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How to Meditate: Meditation 101 for Beginners
10 Science-Backed Benefits of Meditation
What is Meditation?
How to Meditate: Meditation 101 for Beginners
10 Science-Backed Benefits of Meditation
What is Meditation?
Benefits of Mindfulness: Mindful Living Can Change Your Life
Mindfulness 101: A Beginner's Guide
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Rick shares the science-backed benefits of mindfulness and how the practice affects the body and brain, and therefore our lives.
I'm your host Melli O'Brien.
And with me today, I
am thrilled to have Dr.
Rick Hanson with us today.
And Rick is a neuro psychologist and he's
also a New York Times bestselling author.
His books include Hardwiring Happiness,
my favorite is Buddha Brain and Just
One Thing and also Mother Nurture.
And he's also the founder of
the Wellspring Institute for
Contemplating Wisdom and Neuroscience.
Rick has spoken at universities like
Oxford and Harvard, and also taught at
meditation centers around the world and
is also the creator of an online course
called the Foundations of Well-being.
And can I just say also for all of you
out there who want to just find some
really great free resources on how to
live a more happy, contented and peaceful
life, Rick's website, RickHanson.net,
which is spelled Hanson, H A N S O N
is just like an amazing resource of
free information to go and check out.
So I highly recommend going
and checking that out as well.
Rick, I'm absolutely thrilled
to have you here with us today.
Thank you.
And I can't wait to talk all things
neuroscience and mindfulness with you.
You're welcome.
I'm happy to be here.
Yeah.
So as I mentioned, I want to talk about
with you today mainly how mindfulness
changes our brains and changes our
whole lives really from the inside out.
But I'd love to talk with you first
of all, about, well, I have kind of
like a two-fold question for you.
First of all, would you consider
yourself, on reflection now, would
you say that you were a contemplative
child, a spiritually inclined child?
And if you could tell us the story
of how you came to be practicing
mindfulness and interested in the
contemplative traditions of the world.
That's such a great question.
You know, Melli, I think a lot of
people, when they are kids and a lot
of kids, when they're kids, a lot of
kids, period, like me, including at
a young age, you know, my earliest
memories go back to being nearly three.
I wasn't quite three, or
I had just turned three.
And in those vivid memories as well
as other vivid memories is really
continuously, or it shows up in most of
them, a background sense that there was
a tremendous amount of construction of
unnecessary unhappiness - in my family,
the other kids around me, school.
I was in schools watching the adults,
just a lot of needless tension, worry,
bickering, fault-finding, hassling,
stress, frazzledness, and so forth.
And there was in me a very strong sense
of a kind of poignant, wistful wishfulness
that it did not need to be this way.
I didn't know how people could
reliably, stably find lasting true
happiness, love and inner peace.
But I honestly had a sense of a
kind of quest to find out in the
back of my mind, partly motivated
by being quite unhappy myself.
Nothing like pain to want you to pull
your hand back from the hot stove.
So that was the beginning for me.
And I went to a very conventional kind of
high school and grew up in a conventional
setting, raised a casual Christian,
no particular spirituality there.
And then in college, I stumbled on
the whole human potential movement in
the early seventies, which then led me
to Eastern perspectives and practices
by the time I was a senior at UCLA.
And in the spring of 1974, which is when
I began meditating, and at that point,
kind of the doors popped quite open.
I'd had a lot of background
previously in human potential,
humanistic psychology, et cetera.
I'd had beginnings of interest in the
nervous system, the physical, natural
basis for suffering or happiness.
And then when I came across the analysis
of the mind in ultimate reality from
the more Eastern traditions, including
Buddhism, which became kind of my own
home tradition, that just felt wow,
deeply true and a penetrating window
into what we could do to establish
the basis for lasting, unconditional
contentment, love and inner peace.
And so that was kind of the
beginning for me back in 1974.
Been at it pretty steadily ever
since, for better or worse.
And that was my own journey,
if you will, that's where my
journey began with mindfulness.
It's so interesting, you know,
as I hear you talk about what
it was like for you as a child.
It's pretty much my own story.
And I would hazard a guess that so
many people who would be watching
this summit would have the same story
that starts as a child, that sense
of longing for a way of being with
more contentedness and wholeness.
So, and you find yourself now at these
amazing place of, you know, understanding
deeply the way that our brain works.
