We are matter, kindred with ocean and tree and sky. We are flesh and blood and bone. Mind and spirit are as physical as they are mental. The line we'd drawn between them was whimsy, born of the limits of our understanding. Emotions and memories from despair to gladness root in our bodies. Our brains lay physical pathways

and take bodily direction. Our bodies are longing and joy and fear and a lifelong desire

to be safe and loved incarnate. Medicine became an art of treating our parts, not our whole. Religion divided us inside with high

mystical notions that we are souls trapped in bodies and theologies that made flesh and sin

indistinguishable. Now we're bringing our sense of ourselves back to earth. We're tethering our yearning for wholeness to the physiology we've known about for a while.

The neurons we're just learning to see.

Physical, emotional, and spiritual are more entangled than we guessed, more interactive in every direction.

And this knowledge is a form of power.

What these technologies, or intra-psychic technologies, whatever you want to call them, offer us as a chance to continually return to what's deepest and best in ourselves.

And it's not something you have to get by going to Harvard or working in the vineyards for 20 years.

You've already got it.

And the body's a big part of it.

This is becoming wise, an inquiry into the mystery and the art of living.

I'm Krista Tippett.

Thank you. I'm Krista Tippett. John Cabot-Zinn was introduced to meditation

while he was studying molecular biology at MIT.

He says that scientists make the best meditators

because they are most comfortable with knowing

what they don't know. For him, this felt like a way to tap into different ways of knowing,

to reconcile energies that had coexisted uneasily in his childhood with a scientist father

and a painter mother. He came to feel that what he was learning should be accessible to everyone,

and that it held relevance to illness, healing, and stress.

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