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November 6 - November 11, 2020
Yet mindfulness, part of an ancient meditation tradition, was not intended to be such a cure; this method was only recently adapted as a balm for our modern forms of angst. The original aim, embraced in some circles to this day, focuses on a deep exploration of the mind toward a profound alteration of our very being.
An altered trait—a new characteristic that arises from a meditation practice—endures apart from meditation itself. Altered traits shape how we behave in our daily lives, not just during or immediately after we meditate.
the most compelling impacts of meditation are not better health or sharper business performance but, rather, a further reach toward our better nature.
The further reaches of the deep path cultivate enduring qualities like selflessness, equanimity, a loving presence, and impartial compassion—highly positive altered traits.
Only of late have the scientific data reached critical mass, confirming what our intuition and the texts told us: these deep changes are external signs of strikingly different brain function.
A telegram from friends in India soon after revealed that the “swami” was actually the former manager of a shoe factory who had abandoned his wife and two children and come to America to make his fortune.
The meetings are organized by the Mind and Life Institute, itself formed in 1987 by the Dalai Lama, Francisco, and Adam Engle, a lawyer turned businessman.
Living the life of a sadhu, Maharaji’s only worldly possessions seemed to be the white cotton dhoti he wore on hot days and the heavy woolen plaid blanket he wrapped around himself on cold ones. He kept no particular schedule, had no organization, nor offered any fixed program of yogic poses or meditations. Like most sadhus, he was itinerant, unpredictably on the move. He mainly hung out on a tucket on the porch of whatever ashram, temple, or home he was visiting at the time.
Spiritual literature throughout Eurasia converges in descriptions of an internal liberation from everyday worry, fixation, self-focus, ambivalence, and impulsiveness—one that manifests as freedom from concerns with the self, equanimity no matter the difficulty, a keenly alert “nowness,” and loving concern for all.
In contrast, modern psychology, just about a century old, was clueless about this range of human potential.
The major states of consciousness, from the perspective of the science of the day, were waking, sleeping, and dreaming—all of which had distinctive brain wave signatures. Another kind of consciousness—more controversial and lacking any strong support in scientific evidence—was the total absorption in undistracted concentration, samadhi in Sanskrit, an altered state reached through meditation.
Nobel laureate Romain Rolland became a disciple of the Indian saint Sri Ramakrishna around the beginning of the twentieth century, he wrote to Freud describing the mystical state he experienced—and Freud diagnosed it as regression to infancy.15
Though Richie found his focus returning again and again to the throbbing pain in that knee, he also started to glimpse a sense of equanimity and well-being.
How long do state effects—like Richie’s meditative highs—last? At what point can they be considered enduring traits? What allows such a transformation of being to become embodied in a lasting way instead of fading into the mists of memory?
Though centuries old, the Visuddhimagga remained the definitive guidebook for meditators in places like Burma and Thailand, that follow the Theravada tradition, and through modern interpretations still offers the fundamental template for insight meditation, the root of what’s popularly known as “mindfulness.”
In the time of Gautama Buddha, full concentrated absorption in samadhi was heralded as the highway to liberation for yogis. Legend has it that the Buddha practiced this approach with a group of wandering ascetics, but he abandoned that avenue and discovered an innovative variety of meditation: looking deeply into the mechanics of consciousness itself.
The yogi, angered and in pain, raised his walking staff to strike the youngster. But suddenly seeing what he was about to do—and the anger that propelled his arm—the yogi turned around and went right back up to his cave for more practice.
The trouble with drug-induced states is that after the chemical clears your body, you remain the same person as always. And, as Richie discovered, the same fading away happens with highs in meditation.
While the Visuddhimagga and the meditation manuals Dan had read were operator’s instructions for the mind, the Abhidhamma was a guiding theory for such manuals. This psychological system came with a detailed explanation of the mind’s key elements and how to traverse this inner landscape to make lasting changes in our core being.
Valuing just the heights misses the true point of practice: to transform ourselves in lasting ways day to day.
In people with PTSD, any cue that reminds them of the traumatic experience—and that for someone else would not be particularly noticeable—sets off a cascade of neural overreactions that create the flashbacks, sleeplessness, irritability, and hypervigilant anxiety of that disorder.
As Alexander the Great was leading his armies through what is now Kashmir, legend has it he met a group of ascetic yogis in Taxila, then a thriving city on a branch of the Silk Road leading to the plains of India.
after a three-month meditation retreat (about 540 hours total), those practitioners who had strengthened a sense of purpose in life during that time also showed a simultaneous increase in the activity of telomerase in their immune cells, even five months later.24 This enzyme protects the length of telomeres, the caps at the ends of DNA strands that reflect how long a cell will live.
much of the stress relief improvements beginners credit to meditation do not seem to be that unique.13
Moreover, on a questionnaire that was specifically developed to measure mindfulness, absolutely no difference was found in the level of improvement from MBSR or HEP.14
The more experienced among the Zen students not only were able to bear more pain than could controls, they also displayed little activity in executive, evaluative, and emotion areas during the pain—all regions that ordinarily flare into activity when we are under such intense stress.
