks. And
then at the end of the 12 weeks, we have people who go on to do it for a year,
so meeting weekly with that same group that they started with. And it's really
supportive. You know, this is a way that people can continue practicing and
applying it because it's a long term skill. So when you decide you're going to
act in a new way, in whatever domain of your life, it's a choice to start. But
then that maintenance phase that continuing to make that choice again, and
again and again, in your day to day that takes support, that takes long term
sort of commitment, it's not a one time, sort of sort of choice. So the last
part is really cultivating a community for yourself. And we do that
intentionally. Who are the people in your life who really love your picture of
well being and support you? who aren't going to make fun of you for loving to
do some quirky thing, but rather, they are your biggest cheerleaders and how do
we spend more time with these people? And how do we create common habits and
hobbies and that sort of thing in which we can interact with them more and
more? So these are the four pieces, defining your picture of well-being
developing a systematic meditation practice, integrating the insight from that
practice into your life, and then creating a community of support. And we do
this with online courses and meditation recordings and all that sort of
business. So people can can do it from from anywhere in the world.
Ed Watters
30:25
Well,
you've got a lot of good insight and your experience level is astronomical. You
don't find a lot of Buddhist monks that come back and help the Western culture,
overcome their mind. You know, because here in the United States, especially,
we can really start churning our mind, especially right now during our COVID
period. We're all going to get through this. But what you do can help people
through this time period, how can people get ahold of you and connect with you?
Dr. William Jackson 31:04
Sure. So
I think the best way is going to my website. So we have a new website actually
going up this week, we're at the end of January sort of recording this right
now. But it should be up in in a week or so where you can see we have a couple
different courses, we have the big 12-week program, we have some smaller
courses, if you want to just get a taste like one week or four-week course,
they'll be going up. We also have meditation challenges. So if you want to try
to meditate for seven days straight, or do a big one, where you're meditating
30 days in a row for an hour a day, that may be a lot for people, but it's
exciting for others. And then not just with meditation specifically, but
insight just developing insight in your life. We also have programs that are
coming out for developing nutrition, a picture of your, your well being in
terms of what you digest, and we talk about the science of the microbiome, and
not prescribing somebody a diet so to speak, but letting them sort of
organically find that in terms of what they want out of their life and energy
and, and understanding the science behind what types of food bring you what
type of well being both physiologically and mentally as well. And then we will
also have some yoga courses for emotional health and well being that are based
on the same concept of helping you define your picture of well being not as
sort of telling you what that is. And then being part of a community where
people really respect your own unique picture of well-being so going through
the website. Skillful means dot life is probably the best way to connect with
us. Or you know, we have the Facebook's skillful means community or skillful
means on Instagram and we're always putting out some content that we hope will
be helpful for people.
Ed Watters
32:56
Dr.
William Jackson, we thank you for being on the Dead America podcast. It's all
about sharing, helping, and providing that mechanism of hope. Thank you.
Dr. William Jackson 33:10
Thank
you.
Ed Watters
33:16
Thank
you for joining us today. If you found this podcast, enlightening,
entertaining, educational in any way. Please Share, Like, subscribe, and join
us right back here next week for another great episode of Dead America podcast.
I'm Ed Watters your host, enjoy your afternoon wherever you may be.