RASMUS HOUGAARD: There is a general huge misconception
around mindfulness.
Many people think that mindfulness is a spiritual
thing.
Many think that it's a private thing that
we do at home, and most people think that
mindfulness is about slowing down.
That's wrong.
Mindfulness, in short terms, is really about
speeding up our mental processes whereby we
can be more effective with whatever we're
doing, that we have this attentional muscle
that allows us really to be on task with what
we are doing.
EMMA SEPPÄLÄ: Research shows that our mind
actually wanders about 50% of the time, and
research also shows that when our mind is
wandering we are never as happy as when our
mind is in the present moment.
So if your mind is in the future worrying
about something that is going to happen, or
in the past because you're regretting something
or angry at somebody, you're more likely to
feel more negative emotions.
But when you're in the present moment, even
if you're doing a task you don't particularly
like, you'll actually feel happier.
But also what we know is that you'll be able
to be more productive when you're in that
state because you're going to be naturally
focused.
JON KABAT-ZINN: People misunderstand meditation
as oh, I just sweep all my thoughts away and
then I'm in this like nirvana.
What you'll get by trying to sweep all your
thoughts away is a headache at the most, because
there's no way to sweep your thoughts away.
They will get you every time.
And then you can have millions of thoughts
about mindfulness and meditation and those
are just thoughts, too.
They're not meditating.
But when you see that you're not your thoughts
then you can watch them in this kind of impersonal,
more sort of if you will observing way with
kindness, with self-compassion, because a
lot of them are heavily loaded with negative
emotion.
And you can see that if you don't touch them,
if you don't do anything with them, if you
don't get caught in them, they self-liberate
naturally in awareness.
The awareness is like touching a soap bubble.
It's fun for kids and fun for adults, too.
A soap bubble and you touch it and it just
goes poof.
So I love that image.
The thought is the soap bubble and the emotion,
too, that's valancing the thought and you
don't need to do anything with it because
your awareness it's like not even a finger.
It's not corporeal.
The awareness, just the embracing of it or
the arising of it like in the sky it goes
poof all by itself.
And don't take my word for it.
This is something that when you sit down and
you begin to watch you'll see this is not
rocket science.
You don't have to sit in the cave for 30 years
to have that kind of experience.
All you need to do is in some sense get out
of your own way.
Now, I'm not saying that's easy.
That's really hard, but if you can have moments
when you get out of your own way then you'll
see that a lot of this stuff that we get so
caught up in it's like it's a mirage.
SAM HARRIS: There are features of our experience
that we don't notice when we're lost in thought.
So, for instance, every experience you've
ever had, every emotion, the anger you felt
yesterday or a year ago isn't here anymore.
It arises and it passes away, and if it comes
back in the present moment by virtue of your
thinking about it again it will subside again
when you're no longer thinking about it.
Now, this is something that people tend not
to notice because we rather than merely feel
an emotion like anger, we spend our time thinking
of all the reasons why we have every right
to be angry.
So the conversation keeps this emotion in
play for much, much longer than its natural
half-life.
And if you're able through mindfulness to
interrupt this conversation and simply witness
the feeling of anger as it arises you'll find
that you can't be angry for more than a few
moments at a time.
If you think you can be angry for a day or
even an hour without continually manufacturing
this emotion by thinking without knowing that
you're thinking, you're mistaken.
And this is something you can just witness
for yourself.
Again, this is an objective truth claim about
the nature of subject of experience and it's
testable.
And mindfulness is the tool that you would
use to test it.
DANIEL GOLEMAN: Mindfulness allows us to shift
our relationship to our experience.
Instead of getting sucked into our emotions
or our thoughts which is what happens when
we're depressed or anxious, we see them as
those thoughts again or those feelings again.
And that disempowers them.
There's actually research at UCLA that shows
when you can name that feeling – oh, I'm
feeling depressed again – you have shifted
the activity levels neurologically in the
part of the brain which is depressed to the
part of the brain which notices, which is
aware of the prefrontal cortex and that diminishes
the depression and enhances your ability to
be able to understand it or to see it as just
a feeling.
SEPPÄLÄ: Meditation practices can really
help you observe your mind, become aware of
its tendencies.
For example, its tendency to wander, and help
you through that awareness of shift your attention
back into the present moment.
Meditation is an exercise in which you are
engaging fully with the present moment.
So it's a fantastic way to train your mind
to be more present with what is going on right
now.
KABAT-ZINN: When you start to watch the mind
you'll notice that its got a lot of agendas
on the greed spectrum.
I mean it's – and greed is not quite the
same as ambition.
Greed has to do with more for me, more of
what I want for me.
Then there's this other thing that you'll
also notice which is you're sitting there
and the opposite will come up.
What I don't want, what I'm afraid of, what
I need to keep at the door, keep at bay, to
push away.