I mean, I've heard you say that
neuroscience is a baby science,
but still having this understanding
of that world and as well as
the, the contemplative sciences.
So we now have a fairly decent body
of research about how mindfulness
affects the body and the brain.
Could you tell us about some of that?
So when we practice mindfulness,
what actually happens in our
brain and what does that do?
How does that roll out in a person's
life in terms of behavior and emotional
intelligence and those kinds of things?
That's a great question.
So, people use the term mindfulness
as you all know in different ways.
That's true.
Yeah, I tend to, I'm fine with however,
we use it, as long as we know how
we're using it and flag movements
from one definition or meaning to
another, not getting all semantic
or anything, but just for clarity.
You know?
And so I go kind of old school to
the original notions of mindfulness
rooted in Buddhism as sustained present
moment awareness that itself is neutral
with regard to what it's aware of it.
And, yet alongside with mindfulness
are other important factors,
such as curiosity, investigation,
self-compassion, insight and so forth.
Okay.
So we can be mindful under any and
all conditions, a kind of intense
epitome of mindfulness is sustained
contemplative practice, such as
mindfulness of the body or if someone's
doing this in a more theistic frame
in which there's a relationship
with something transcendental, we
could think of prayer as a kind of
sustained mindfulness practice as well.
Okay.
So research has been done on people
who have greater trait mindfulness.
They're more mindful in general.
Without practice?
For various reasons.
So it correlates with being a more mindful
person, however, you became mindful.
Maybe you are just naturally more mindful.
Okay.
But whatever it is, you know,
mindfulness itself is a trait.
It correlates with a lot of good
things, including resilience, mental
health, happiness, positive emotion,
empathy for others and so forth.
Okay.
Intervention studies that more
specifically look at what happens to
the brain when people deliberately do
mindfulness practice are very interesting.
Particularly people who do, you know,
a significant amount of meditative
practice, not perfect meditators, but
you know, 20, 30 minutes most days
maybe, or, you know, with experience
perhaps less time, but they're still
doing a fair amount of practice.
So they tend to have different brains
in some important and interesting ways.
First, they tend to have
more cortical tissue.
That's the outer shell of the brain,
if you will, from the root of the Latin
word bark, like the bark of a tree.
And those thicknesses really matter
because you could put roughly five
thousand synapses, little connections
between neurons side by side in
the width of just one single hair.
So increasing cortical thickness
by even a fraction of a
millimeter makes a big difference.
So long-term mindfulness meditators,
for example, have a measurably
thicker cortex behind their foreheads,
prefrontal regions that help regulate
attention, emotion, and actions.
They also have thicker cortex in the
insula, a part of the brain that helps
us tune into ourselves and also tune
into the emotions of other people.
They have measurably thicker cortex
third in the hippocampus, a part
of the brain that puts things in
perspective and also calms down the
alarm bell of the brain, the amygdala.
So we get more resilient.
Also meditators, interestingly,
have smaller amygdalae.
They have, the amygdala
is a little smaller.
The alarm bell is a little,
not quite so loud and freaky.
Also people who routinely practice
meditation, or even at the end of
just an eight week intervention
study have a stronger immune
system that's outside of the brain.
Right.
But they also have increased activation
of the left side of the prefrontal
cortex, which for most people, you know,
right-handed people and roughly half of
all, left-handed people have language on
the left and visual-spatial on the right.
Anyway, meditators have greater
activation of the left prefrontal
cortex, which is associated with more
positive emotion and a better mood.
In part because left prefrontal cortex
puts the brakes on negative emotions.
Just to finish up with two more
interesting findings, we have
brainwaves which basically track
the synchronized activity of large
swaths of neural real estate, kind
of all firing in synchronization
with each other many times a second.
And the fastest of these brainwaves,
the gamma range brainwaves, beating
roughly 30 to 80 times a second, which
is associated with greater learning
from life's experiences and also more
sense of integration and wholeness.
Long-term meditation practitioners
have greater intensity and
reach of this range of important
brainwaves, gamma wave brainwaves.
And last, it's beginning to be found that
people who meditate, particularly those
who maybe do intensive concentration
practices, preserve the length of,
what are called telomeres, which are
strips of atoms at the very ends of the
chromosomes that protect us against the
age related illnesses of various kinds.
So if you want to stay younger in
a sense, one of the many ways to
do that of course, is to meditate.
