and education at the Tucker Foundation,

here at Dartmouth college.

I am honored to welcome you all and to introduce John Cabotson

on behalf of the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center

Pailateive Care Service, the Tucker Foundation,

the Rubin Committee of Dartmouth College,

Alice Peck Day Hospital, Dartmouth Medical School,

the Norris Cotton Cancer Center,

and the Valley Insight Medication Society.

Special thanks to Ira Biak and Yvonne Corbet,

and the Pailateive care service for partnering on this project.

And to those at tucker who have worked so hard,

and who are this week celebrating the 60th anniversary

year Tucker Foundation, Dartmouth's center for service,

spirituality, and social justice.

We are pleased to welcome Dr. John Cabotson

to Dartmouth college today for the second time.

Cabotson first visited Dartmouth in the summer of 1984

when the college and the Connecticut river served

as the training camp for the men's Olympic rowing team.

He was the meditation trainer for the team, helping them

to optimize their mental performance.

Today he is here to help optimize our performance.

John Cabotson hold an a Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT.

He is professor of medicine emeritus at the University

of Massachusetts Medical School and founder of the Center

For Mindfulness and Medicine, Healthcare, and Society

and its mindfulness-based stress reduction clinic.

He is the author of numerous best-selling books,

including Full Catastrophe Living,

Wherever You Go There You Are, Coming to Our Senses,

and the Mindful Way Through Depression,

co-authors with Williams, Tisdale, and Siegal.

Dr. Cabotson's research focuses on mind-body interactions

for healing, and on the clinical applications

and cost effectiveness of mindfulness training for people

with chronic pain and stress-related disorders,

including the effects

of mindfulness-based stress reduction on the brain.

His current projects include editing the Mind's Own

Physician, with Richard Davidson, and guest co-editing

with Mark Williams a special issue

of The Journal Contemporary Buddhism.

Dr. Cabotson's work has contributed hugely

to a growing movement of mindfulness

in main stream institutions such as medicine, psychology,

healthcare, schools and colleges, corporations, prisons,

and professional sports.

Courtesy of Kerry Jo Grant [Assumed spelling] here

in our health promotion department, Dr. Cabotson

and his work have even made their way to the inside

of our bathroom doors.

Featured as they are in the current edition

of the Dartmouth College Stall Street Journal.

Please join me in welcoming John Cabotson back

to Dartmouth college.

[ Applause ]

>> Thank you.

It's a delight to be here.

Do I have to have the light this bright in my eyes?

Because maybe you could tone it down a little bit

so people can still see me,

but I'd like to be able to see you too.

It's a delight to be here.

It's nice to walk into a theater

where mindfulness is on the marquee.

You know you've really made it when it's on the marquee,

along with Frankenstein.

So -- it's like, you're part of the main stream, so to speak,

however that goes from moment to moment and from day-to-day.

But it's really a delight to be here, and I am here basically

because of Helen Damon Moore and her work, which I actually got

to see at University of Iowa, when she was

at Iowa before coming here.

And also Dr. Ira Biak, who I met in --

in Ireland about two years ago, almost exactly two years ago.

And was just incredibly impressed with what he's doing

with integrative medicine and palliative care.

And so you know, it's like I don't live that far

from this place, and got in the car this morning and drove up.

And I'm really happy to be here for the next three days.

And you know, so to have this many people come out at 4:30

on a sunny afternoon after the kind of winter we had,

to a talk about mindfulness is really some kind of an indicator

that something has shifted in the society.

You all have better things to do, I'm sure,

this afternoon, than to come here.

Unless you have some kind of real intuition

about what the healing power of mindfulness might be.

And then it might actually be incredibly valuable

to spend the end of a nice sunny Thursday afternoon

here together.

So this talk is not about me or what I have

to say, it's about us.

It's about every single one of us,

and in some sense what the potential is, as the slide says,

for living your moments as if they really mattered.

And I put a little asterisk in there,

and the reason they too is

because we're only alive when we're alive.

This seems kind of a no-brainer, but you could say that a lot

of our lives we're walking around with a no-brainer,

or just basically no brain, or the brain is on auto pilot

or something like that.

And what mindfulness is really

about is bringing it back on line, so to speak.

In the present moment, because that turns

out to be the only moment that any of us ever have.

But we're so good at thinking, so incredibly good at thinking,

that we can spend enormous amounts of our time

and energy absorbed in the past.

Have you noticed that?