And that's collectively referred to as aversion.
So we've got greed on the one hand and it
is toxic.
The more you're sucked into greed, the more
egotistical you become, the more it's all
about me, the more you're willing to lose
your own ethical foundation to get a particular
result, only to find that even that result
is not really satisfying so you're on to the
next result and it's a never ending trajectory.
But nevertheless, we have to admit it's here
all the time.
It's not like oh, I've transcended greed.
I don't think we do transcend greed, but we
can transform how we are in relationship to
it and with awareness the greed doesn't have
to run us.
So we can bring mindfulness to greed, and
the greed can be attenuated or liberated.
Mindfulness to aversion, and the aversion
could be attenuated or liberated, or mindfulness
to our own deluded nature, thoughts and emotions
and so forth.
And that is liberating of them.
Then what do you have left?
You.
As pure awareness.
Fully embodied.
What comes next?
I don't know.
You're writing the script.
It's not like oh, then you'll feel this and
you'll fee that, and you'll be enlightened
and everybody will bow down to you, and you
will never have to have any kind of challenges
or difficulty.
The full catastrophe will evaporate forever.
No, it'll be the same old, same old.
Only you won't be the same old, same old.
You'll be the same you.
You'll have the same bank account.
You'll have the same social security number.
You'll have the same face in the mirror.
You'll be aging every day, but you will be
in wiser relationship to your possibilities.
SAM HARRIS: The enemy of mindfulness and really
of any meditation practice is being lost in
thought.
Is to be thinking without knowing that you're
thinking.
Now, the problem is not thoughts themselves.
We need to think.
We need to think to do almost anything that
makes us human – to reason, to plan, to
have social relationships, to do science.
Thinking is indispensable to us, but most
of us spend every moment of our waking lives
thinking without knowing that we're thinking,
and this automaticity is a kind of scrim thrown
over the present moment through which we view
everything and it's distorting of our lives.
It's distorting of our emotions.
It engineers our unhappiness in every moment
because most of what we think is quite unpleasant.
We're judging ourselves, we're judging others,
we're worrying about the future.
We're regretting the past.
We're at war with our experience in subtle
or coarse ways and much of this self-taught
is unpleasant and diminishing our happiness
in every moment.
So meditation is a tool for cutting through
that, for interrupting this continuous conversation
we're having with ourselves.
GOLEMAN: If you do mindfulness practice ten
minutes a day or ten minutes three times over
the course of a day something remarkable happens
to your attention and that has to do with
the fact that we're all multitasking these
days.
People on average look at their email about
50 times a day.
They look at their Facebook 20 some times
a day, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
There's Instagram, there's your phone calls,
there's whatever it is you have to do.
And what this means for attention is that
we're challenged.
That focused attention is an endangered species.
PETER BAUMANN: What happens with attention
is it either goes to the highest opportunity
or it goes to the highest threat that we perceive
in our environment.
So suddenly there is something that we in
our hunter-gatherer times something that was
valuable to eat and then that's where our
attention goes.
Or there's something like a dark shadow moving
and then that's where our attention goes.
It's automatic and the reason that we have
attention is to pay attention and then summon
all of our resources to either take advantage
of the opportunity.
or to avoid the threat.
That's really the purpose of attention.
So we zone out everything else, we kind of
blank everything and just focus on one thing
in that particular moment is of highest value
or potentially the highest threat.
There is so much happening in our lives that
we pay attention to and quite frankly the
little devices that we carry around don't
help very much because our attention gets
totally absorbed into that attraction from
these little devices.
And we get a little bit of dopamine all the
time when we say oh, information.
Information is valuable instinctively.
So we want to know what's happening and what's
going on and that's true for gossip and that's
true for why we watch the news.
But the problem is that our attention is so
much absorbed in that, that we rarely, if
ever, pay attention to just being present.
And that is really what mindfulness and meditation
is trying to balance out a little bit, so
that when the mind quiets and you actually
are at home in your body, then that distraction
fades away and you actually get in touch with
that underlying happiness that the Greeks
call eudaimonia.
SEPPÄLÄ: Research shows that people who
meditate can increase their attention span.
In fact, in some research studies we use a
task called the attentional blink task in
which you show people a number of different
images in very fast sequence and usually we
would only pick up every fourth image.
We don't actually see the others.
That's why we call it the attentional blink.
Well, research has shown that after meditation
retreat people tend to not show that attentional
blink or to show it less which is very interesting.
It means that if we calm our mind we're somehow
able to pick up things better in our environment
which also makes sense in terms of how divided
our mind is with regards to multitasking and
so forth.
When our mind is very settled then we're able
to literally see more things, register more.
DAN HARRIS: There's also a study out of Yale
that looked at what's called the default mode
network of the brain.
