Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body

by Daniel Goleman

As we see it, 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.

Meditation is a catch-all word for myriad varieties of contemplative practice, just as sports refers to a wide range of athletic activities. For both sports and meditation, the end results vary depending on what you actually do.

After pointing out the existence of altered states of consciousness (though not by that name), James adds, “We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.” Dan’s article had begun with this very passage from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, a call to study altered states of consciousness. These states, as James saw, are discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. And, he observed, “No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.” The very existence of these states “means they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.”

Path to Purification in Pali (the language of Buddhism’s earliest canon), was the ancient source for those mimeographed manuals Dan had pored over in Bodh Gaya. 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.”

At first the flow of thoughts rushes like a waterfall, which sometimes discourages beginners, who feel their mind is out of control. Actually, the sense of a torrent of thoughts seems to be due to paying close attention to our natural state, which Asian cultures dub “monkey mind,” for its wildly frenetic randomness.

Sustained focus, the manual notes, brings the first major sign of progress, “access concentration,” where attention stays fixed on the chosen target without wandering off. With this level of concentration come feelings of delight and calm, and, sometimes, sensory phenomena like flashes of light or a sense of bodily lightness.

“Access” implies being on the brink of total concentration, the full absorption called jhana (akin to samadhi in Sanskrit), where any and all distracting thoughts totally cease. In jhana the mind fills with strong rapture, bliss, and an unbroken one-pointed focus on the meditation target. The Visuddhimagga lists seven more levels of jhana, with progress marked by successively subtle feelings of bliss and rapture, and stronger equanimity, along with an increasingly firm and effortless focus. In the last four levels, even bliss, a relatively gross sensation, falls away, leaving only unshakable focus and equanimity. The highest reach of this ever more refined awareness has such subtlety it is called the jhana of “neither perception nor nonperception.” 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 Buddha’s path veers into a different kind of inner focus: the path of insight.

Here, awareness stays open to whatever arises in the mind rather than to one thing only—to the exclusion of all else—as in total concentration. The ability to maintain this mindfulness, an alert but nonreactive stance in attention, varies with our powers of one-pointedness.

With mindfulness, the meditator simply notes without reactivity whatever comes into mind, such as thoughts or sensory impressions like sounds—and lets them go. The operative word here is go. If we think much of anything about what just arose, or let it trigger any reactivity at all, we have lost our mindful ...

The Visuddhimagga describes the way in which carefully sustained mindfulness—“the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens” in our experience during successive moments—refines into a more nuanced insight practice that can lead us through a...

This shift to insight meditation occurs in the relationship of our awareness to our thoughts. Ordinarily our thoughts compel us: our loathing or self-loathing generates one set of feelings and actions; our romantic fantasies quite another. But with strong mindfulness we can experience a deep sense in which self-loathing and romantic thoughts are the same: like all other thoughts, these are passing moments of mind. We don’t have to be chased through th...

Once we glimpse our mind as a set of processes, rather than getting swept away by the seductions of our thoughts, we enter the path of insight. There we progress through shifting again and again our relationship to that inner show—each time yi...

We were speaking to a basic confusion, still too common, about how meditation can change us. Some people fixate on the remarkable states attained during a meditation session—particularly during long retreats—and give little notice to how, or even if, those states translate into a lasting change for the better in their qualities of being after they’ve gone home. Valuing just the heights misses the true point of practice: to transform ourselves in lasting ways day to day.

“The true mark of a meditator is that he has disciplined his mind by freeing it from negative emotions.”

That rule of thumb has stayed constant since before the time of the Visuddhimagga: It’s not the highs along the way that matter. It’s who you become.

we articulated a hypothesis: The after is the before for the next during.

We were intrigued by the possibility of some biological pathway where repeated practice led to a steady embodiment of highly positive traits like kindness, patience, presence, and ease under any circumstances. Meditation, we argued, was a tool to foster precisely such beneficial fixtures of being.

For the Stoics, one key was seeing that our feelings about life’s events, not those events themselves, determine our happiness; we find equanimity by distinguishing what we can control in life from what we cannot.

Today that creed finds an echo in the popularized Twelve Step version of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference. The classical way to the “wisdom to know the difference” lay in mental training. These Greek schools saw philosophy as an applied art and taught contemplative exercises and self-discipline as paths to flourishing. Like their pe...

In the Greco-Roman tradition, qualities such as integrity, kindness, patience, and humility were considered keys to enduring well-being. These Western thinkers and Asian spiritual traditions alike saw the value in cultivating a virtuous life via a roughly similar transformation of being. In Buddhism, for example, the ideal of inner flourishing gets put in terms of bodhi (in Pali and Sanskrit), a path of self-actualization that nourishes “the very best within oneself.”

University of Wisconsin psychologist (and Richie’s colleague there) Carol Ryff, drawing on Aristotle among many other thinkers, posits a model of well-being with six arms:

Similarly, in a separate study, people practicing a popular form of mindfulness reported higher levels of well-being and other such benefits up to a year later.26 The more everyday mindfulness, the greater the subjective boost in well-being.

Another common meaning of mindfulness refers to a floating awareness that witnesses whatever happens in our experience without judging or otherwise reacting.

Perhaps the most widely quoted definition comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn: “The awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience.”17

In modern life stressors are mostly psychological, not biological, and can be ongoing (if only in our thoughts), like a horrific boss or trouble with family.

But the brain’s executive center, located behind the forehead in our prefrontal cortex, gives us both a unique advantage among all animals and a paradoxical disadvantage: the ability to anticipate the future—and worry about it—as well as to think about the past—and regret.

As Epictetus, a Greek philosopher, put it centuries ago, it’s not the things that happen to us that are upsetting but the view we take of those doings. A more modern sentiment comes from poet Charles Bukowski: it’s not the big things that drive us mad, but “the shoelace that snaps with no time left.”

we were impressed by the precision with which one of his interpreters, Alan Wallace, was able to equate scientific terms with their equivalent meanings in Tibetan, a language lacking any such technical terminology. Alan, it turned out, had a PhD in religious studies from Stanford University, extensive familiarity with quantum physics, and rigorous philosophical training, in part as a Tibetan Buddhist monk for several years.

This program starts with full focus on the breath, then progressively refines attention to observe the natural flow of the mind stream and finally rest in the subtle awareness of awareness itself.8

In short, the Zen meditators seemed to respond to pain as though it was a more neutral sensation. In more technical language, their brains showed a “functional decoupling” of the higher and lower brain regions that register pain—while their sensory circuitry felt the pain, their thoughts and emotions did not react to it.