So if I were to just summarize it, I
mean, it's really quite extraordinary the
benefits just in the brain, which then
translate to benefits in the emotions
and our psychology and our relationships
altogether - greater resilience, greater
happiness, more capacity to weather
life's ups and downs, more insight into
yourself, more insight into other people,
less depression, less anxiety, quicker
recovery from illnesses of various kinds
or surgeries, and faster healing of
wounds, less inflammation in the body.
To sum up, if the big pharmaceutical
companies like Merck or Pfizer
could patent meditation or patent
MBSR, mindfulness based stress
reduction, whatever, they could
patent it and make money from it.
We'd be seeing ads for
meditation routinely.
Well, certainly in American TV where
you see ads for Prozac, Viagra and
the rest of that all night long.
I don't know if the ads for Viagra
would diminish, but I think the answer
Prozac would be replaced by ads for
MBSR and other forms of meditation.
Yeah.
I was just thinking when you were talking
about, you know, the anti-aging aspect
of mindfulness, wouldn't it be great
if we could open a beauty magazine
one day and instead of seeing product
after product of, you know, putting
all this stuff all over your face
and spraying it all over your hair,
if it could just say, well, Hey, why
don't you just practice mindfulness?
And it gives you an inner glow to boot.
Well, actually, it's a
pitch for adolescents.
For those of you who are teenagers or
have teenagers, one of the more powerful
ways to motivate teenagers to do some
kind of emotional intelligence practice,
including mindfulness practice is
that it will lower your stress level.
That's one of the most dominant findings.
It will lower your stress level
and stress gives you pimples.
Oh.
So you want to improve your complexion?
One of the good odds, not a
guarantee but a good odd strategy,
is to practice mindfulness.
That's motivating.
That is motivating, not only for
teenagers, but that is motivating.
So, what I'd love to, at least from your
point of view, from the point of view
of neuropsychology is, is there, do we
know if there is some kind of minimum
effective dose or some kind of ideal dose?
How dose dependent is mindfulness?
What happens in the brain
with different dosages?
It's a great question.
And it relates to the type of
practice you do, of course, and
also the kind of person you are.
Right?
Yeah.
And some people are very receptive.
They really tune in, you know.
Other people, they probably
are, you know, slower learners.
And so they just need to have
higher doses to get the same effect.
Right.
What I've seen looking at this is that,
at least in terms of the body of knowledge
that we have neuroscientifically, in
terms of measurable changes in the
nervous system, I mean, there's a general
principle, which is the more the better.
Yeah.
And the briefest intervention study I'm
aware of would be eight weeks of MBSR.
Yeah.
The larger point though, I think, really
is to commit to something routinely.
So my personal vow is to always meditate
at least one minute or more a day.
And sometimes I remember that
minute just before going to
sleep and that's the minute I do.
But I think there's something very
powerful about, you know, the dailiness
of it, whatever that is you'll do.
And second, I think it's important to
adapt your practice to your own needs.
Maybe you're a person who's more toward
the spirited, ADD end of the normal
temperamental spectrum, and so for you
just sitting isn't going to do it for you.
But being guided in a practice, you
have a lovely voice, listening to
one of your practices perhaps, or
walking, because it's more stimulating.
If that's the minute or the 20 minutes
or the 45 minutes that you're going to
do every day, or maybe something more
heartfelt, like loving kindness or
gratitude or opening to some sense of God
is love, if that's meaningful for you.
Whatever your practice is that
you'll do, that's the one to do.
What is crystal clear is that people in
just eight weeks of MBSR had significant
and measurable changes in their brains.
And current neuroimaging technology needs
to see pretty big changes in the brain
to be able to measure it because it's a
little bit like the early microscopes.
You know, those little amoebas or
whatever they were seeing, you know,
and the saliva, whatnot had to be
really big to be able to see them.
Same with neuroimaging.
It's got to be pretty big to see it.
So if you can get a scientific
study about changing the brain,
something big has happened there.
Yeah.
Wow.
Wonderful.
I'm really glad that you, I'm really
glad that you brought that up as
well that people have different
personality types and there really
isn't one right way to practice.
And that's, that's a really great insight.
I'm so glad that you shared that.
We all have such different tendencies.
The thing I would really say is
that you can have your body and
your emotions as a real marker.