It's a connected series of brain regions that
are active during most of our waking hours
when we're doing that thing that human beings
do all the time which his obsessing about
ourselves, thinking about the past, thinking
about the future, doing anything but being
focused on what's happening right now.
Meditators not only turn off the default mode
network of their brain while they're meditating,
but even when they're not meditating.
In other words, meditators are setting a new
default mode.
And what's that default mode?
They're focused on what's happening right
now.
WENDY SUZUKI: We know a lot about or we're
growing our knowledge about the effects of
meditation, long-term meditation in people
like monks that meditate for 50 or 50,000
hours in their lifetime.
And we know that this completely changes the
electrophysiological responses of their brains.
They have much higher levels of what we call
gamma waves which is a particular frequency
of wave.
GOLEMAN: All of us get gamma for a very short
period when we solve a problem we've been
grappling with even if it's something that's
vexed us for months.
We get about a half second of gamma.
It's the strongest wave in the EEG spectrum.
We get it when we bite into an apple or imagine
biting into an apple and for a brief period,
a split second, inputs from taste, sound,
smell, vision, all of that come together in
that imagined bite into the apple.
But that lasts for a very short period in
an ordinary EEG.
What was stunning was that the Olympic level
meditators – these are people who have done
up to 62,000 lifetime hours of meditation
– their brainwave shows gamma very strong
all the time as a lasting trait just no matter
what they're doing.
It's not a state effect.
It's not during their meditation alone, but
it's just their everyday state of mind.
We actually have no idea what that means experientially.
Science has never seen it before.
We also find that in these Olympic level meditators
when we ask them, for example, to do a meditation
on compassion their level of gamma jumps 700
to 800 percent in a few seconds.
This has also never been seen by science.
So we have to assume that the special state
of consciousness that you see in the highest
level meditators is a lot like something described
in the classical meditation literature centuries
ago, which is that there is a state of being
which is not like our ordinary state.
Sometimes it's called liberation, enlightenment,
awake.
Whatever the word may be, we suspect there's
really no vocabulary that captures what that
might be.
The people that we've talked to in this Olympic-level
group say it's a very spacious and that you're
wide open.
You're prepared for whatever may come.
DAN HARRIS: There's no way a fidgety and skeptical
news anchor would ever have started meditating
were it not for the science.
The science is really compelling.
It shows that meditation can boost your immune
system, lower your blood pressure, help you
deal with problems ranging from irritable
bowel syndrome to psoriasis.
And the neuroscience is where it really gets
sci-fi.
There was a study out of Harvard that's shows
that short, daily doses of meditation can
literally grow the gray matter in key areas
of your brain having to do with self-awareness
and compassion and shrink the gray matter
in the area associated with stress.
GOLEMAN: Beginners in mindfulness or other
meditations it turns out right from the get
go have a better reaction to stress.
What that means is that – and we see this
in brain function.
The area of the brain which reacts to stress
called the amygdala, it's the trigger point
for the fight or flight or freeze response.
It's what makes us angry all of a sudden or
anxious all of a sudden.
The amygdala is quieter.
It's calmer in the face of stress and this
lets us be calmer in the face of stress.
And this is another benefit that we see right
from the beginning.
LOSANG SAMTEN: We all need that peace of mind.
So the peace of mind comes from the mindfulness.
Through that we understand how important kindness
or compassion.
One mental good quality leads into the next
and the next and the next.
Life is not perfect.
Life will never be perfect.
How much we put into effort to be perfect,
there is no perfect everything.
We are human.
Patience is wonderful to have.
So, if somebody who is in your life, if he
or she is so stressful and at that time sometimes
not necessarily there's not much room for
communicating, just be patient.
Just be (breathing noise).
As a human being we all need that kind of
quality.
But yet, again, the seeds—we all have that.
We all have our patience, how much we call
an impatient person, he or she has the seeds
of the patience and the kindness and the compassion.
All of these seeds we didn't have to buy anywhere.
We have that.
We all have room to grow, but we all have
the seeds.
GOLEMAN: One of the most important things
whether you're looking in the Christian literature
or the Buddhist literature or Jewish literature
or Hindi literature, it doesn't matter.
All of the meditative traditions within those
classical schools of thought are saying the
most important thing is that you become less
focused on yourself, caring only about yourself,
less selfish as it were and more open to the
needs of others.
More compassionate, more caring, more present
to other people.
If you look at longer term meditators, people
who've done more than say 1,000 or 2,000 hours
of meditation over their entire life – and
this happens naturally.
Let's say you do a half hour or sit every
morning before you go out for the day.
Well, after a decade or two it does add up
and it seems that cumulative amount does make
people less selfish, less just caring about
me, and more open to other people around them.
More caring, more able to tune in, more able
to empathize.
And this also shows up in a brain change which
we think is quite significant which is that
the nucleus accumbens which is the focus of
craving of I've got to have that drug addiction,
for example, actually becomes smaller in longer
term meditators.