Just incredible preoccupations about who's to blame

about why it's like this.

Or how great it was in the good old days,

and why can't it be that way now.

So there's a tremendous attraction to the past

and tremendous aversion, but whether it's attraction

or aversion, we spend a lot of time there.

Would you agree?

Have you noticed that a lot of the time if you check

on what your mind is up to, it's up to memory.

It's up to thinking about things

that are already over, to a large degree.

The other favorite preoccupation of the mind is

in the opposite direction.

The future.

And if again you check in every once come a while just to,

you know, sometimes I like to say you know,

you can call yourself up.

You may have to, you know, because we're on 24-7,

we're just infinitely connected.

Probably every single person has one of these in their pocket,

although I hope there are some exceptions.

But -- and they're called smart phones, you know?

But they're not.

But we actually -- but they can really dumb us

down because we can be infinitely connected everywhere

except here.

And so we may need to call ourselves

up every once in a while.

John, are you actually here?

And the answer is no, I'm off in the future thinking.

And one of our favorite preoccupations --

and by the way, of course you'll get a bill from AT&T or Verizon.

But seriously, what -- what are our favorite preoccupations

in the future?

Well, one is worrying.

I don't know about the north country,

maybe you've gone beyond worrying.

The rest of the world a lot of worry about things that --

that haven't happened yet and may never happen.

In fact, Mark Twain is famous for having said,

you've probably heard this in a lot of different guises,

but he's famous for having said there's been a huge amount

of tragedy in my life, and some of it actually happened.

But -- but there is this saying that you know, we die --

he died a thousand deaths.

I mean , we drive ourselves crazy over things

that are not going to be happening

because we're not smart enough to actually forecast the future,

but that doesn't prevent us from driving ourselves crazy,

and perseverating over and over and over about what will happen.

And then something else happens because we're not that smart.

So something else happens, and we say we're blind-sided.

Now how many of you would like the future to be different

from the way -- the way we think it's going to turn out.

Anybody ever find yourself wishing the future was going

to be like, majorly different, that we'd make some kind

of change in the world?

Raise your hands, I want to just feel in the audience.

Okay, I heard social justice mentioned earlier, and you know,

this is after all a university

or I guess you call yourself a college.

You know, a campus kind of situation.

So it doesn't surprise me.

But this -- this kind

of engagement really requires thinking about, like,

what it means to make the future different.

How can we possibly apply any leverage,

could we kind an Archimedes, you know, fulcrum in which

to influence the future.

There's only one fulcrum that I know for that,

and that is the present.

Because guess what, we're living in the future

of every single moment in all of our lives

that came before this one.

Do you remember back, I mean, I see there's kind of a range

of ages, although most of you don't look

like you're college students, I've got to say.

And I'm a little disappointed.

I mean, I -- you know, not that I'm disappointed that you came,

but I'd like to see a lot more college students.

They look at -- they're going to Frankenstein probably, later.

It's an awkward time of day for the young people.

How many of you are under 25, 25 and under.

Oh, so I'm wrong.

That's really nice to be wrong.

So -- really -- so I was going to say to the older people,

but maybe you did it when you were even younger.

Do you remember before you got into college here,

and probably you got into planning what the courses were

that you were going to take when you got ahold of the catalog,

or you went on line and began planning, oh,

in the freshman year I'll take this,

and the sophomore year, and the junior year.

And maybe you planned even who you're going to meet

and who you're going to marry,

and what your children are going to look like.

Does that sound familiar, that sometimes we do

that when we're young.

And we think that it's all going to turn out in the future.

So no matter what your age is, I've got news for you.

This is it.

It already turned out.

How did it turn out?

It turned out just like this.

In any moment your life is just like this.

Not happy with it , a little bit sad or depressed

or wishing it was different -- that's not a problem.

That's not a problem.

Because we can always sort of feel like okay, how are we going

to be in relationship to this, and of course life is not easy.

And a lot of times we're faced with enormous challenges,

sometimes with enormous pain.

Sometimes with enormous threat.

And that's part of the human condition.

But the real interesting question when it concerns, say,

the future, and concerns living

as if life really mattered is can we actually be

in the present moment when things are not kind

of the way we thought they would be.

Or sometimes the shorthand for it is well,

I didn't sign up for this.

I mean, or another way to put it, sometimes,

maybe no offense meant, but how did I get born into this family,

or who are all these crazy people,

why am I the only sane person.