For example, one of the most reliable,
probably the most reliable indicator
of long-term meditation practice is how
rapidly people's heart rate and breathing
rate drops when they go into meditation.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Beginners, if you will, in most
cases, on average, take quite a
while for the body to settle down.
Whereas experienced meditators who start
out at that same baseline, let's call
it, as a, these are beginners, these are
regular meditators, let's say their heart
rates are the same, or they come zooming
in, like I did for this interview from
having doing, having done a lot of emails.
You know, the meditators, they're
going to drop really fast.
So that's a marker.
And second, positive emotion.
How readily does a person,
you know, move into some sense
of peacefulness, wellbeing?
Key point, you're not craving
that, you're not chasing it, you're
not clinging to it because that
interrupts wellbeing obviously.
But, so my point is that what's going to
have an impact on you is if you're, in
terms of this question of dosing, it's
not about duration, it's about impact.
You have an experienced meditator drops
into the very deep zone in one minute,
and then hangs out there for five minutes.
Right?
So they get four minutes in the deep
zone, but a beginning meditator does 20
minutes of meditation and they clock,
you know, 20 seconds in the deep zone,
even though they're spending more time,
they're going to have less impact.
So I think the takeaway from this is
not to strive and seek some kind of,
you know, Zen moment on one hand.
But on the other hand, let
your body be your teacher, let
your emotions be your teacher.
They're telling you, and
they are giving you feedback.
So find out which really helps you
relax and open into some kind of
really beautiful, peaceful place.
I'm aware of a lot of meditative
practices, a lot of traditions and
a lot of methods, including outside
Buddhism, and it's humbling to appreciate
that a very large fraction of the
value of mindfulness and meditation
is carried by two things that are
not unique to mindfulness meditation,
stress relief, and positive emotion.
But the fact of that doesn't diminish
the impact of meditation because
whatever your skillful means is to
get to the ends, let's say, of stress
relief and including relaxation and
second positive emotion, that's going
to have a lot of benefit for you.
And then in addition to that, you can
look for what also is available in things
like mindfulness, such as the development
of that, what's called ,that observing,
witnessing, you know, disidentification
from the streaming of consciousness or
particular insights, such as insights
into impermanence, transience, and so
on, or other benefits in your particular
practice, like a sense of union with
the divine or your guru or whatever.
But, yeah, but to sum up,
you want to help yourself.
You know, drop into a powerful, good,
deep place because that's going to
have a lot more benefit for you.
Yeah.
It's really interesting, you know,
that was one of my teachers who was
actually a Swami in the yogic tradition.
He always had, he really kind of hopped on
with us about the point, if we ever talked
about dosage or, you know, how often we
should do things, he always used to say
to us, look, five minutes of high quality
practice is worth an entire retreat
of, you know, kind of coming and going.
And he was just like, you know, you,
you want to be thinking about high
quality practice more so than anything.
And also just, you know,
respecting where you're at.
But having that in mind as you do.
There's no use sitting there for thinking
for an hour, but lost in thoughts.
I know it's a really tricky thing
because mindfulness is a relationship
to states, states of mind, right?
It's our relationship where
we're being, we're not being
forgetful, we're recollected.
That's out of the root meaning of the word
from mindfulness and early teachings of
the Buddha, it's around recollectedness.
It's our relationship to states.
And sometimes people make the mistake
of thinking that mindfulness is a state.
That's a mistake.
You know, mindfulness is
a relationship to states.
Okay.
It's not to be equated with bare
witnessing or choiceless awareness.
In bare witnessing, there's
little but mindfulness present.
But mindfulness is not conflated
with or equated to that condition
so that anything except choiceless
awareness is not mindfulness.
A very important point.
And I think a lot of people in the
modern mindfulness movement, you know,
I've inadvertently really misunderstood
that, and that's an important point.
But second, mindfulness
is a means to an end.
You know, it's not an end in itself.
And I think some people get really
caught up and kind of glamorize or
glorify the technique of mindfulness.
And there they are, you know, kind
of being mindful of the streaming of
consciousness and what streams through
their consciousness and the overall change
in their being is fairly nonexistent.
And it's really okay to both be mindful
while also, from time to time, as
appropriate, you know, from time to
time, gently encourage a relaxing
of the body, an opening into warmth,
warmheartedness, you know, a coming
into gratitude, a letting go, an
opening out into allness altogether.