And this seems to be related to this lack
of I, me, mine in how people behave and how
they think in their emotional life.
And we see it most strikingly, of course,
in Olympic level meditators where these are
people who've done 10,000 to 62,000 hours
of meditation and they are genuinely selfless
people but they're very nourishing, very enjoyable
to be with because they pay attention to you.
They really focus on the person they're with
and how they can be of service or what do
you need now.
It's very refreshing.
SUZUKI: How do you get to be a regular meditator
and the answer is, I think, start very, very
small.
I know for myself I have a subchapter in my
book called "Confessions of a Yo-Yo Meditator"
because I think I have tried all different
kinds of meditation.
And my big mistake early on was to try and
meditate for too long at a sitting.
So I would try and meditate for 20-25 minutes
with no meditation experience and it was a
disaster.
I forced myself to do it for 30 days thinking
that would be it and I would form my habit.
And day 31 I took a little break and I never
came back.
But then when I came back again starting very,
very small with things that I can just do
on my own, just breathing meditation, focusing
on the breath.
Something that we all do at the end of yoga
classes.
That's what really kind of helped me build
my muscle and I just have to stick with that
very short meditation and build it up that
way.
I think people too often either start too
long or don't stick with it enough, but again
shorter is better.
DAN HARRIS: My powers of prognostication are
not great.
I bought a lot of stock in the company that
made palm pilot back in 2000 and that didn't
go so well for me, but having said that I'm
going to make a prediction.
I think we're looking at meditation as the
next big public health revolution.
In the 1940s if you told people that you went
running they would say who's chasing you.
Right now if you tell people you meditate,
and I have a lot of experience with telling
people this, they're going to look at you
like you're a little weird most of the time.
That's going to change.
Meditation is going to join the pantheon of
no brainers like exercise, brushing your teeth
and taking the meds that your doctor prescribes
to you.
These were all things that if you don't do
you feel guilty about and that is where I
think we're heading with meditation because
the science is so strongly suggestive that
meditation can do really, really great things
for your brain or for your body.
DAMIEN ECHOLS: This is a technique that flushes
our thoughts out.
If you have a song going through your head
over and over or if you're reliving an argument
you had with someone a year ago, if you're
obsessed over something that you can't get
out of your head.
This technique is good for that as well as
just generally meditation purposes.
It doesn't have a name.
I usually just refer to as the prison cell
meditation, but if you're interested I'll
do that.
Is that okay?
All right.
You start by closing your eyes and then you
envision yourself in a prison cell.
Standing in the center of a cell, everything
is white.
The walls are white, the ceiling is white,
the floors are white.
The only thing there is in the cell other
than you on the back wall is a slit of a window.
And it's up so high that the only way that
you can reach it, the only way you can see
out of it is by gripping the window ledge
high above your head and hoisting yourself
up by sheer brute physical upper body strength,
almost like you're doing a pull up or a chin
up.
So you want to bring as much tactile sensation
to the visualization as you possibly can.
You want to feel it as much as you can.
So picture yourself walking to the back of
this wall, pressing yourself against it, reaching
up with your hands and gripping the edge of
that windowsill with your fingertips.
Try to feel what the back wall of that prison
cell would feel like pressed against the side
of your face, pressed against your torso.
Feel the coldness of it, the grittiness of
it.
And as you start to lift yourself up off the
floor using just your arms, try to feel what
that would actually feel like.
Feel the muscles in your shoulders.
Feel the muscles in your chest, in your abdomen
firing, tensing as you're pulling yourself
up.
Try to feel what the wall would feel like
as you scrape against it lifting yourself
slowly by sheer strength.
As your eyes crest over the rim of the window
white light bursts through the window, floods
through the window and obliterates everything
– the cell, you, everything until there's
only white light remaining.
Do it again.
Press yourself against the back of the wall,
reach out with both hands and grip the edge
of the windowsill.
Feel the muscles in your chest and your abdomen,
in your shoulders tensing as you start to
lift yourself up.
Feel the wall scrape against the front of
your thighs, against the side of your face
as you hoist yourself until your eyes go over
the edge of the window frame and then white
light comes flooding in through the window
obliterating everything – you, the cell
until there is only white light.
Once more.
Feel yourself pressed against the wall, raise
your arms, hook your fingertips over the window
ledge.
Begin to raise yourself slowly up by sheer
strength feeling the muscles in your shoulders,
your chest, your torso straining as you lift
your body weight.
Feel the wall of the prison cell as you scrub
against it.
And as your eyes go over the edge of the window
frame white light comes flooding in obliterating
everything.
And this is one of those things you can do
for as long as you have time.
You can do it five times.
You can do it ten times.
The longer you do it, the more effective it
is.
And it gives you something to work with in
your visualization instead of just trying
to stay in the present moment which is really,
really hard.
