Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace)

by Chade-Meng Tan

1. Self-awareness: Knowledge of one’s internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions 2. Self-regulation: Management of one’s internal states, impulses, and resources 3. Motivation: Emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate reaching goals 4. Empathy: Awareness of others’ feelings, needs, and concerns 5. Social skills: Adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others

When people come to a course such as ours that advertises itself as an “emotional intelligence course,” most people expect it to be a purely behavioral course. They expect to be told how to play nice, share candy, and not bite their co-workers.

DeCharms had people who suffer from chronic pain lie inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner and, using real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rtfMRI) technology, he showed each participant an image of a fire on a video screen. The greater the neural activity in the parts of their brains associated with their pain, the greater the fire became. By using that visual display, he could get people to learn to up- or down-regulate that brain activity and, with that ability, participants reported a corresponding decrease in their levels of pain. He calls this “neuroimaging therapy.”

First, a lot of meditation is about self-discovery. Yes, we start with training of attention, but attention is not the end goal of most meditation traditions; the true end goal is insight. The reason we create a powerful quality of attention is to be able to develop insights into the mind.

This attentional blink has previously been assumed to be a feature of our brain’s wiring, and therefore, immutable. Slagter’s study shows that after just three months of intensive and rigorous training in mindfulness meditation, participants can significantly reduce their attentional blink. The theory is that with mindfulness meditation training, one’s brain can learn to process stimuli more efficiently, hence after processing the first salient target, it still has the mental resources to process the second.

The simplest way to do it is to bring full moment-to-moment attention to every task with a nonjudgmental mind, and every time attention wanders away, just gently bring it back.

It is advantageous for us that pacing is accepted in our culture. It means you can do walking meditation any time of the day, and people will think you are just pacing.

We frequently hear people telling us right after this exercise, “I got to know this person for six minutes, and we are already friends. Yet there are people who have been sitting in the next cubicle for months, and I don’t even know them.” This is the power of attention. Just giving each other the gift of total attention for six minutes is enough to create a friendship.

Take one breath a day: I may be the laziest mindfulness instructor in the world because I tell my students all they need to commit to is one mindful breath a day. Just one. Breathe in and breathe out mindfully, and your commitment for the day is fulfilled; everything else is a bonus.

More importantly, after a while, your formal meditation may be infused with a powerful quality known in Sanskrit as sukha. The most common translations for sukha are “bliss,” “ease,” and “happiness.” In my opinion, the best translation of sukha is its most technical translation: “non-energetic joy.” Sukha is a quality of joy not requiring energy. It is almost like white noise in the background, something that is always there but seldom noticed.

There are two important implications of sukha’s non-energetic quality. The first is that it is highly sustainable because it does not require exertion of energy. The second is that because it does not require energy, it is so subtle that it takes a very quiet mind to access, like a soft background hum that is audible only when nobody in the room is talking loudly. What that means is you need to learn to quiet your mind to access sukha, but once you become skillful at doing that, you have a highly sustainable source of happiness

Let us shift into focused attention. Bring your attention to your breath, or any other object of meditation you choose. Let this attention be stable like a rock, undisturbed by any distraction. If the mind is distracted, gently but firmly bring the mind back. Let’s continue this exercise for the remainder of 3 minutes. (Long pause) Now we shift into open attention. Bring your attention to whatever you experience and whatever comes to mind. Let this attention be flexible like grass moving in the wind. In this mind, there is no such thing as a distraction. Every object you experience is an object of meditation. Everything is fair game. Let us continue this exercise for the remainder of 3 minutes. (Long pause) (Shift to focused attention for 3 minutes. Then shift to open attention for 3 minutes.) Let us end this sitting by resting the mind. If you like, you can again visualize the breath to be a resting place, or a cushion, or a mattress, and let the mind rest on it.

got you this book on mindfulness meditation instead of an Xbox. It’s just as fun!”

If I can understand a system so thoroughly I know exactly how it fails, I will also know when it will not fail. I can then have strong confidence in the system, despite knowing it is not perfect, because I know what to adjust for in each situation.

In addition, if I also know exactly how the system recovers after failure, I can be confident even when it fails because I know the conditions in which the system can come back quickly enough that the failure becomes inconsequential. Similarly, by understanding those things about my mind, my emotions, and my capability, I can gain confidence in myself despite my numerous failings and despite looking like I do.