The Zen practitioners’ pain threshold was 2 degrees Centigrade (5.6 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than for nonmeditators.
Brain scans of people who for years had faced work that demanded up to seventy hours each week revealed enlarged amygdalae and weak connections between areas in the prefrontal cortex that can quiet the amygdala in a disturbing moment.
The amygdala, a key node in the brain’s stress circuitry, shows dampened activity from a mere thirty or so hours of MBSR practice.
Yet in English the word compassion, the Dalai Lama pointed out, signifies the wish that others be well—but it does not include oneself. He explained that in his own language, Tibetan, as well as in the classical tongues Pali and Sanskrit, the word compassion implies feeling this for oneself as well as others. English, he added, needs a new word, self-compassion.
Dalai Lama say, “The first person to benefit from compassion is the one who feels it.”
habituation conserves brain energy by paying no attention to that thing once we know it’s safe or familiar. One downside of this brain dynamic: we habituate to anything familiar—the pictures on our walls, the same dish night after night, even, perhaps, our loved ones. Habituation makes life manageable but a bit dull.
The neural circuitry for selective attention, the study concluded, can be trained—contrary to the standard wisdom where attention was assumed to be hardwired and so, beyond the reach of any training attempt.
multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” which hampers not just concentration but also analytic understanding and empathy.13
This training in mindfulness occurred while the students in the study were still in school. The boost to their attention and working memory may help account for the even bigger surprise: mindfulness upped their scores by more than 16 percent on the GRE, the entrance exam for grad school. Students, take note.
In meta-awareness it does not matter what we focus our attention on, but rather that we recognize awareness itself. Usually what we perceive is a figure, with awareness in the background. Meta-awareness switches figure and ground in our perception, so awareness itself becomes foremost.
just ten minutes of mindfulness overcame the damage to concentration from multitasking—at least in the short term; only eight minutes of mindfulness lessened mind-wandering for a while. About ten hours of mindfulness over a two-week period strengthened attention and working memory—and led to substantial improved scores on the graduate school entrance exam.
our experience is not based on the direct apperception of what is happening, but to a great extent upon our expectations and projections, the habitual thoughts and reactions that we have learned to make in response, and an impenetrable sea of neural processes.
We live in a world our minds build rather than actually perceiving the endless details of what is happening.
while we’re doing nothing there are brain regions that are highly activated, even more active than those engaged during a difficult cognitive task. While we are working at a mental challenge like tricky subtraction, these brain regions go quiet.
So, where are all those neurons, chatting back and forth while we do nothing in particular? Raichle identified a swath of areas, mainly the mPFC (short for midline of the prefrontal cortex) and the PCC (postcingulate cortex), a node connecting to the limbic system. He dubbed this circuitry the brain’s “default mode network.”1
In short, our mind wanders mostly to something about ourselves—my thoughts, my emotions, my relationships, who liked my new post on my Facebook page—all the minutiae of our life story. By framing every event in how it impacts ourselves, the default mode makes each of us the center of the universe as we know it.
Our default mode continually rescripts a movie where each of us stars, replaying particularly favorite or upsetting scenes over and over.
One of the great appeals of high-risk sports like rock climbing seems to be just that—the danger of the sport demands a full focus on where to put your hand or foot next. More mundane worries take backstage in the mind.
The same applies to “flow,” the state where people perform at their best. Paying full attention to what’s at hand, flow research tells us, rates high on the list of what puts us into—and sustains—a joyous state. The self, in its form as mind-wandering, becomes a distraction, suppressed for the time being.
This simple mental move has a neural correlate: activating the connection between the dorsolateral PFC and the default mode—a connection found to be stronger in long-term meditators than in beginners.3 The stronger this connection, the more likely regulatory circuits in the prefrontal cortex inhibit the default areas, quieting the monkey mind—the incessant self-focused chatter that so often fills our minds when nothing else is pressing.
our sense of self emerges as a property of the many neural subsystems that thread together, among other streams, our memories, our perceptions, our emotions, and our thoughts. Any of those alone would be insufficient for a full sense of our self, but in the right combination we have the cozy feel of our unique being.
Such a step out of the self, technically speaking, suggests weakening activation of the default circuitry that binds together the mosaic of memories, thoughts, impulses, and other semi-independent mental processes into the cohesive sense of “me” and “mine.”
meditators who had an average 7,500 lifetime hours, compared to people their own age, had decreased gray matter volume in a key region: the nucleus accumbens.
As we master any activity, the brain conserves its fuel by putting that action on “automatic”; cuing up that activity shifts from top-of-the-brain circuits to the basal ganglia far below the neocortex.