Right?
It's okay to do that.
It doesn't, I mean, there's a place
for radical choiceless awareness where
you don't do anything about that.
But much of the time, I think it's
really okay to be both mindful, while
periodically, gently inviting in a
deepening of that which you would
like to cultivate more of in yourself.
Yeah.
So some people, I've heard the same thing
before where people think it's kind of
mutually, you cannot be mindful and at
the same time, for instance, wanting
to cultivate more love or compassion or
wanting to create something in your life.
So what you're saying is, and I
completely 100% agree with you,
that they don't have to be separate.
Mindfulness is not choiceless
awareness where you never cultivate,
or in your language, you never pull
any weeds or you never cultivate
any good things in your life.
They absolutely go together.
And in fact, mindfulness is, I
guess the first step to being
able to do that in our lives.
I think that's a
critically important point.
I mean, if we are, again, going back old
school to the original's best teachings
of the Buddha, if we were to be mindful
and he has this long list, you know,
while walking, while sitting while
lying, while talking, while eating,
while going to the bathroom and he puts
it in there, if we were to be mindful
under all those conditions, why not be
also mindful while we are, as you put
it, you know, quoting me too, trying to
release the negative or grow the positive.
Yeah, it's really okay.
Yeah.
Glad you brought that up.
And we spoke a little bit, we kind of just
touched on briefly something that I'd love
to expand on a little bit more, and that
is that, you know, over time with repeated
practice of mindfulness, it seems that
certain insights, certain realizations
about, you know, the nature of things
or ourselves tend to naturally arise.
And one of those things that
seems to be very common is a kind
of a reorientation of our sense
of self to a much more expansive
and, interconnected sense of self.
And I was wondering about what
this is like in the brain.
Do we know if there are structural changes
in the brain that create this experience
of a reorientation of our sense of self?
I would love to hear, first of all,
what are the typical insights that
seem to arise out of the practice and
how does that relate to our brains?
It's such an interesting question.
So, a couple things.
So first, if you scan the brains,
let's say, of long time meditation
practitioners, much of the research on
this has been done on Tibetan lamas,
yogis, tulkus, monks, monastic nuns.
Yeah.
We're talking 20,000, 30,000 hours,
literally people doing twelve-year
retreats, stuff like that.
And the first interesting thing is
their brains look almost exactly like
the brain of some kind of anxious,
driven, aggressive stockbroker, right?
They all look the same
because they are brains.
Right?
They're still walking or talking,
they're maintaining a heart.
You know, structurally, they
look very, very similar.
There's some small differences that
you start to see like, as I said,
thicker tissue in certain parts
of the brain and also differences
that can make a big difference.
Also this thing I said about more
gamma wave activity, more sense of, you
know, more integrating, synchronization
of large swaths of the brain.
So on the one hand, there there's a
similarity, but on the other hand,
there are differences that do seem
to equate and to really pop out.
One, is this sense of gamma wave brain
activity that's very integrative.
And it makes me think about, you
may be familiar with this, one of
the five factors of those so-called
dhyanas, these non-ordinary states
of awareness that constitute the wise
concentration, right concentration
element of the eightfold path.
Those states of awareness in the
Southeast Asian Buddhist tradition
that I'm most rooted in, have those
states of awareness arise due to
factors, right and arise to the causes.
They arise dependently.
Yeah.
One of those five factors is called
unification of consciousness, singleness
of mind, which probably involves this
kind of gamma wave integrative, wholeness.
You start to experience, we have a
poet in America called Walt Whitman.
He had a lovely line, "I am multitudes."
It's a sense of accepting and
embracing and including all the
multitudes, you know, that you are.
So there's this movement from a
sense of this contracted tense, a
congealed I looking out through the
eyes, this entity somewhere inside.
It has to defend itself and glamorize
and glorify itself and claims
things and identifies with things.
And you start more opening out into...
you are a person.
Persons certainly exist
and they have duties, moral
duties and also moral rights.
But it's not easy to find and you cannot
find it so far in neuroscience, and I
think nor in your own direct experience,
the full package of the presumed
entity, I, that's assumed to exist
in Western psychology and philosophy,
and that has huge implications.
So it's, we're talking here about the
sense of opening out into the whole
person which looks plausibly like it is
supported in part by this integrative
whole brain gamma wave activity.
