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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...