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October 20 - December 25, 2017
“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.”
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.
model of well-being with six arms:
“The awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience.”17
Attention flows through a meager bottleneck in the mind, and we allot that narrow bandwidth parsimoniously. The lion’s share goes to what we choose to focus on in the moment. But as we keep our attention on that thing, our focus inevitably wanes, our mind wandering off to other thoughts and the like. Meditation defies this mental inertia.
“What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.”
Attention tasks don’t really go on in parallel, as “multitasking” implies; instead they demand rapid switching from one thing to the other. And following every such switch, when our attention returns to the original task, its strength has been appreciably diminished. It can take several minutes to ramp up once again to full concentration.
A surprise: mindfulness also improved working memory—the holding in mind of information so it can transfer into long-term memory. Attention is crucial for working memory; if we aren’t paying attention, those digits won’t register in the first place. 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 30 percent on the GRE, the entrance exam for grad school. Students, take note.
Another way cognitive control helps us is in managing our impulses, technically known as “response inhibition.”
Meta-awareness allows us to track our attention itself—noticing, for example, when our mind has wandered off from something we want to focus on. This ability to monitor the mind without getting swept away introduces a crucial choice point when we find our mind has wandered: we can bring our focus back to the task at hand. This simple mental skill undergirds a huge range of what makes us effective in the world—everything from learning to realizing we’ve had a creative insight to seeing a project through to its end.
Almost from the start of that endless hour Richie’s usual ache in his right knee, now intensified by the no-moving vow, went from pulsating jolts to torture. But then, just as the pain reached the unbearable point, something changed: his awareness. Suddenly, what had been pain disappeared into a collection of sensations—tingling, burning, pressure—but his knee no longer hurt. The “pain” dissolved into waves of vibrations without a trace of emotional reactivity. Focusing on just the sensations meant completely reappraising the nature of hurting: instead of fixating on the pain, the very notion
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With nothing much else to capture our attention, our mind wanders, very often to what’s troubling us—a root cause of everyday angst. For this reason, when Harvard researchers asked thousands of people to report their mental focus and mood at random points through the day, their conclusion was that “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
As Dōgen, founder of the Soto school of Zen,
instructed, “If a thought arises, take note of it and then dismiss it. When you forget all attachments steadfastly, you will naturally become zazen itself.” Many other traditions see lightening the self as the path to inner freedom. We’ve often heard the Dalai Lama talk about “emptiness,” by which he means the sense in which our “self’—and all seeming objects in our world—actually emerge from the combination of their components. Some Christian theologians use the term kenosis for the emptying of self, where our own wants and needs diminish while our openness to the needs of others grows into
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At the higher reaches of practice, mind training lessens the activity of our “self.” “Me” and “mine” lose their self-hypnotic power; our concerns become less burdensome. Though the bill still must be paid, the lighter our “selfing,” the less we anguish about that bill and the freer we feel. We still find a way to pay it, but without the extra load of emotional baggage.
The volunteers had never meditated before, but in this mindfulness course they learned that if you are lost in some personal melodrama (a favorite theme of the default mode), you can voluntarily drop it—you can name it, or shift your attention to watching your breath or to bare awareness of the present moment. All of these are active interventions, efforts to quiet the monkey mind.
These regions very likely underlie what traditional texts see as the root causes of suffering—attachment and aversion—where the mind becomes fixated on wanting something that seems rewarding or on getting rid of something unpleasant.
Constant stress and worry take a toll on our cells, aging them. So do continual distractions and a wandering mind, due to the toxic effects of rumination, where our mind gravitates to troubles in our relationships but never resolves them.
After the day of practice the meditators had a marked “down-regulation” of inflammatory genes—something that had never been seen before in response to a purely mental practice. Such a drop, if sustained over a lifetime, might help combat diseases with onsets marked by chronic low-grade inflammation. As we’ve said, these include many of the world’s major health problems, ranging from cardiovascular disorders, arthritis, and diabetes to cancer.
the after is the before for the next during.
“an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