So that's the first major finding and
it has a lot of implications, including
training in whole body awareness in part
to support those gamma wave patterns.
So when you say training in whole
body awareness as in having that,
you know, like something like a
body scan practice where you just
hold the whole body in awareness?
It depends what you mean by the body scan.
So usually the way attention works
with the body is that if you think
of awareness like a stage, right?
One way to think of it is attention
and intention is the spotlight
on the whole stage of awareness.
Attention kind of skitters around from
sensation to sensation to sensation.
If you're tracking your body or
just simply sensations of breathing,
right, or put a little differently,
you know, different things get
foregrounded under the spotlight
moment after moment after moment.
But what we can also do is to widen
that spotlight to include, in a sense of
gestalt awareness, a wider and wider field
in which everything in it is experienced
as a single percept, one single
integrated experience, but has different
aspects, but experienced as one thing.
All right.
So it's kind of like if you go
outside, you can have your gaze fled
from thing to thing to thing, or you
can kind of soften your gaze, yeah,
and like, whoa, the whole thing.
So if you practice that with your body,
which is a wonderful, powerful practice,
I think that one of the probable benefits
of it is that it supports this gamma
wave activity, which is one of the
major findings of people who have, in
their own report, more of a sense of
selflessness and less inclination to
take life so personally, et cetera.
The other major finding, which has a
lot of practical implications, is that
when people are doing me, myself and
I - I've been cheated and mistreated.
When will I be loved?
Why'd you treat me like that?
And you know, I think this.
It's my precious.
When we're doing that kind of stuff,
right, we tend to activate networks in the
middle of the brain, middle and cortical
networks, either when we're goal-directed
toward the front of the midline or
when we're just kind of spacing out a
daydreaming, the soulful default mode
toward the back of the midline networks.
Either way, there's a lot of
I in those midline networks, a
lot of me making and I making.
All right.
So on the other hand, uh, studies show,
and people can check out work from
a fellow named Norman Farb, F-A-R-B,
his papers, but anyway, when people
go more into open awareness, where
they're in the present moment, they're
not engaged with the future oforthe
past, there's less and less sense of I,
they're not taking things so personally,
these midline activations reduce.
They decrease.
And what starts to happen is networks
on the science of the brain, especially
the right side for right-handed
people, which is where visual gestalt,
holistic processing more resides in
the right hemisphere, they tend to
activate lateral networks over here.
And with mindfulness training, at the end
of like eight weeks of MBSR, there's more
stable capacity to go into the lateral
mode of present moment, more self-love,
less problem solving, less abstracting,
less taking things personally, really
being in the now kinds of awareness.
And with practice, you can strengthen
those lateral modes because
neurons that fire together wire
together, as the saying has it.
So if you stimulate those particular
networks, they're going to get stronger
over time, kind of like working a
muscle again and again, and again.
And people who are more able to
drop into present moment awareness,
which has a less sense of self in
it, you're still a person, you're
aware, you're abiding but as the
multitude, but not so much as an ego.
People like that have more reliable
activation of the lateral mode.
And so one way into that is to do
the whole body awareness, the gestalt
awareness I was talking about, your
training in lateral mode activation.
And as you do that, what also really
tends to fall away is the sense of I.
There's still a person there.
You're still aware.
And still able to function.
Yeah, and making choices and for
having perspectives and being
determined and all the rest of that.
But, you know, you start operating
more and more in life as the whole
package, the whole person you are
rather than, you know, protecting and
endlessly bound to this little presumed
dictator, you know, the inner I.
Hmm.
That's really, really interesting.
That's fascinating.
And again, over time, more and more
practice, especially with that kind of
whole body awareness, things like that,
you would expect that that sense of not
being such a limited little I would deepen
and deepen and deepen as time goes on.
Yeah.
I think that's really true.
There's a way in which mindfulness
practice or spiritual practice altogether,
contemplative practice often has a
sense of rounded, of kind of grim,
dour, bummer recognition of suffering.
You know, if you're not miserable,
you're not really paying attention.
And it's, you know, oh,
happiness who needs it.
It's just more poignant, like blah.
And, you know, it's, what's interesting
is that if you look at the people,
generally speaking, who are the most
developed in any tradition you care
about - of Christian, Judaism, Islam,
Hinduism - even people who have really
gone a long way with a kind of more
secular paths of self-actualization.
