How A Police Reporter Found Mindfulness And Helped Share It With Millions

Speaker 1 · 0:00Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. My name is Sean Fargo. My guest today has done as much as almost anyone alive to shape how the modern world understands mindfulness. And he's done most of it quietly from behind the editor's desk and writer's desk. Melvin McLeod has spent more than 30 years at Lion's Roar. First as its editor-in-chief, and now as its editor at large. It's the largest Buddhist media organization in the English language. In my experience, it's a wonderful magazine with very deep interviews and articles on some of the world's top mindfulness and meditation teachers. Melvin is also a co-founder of Mindful Magazine, and he's been a meditator himself for over 40 years. He came to all of this by a pretty unlikely road. He was a young police reporter in Montreal in a newsroom when he picked up a book on Buddhism, and he felt something click and knew right then that this was who he was. From there, his life took some unusual turns. He spent years as a television reporter for the CBC. He spent a year alone in a cabin in the woods, and he traveled across India looking for his teacher. Eventually, his spiritual life and his working life came together, and he found his calling as an editor. And what an editor he's been. Over the years, he's helped bring the teachings of Tiknat Han, Pama Chodron, John Kabatzin, the Dalai Lama, and so many others to millions of readers. Melvin McLeod, it's a true honor to have you here. Welcome.

Speaker 2 · 1:56Well, thank you so much. Perhaps more than I deserved in terms of your praise. So thank you very much, and it's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1 · 2:04Well, just even going through that introduction, I'm welling with gratitude for your work. I've been a reader of Lion's Roar, Mindful Magazine, Best Buddhist Writing, Tignat Han, etc. And yeah, I'm very grateful for all the work that you've edited and published and written. I know how much of a mark you've made on Buddhist practice and mindfulness practice, and you've had an influence on my life. So very grateful to have you here.

Speaker 2 · 2:37That's very gratifying to hear.

Speaker 1 · 2:40I'm looking forward to learning a little bit more about your background, your upcoming book, which I invite everyone to

Speaker 1 · 2:48check out. But first, I'd like to learn a little bit about how you found these practices. You opened a book on Buddhism while you were in a newsroom somewhere and something just clicked. So I'm just wondering what you recognized in the moment when you open the book. Does that young reporter still show up in how you see mindfulness today?

Speaker 2 · 3:12Just to go back, I had a fairly standard baby boomer life in college, uh, explored various new age teachings and books, as well as discovering through various substances that reality might not be what we always think it is. I then went on to a beginning a career in journalism. I had bought a book because my mother was ill at the time of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Evans Wentz's translation of it. I was indeed sitting in front of a bank of police radios in the old Montreal Star newsroom where I was a beginning police reporter, started to read the first page of Evans Wentz's introduction to that book, and immediately felt some sort of mysterious and deep connection with it. What I intuited about whatever this was I was reading, and remembering I'd only read one paragraph of it, was that whatever this Buddhism was, and I think it applies just as much to mindfulness, it had total integrity in the sense that it was never going to tell me what it thought I wanted to hear. It was only going to tell me what was true and what I needed. And so, right from the beginning, I felt there was a crystalline integrity to Buddhism and as much to mindfulness. That indeed, as the famous Rolling Stones song goes, you can't always get what you want, but Buddhism and mindfulness are going to give us what we need.

Speaker 1 · 4:35Beautiful.

Speaker 1 · 4:36Yeah, and it feels akin to perhaps why you became a journalist or a writer in the sense that you're looking for the truth and wanting to share that with others.

Speaker 2 · 4:48I think that's true. I mean, I was a journalist before I was a Buddhist, really. I would say that I've been extremely lucky in that I've been able to bring my professional skills to bear as a journalist, as an editor, as a writer, in the service of traditions that I believe are of great benefit to people's lives and to our society. And in that sense, I suppose I've been one of the lucky ones that I've been able to devote my professional skills to something I believe deeply in and still do, that can be of great benefit to our lives in the world. And

