Marvin G. Belzer, PhD, has taught mindfulness meditation for twenty years. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences. For many years he taught a semester-long meditation course in the Department of Philosophy at Bowling Green St. University, where he was an Associate Professor of Philosophy. He teaches an undergraduate course at UCLA (Psychiatry 175: Mindfulness Practice and Theory) and teaches mindfulness in many different venues in Los Angeles.

 

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A Transcript of our Conversation:

Hello, I’m interviewing Marvin G Belzer PhD associate director of the Mindful Awareness the Research Center at UCLA. Thank you very much for meeting me my pleasure. And in all disclosure, I am taking courses from Marvin right now. So, you know, just so everybody knows what’s going on.

I’ve already explained to you why I’m doing this and where the questions came from. So I’m just going to jump right into the questions and we’ll go from there. The first one is.  Why meditate? Well, I love the question. I often teach college students and young people older teens and I love talking with him about this and so I’m kind of prepared here and I would kind of break it into three areas.

The first is. There are these very simple activities that we can do with our minds to cultivate calmness. And so there’s this package of qualities of clarity stability resilience kind of under that that heading of concentration or calmness and whatever else we can do in meditation. It’s it’s very clear that the central nervous system is such that paying attention deciding to pay attention to something really simple.

The in our experience does not make believe the mind naturally can settle become calmer more clear and so forth. And so I would conjecture that something like this is a part of all the meditation Traditions, maybe not all exactly but you know this just this cultivation of columnists and it’s not something we have to struggle to create.

It’s much simpler. It’s just directing attention to something. Simple like the breath and so forth.  Secondly, my area as you know is mindfulness meditation and so mindfulness includes that component for sure but it also includes a component of bringing awareness to what presents itself.  even as we try to keep the attention with the breath or something like that and.

Gets us to the second sort of reason to do this sort of meditation, which is in bringing awareness to whatever presents itself including physical pain, including difficult emotions, you know, the racing mind there’s something about doing this which gives us more freedom in our response to these ordinary States.

And so the kind of work with physical pain is maybe the most Vivid and so. If a part of my body is in pain, then we can practice mindfulness with this in a way that helps us manage the pain.  And what manage the pain means basically is having more freedom in our response to this difficult State.

And so the gist of it, of course, is really simple. We focus somewhere else like the breath the pain comes to mind. We include the awareness of the pain may be. Just for a few seconds. So it’s at that oscillating back and forth and there is something about the willingness just to be with the raw Sensations, even when it doesn’t reduce the intensity of the pain.

It gives us more freedom in our response. So the word freedom in might be a bit fancy, but for in my way of seeing it like the freedom that one can have relative to pain relative to it. I-80 also is a window into who knows how much Freedom we might have as human beings, right? And so there’s obviously much more to say about that.

But that that would be kind of that’s not as clear-cut to in my mind as the first a...