My thinking about this was enriched further when I happened upon a podcast of a talk given in 2011 at an annual event called the Buddhist Geeks Conference. There, a woman named Kelly McGonigal delivered a talk called “What Science Can Teach Us About Practice.” McGonigal, who teaches at Stanford University, discussed how recent studies of the brain’s inner workings proved that the practice of meditation can lessen human suffering—not just the existential angst kind of suffering, which is bad enough, but actual physical pain.