Speaker 2 · 5:24in fact, I would then segue to say that although I remain a committed Buddhist practitioner, that in a sad way, I believe that the Eastern religion of Buddhism, Capital B Buddhism, is really in the end only going to have a limited impact in this society by virtue of being a little known Asian religion. Of course, it offers great value to those who practice it. But in the end, if the basic truths and practices of mindfulness, awareness, compassion, insight, which are universal, they represent universal human longings, they represent universal human truths. If they are genuinely to have impact on the society, American society, human society, in a substantial way. And after all,

Speaker 2 · 6:18having benefit is what all of this is all about, then I believe that that's going to happen in the context of the secular evidence-driven tradition or now movement of mindfulness. So, in a way, I would say that I've had a deep belief, and I think evidence of my own life, that the practice of meditation, of mindfulness, of awareness, of compassion, of insight, are of deep value. And now I believe that, albeit that I remain a totally committed Buddhist practitioner, I feel that the much more potentially powerful and effective vehicle for presenting those truths and those techniques in this modern society is via the mindfulness movement. And that's what my book is devoted to: to offering a complete view of what can be presented to people, not as religion, not as Buddhism, not necessarily even as spirituality, but simply by presenting simple truths as true, by presenting things that work as things that work.

Speaker 1 · 7:25You referenced that Rolling Stones song, we may not always get what we want, but we usually get what we need. Would you say that at the heart of your new book is a challenge to the whole like mainstream movement that mindfulness, as it's been popularized in the West, we may have shrunk it down too far as a technique, just for calm and focus. But what you're pointing to is that really it's more of a complete path with these five keys. And what do you think we've lost by treating it as a tool instead of a more complete path of what you're pointing to?

Speaker 2 · 8:04I think I would reverse the chronology or the process that you've just described. Rather than saying that something has been lost or shrunk, rather that it is time for the mindfulness movement to take the next step in its development. I believe deeply that what we call mainstream mindfulness, the mindfulness movement, the secular mindfulness movement, started by John Kabatin, is indeed a new and genuine contemplative tradition brilliantly suited to the modern world. It has made in its first phase an extraordinary accomplishment, which is to say that since it was founded, say in the early 70s, that it has inspired millions of people to practice basic mindfulness meditation to their benefit in many, many ways. And that's not easy in a society and that is often skeptical about the claims of things like meditation. So, in its what I consider to be its first step, the mainstream mindfulness or secular mindfulness movement has achieved an historic accomplishment. And now, on that basis, it is time for us to take the next step in its development and to present mindfulness not simply as a beneficial meditation technique. And of course, it has many, many concrete benefits, but by looking at it instead as a complete path that starts with mindfulness meditation, that the benefits of mindfulness to our lives and to our society can be both deepened and expanded. So rather than thinking that anything has been lost, I rather take a positive view that now having done something really amazing in its first step of its development, it's time now for the mindfulness movement to take the next step. Now,

Speaker 2 · 9:54here's one reason why I think that's so important. Of course, by looking at mindfulness as a complete path, and I'm sure we will discuss the ways in which I at least have chosen to describe it that way, that has many benefits to individual practitioners. But I think its greatest benefit is that traditionally the kinds of deep personal and societal transformation that are offered when mindfulness is seen as a complete path are traditionally associated with and limited to religious paths. And that's, of course, over the millennia been fine. And in those religious paths, with all their negative baggage, many people have found the kind of deep personal and social change they long for. Now, in today's world, millions of people rightly are weary of religious practice, do not believe in religion, and are all too aware of the negative baggage of institutionalized religion. And yet still they long for the kind of deep personal and social transformation that previously was associated only with religious practice. Now, for the first time, when viewing mindfulness as a complete and transformative path of life, they can access proven, powerful methods of transformation in a modern, common sense and evidence-based format. So while previously these kind of really powerful methods were traditionally only offered in the context of religion, now for the first time they are available to people in the world today who are not interested in religious practice, but still long for that same kind of personal and social transformation that these techniques can deliver that can allow us to live the kinds of life we all long for in the kind of society that we deserve. That I believe is potentially the greatest benefit of the mainstream mindfulness movement, that when looked at as a complete path of life, it offers to people the kind of powerful and effective techniques traditionally only available in a religious context, now available in an evidence based, science proven, secular context.