Yeah.
And certainly Buddhism.
The farther along people are,
generally the happier they get.
Their heart is lifted.
They're inspired.
They're peaceful.
They're contented.
You know, it's a path, as Jack Kornfield
puts it, it's a path with heart.
It's a path of heart,
with heart, to heart.
And one of the things that's been really
striking in terms of the beneficial
applications of modern psychology and
neuropsychology to contemplative practice
is to really appreciate the healing power
and the spiritually transforming power of
positive emotion, of one kind or another.
Peacefulness, compassion,
kindness, gratitude, sense of
your own worth, enjoying wholesome
pleasures in life, you know.
The trick of course is to appreciate the
value of positive emotion and open to it
and receive it, including the positive
experiences you have on the cushion or
in your body scan, or in your mindfulness
class, to appreciate these emotionally
positive, emotionally, enjoyable
experiences, to really appreciate them
so they sink into your brain, right?
While at the same time letting go of
them and not claiming them as mine.
Right.
Yeah, wonderful.
Well, I want to be
respectful of your time.
So I just have one, final kind
of comment, question for you.
So it's been said that mindfulness has
the capacity to change the world from
the inside out one, person at a time.
And so what I'd love to know is that from
your perspective, from the perspective
of neuroscience, but as well, just
drawing on your own direct experience
of what unfolds in our life when you
practice mindfulness, what do you think
the changes would be like on the world
stage if mindfulness hit critical mass?
You know, I'm talking a billion,
two billion people, what
would that world look like?
It gets very interesting in terms of
how, I mean, it's a beautiful thought
and what do we mean, mindfulness?
Right?
And, you know, it's been pointed out that
burglars are mindful, snipers are mindful.
Mindfulness itself, even in Buddhist
psychology in the Abhidhamma
traditional early psychology.
So it is a neutral mental factor.
On the other hand, it is striking
that this simple, neutral present
moment awareness for most people,
has enormous positive benefits.
They kind of ripple out from it.
And I, myself reflected as have
others on why would that be?
Right?
And I think part of it is the ways
in which mindfulness by its very
nature disentangles us from negative
reactive patterns streaming along.
We start understanding them better.
And, implicit in the act of mindfulness
itself is a disidentification.
You kind of step out of the horror
movie or the crazy explosions, action
thriller and suddenly you're 20 rows
back looking at it going, wow, too bad.
Whoa, that looks pretty intense.
You know, that itself is huge
and could really make a big
difference in the world altogether.
So I think that part is really true.
In addition to mindfulness itself
though, my own opinion and I think
others probably share, is that we need
to add a moral dimension to mindfulness.
I think it's, I think to some extent,
maybe for some people, a more moral
dimension of compassion or benevolence,
kind of a sense of interconnectedness.
You know, if I hurt you,
it hurts me eventually.
If I help you, it helps me eventually.
Things like that.
To some extent, kind of maybe-sort
of for some people drift out
of or emerge out of mindfulness
itself, pure mindfulness practice.
But it's a slow process.
And that's why I think that great teachers
like the Buddha, who certainly appreciated
mindfulness, he allocated one of the eight
elements of the noble eightfold path to
it had seven other elements, as well.
It's the eightfold path,
not the one fold path.
So I think cultivating a warm heart,
kindness for others, moral commitments,
a sense of social justice, things
like that are also really important.
Yeah.
Last, in addition to that, I've
been really focusing on the second
and third noble truths in Buddhism,
which are essentially a purely
psychological drive theory of suffering.
And there's nothing mystical about
the four noble truths, you know.
There is suffering.
It's not that the entirety of life
is suffering, but there's a lot
of self-constructed suffering.
Think of that as the first noble truth.
Whoa, I'm startled by
another call that came in.
But anyway, back to this.
There is the first noble truth, you know,
that there is constructed suffering.
And then there's the second noble truth
that basically says, why do we suffer?
Suffering arises due to
causes, causes being craving.
Then third noble truth says
it's possible to reduce causes.
Fourth noble truth says how to do it.
Okay.
What's the modern
neuropsychology of craving.
Why do we crave?
Well, craving is a drive state
that itself arises due to causes.
What are the underlying causes of
craving, broadly defined, right?
Underlying causes of craving are
internal sense of deficit or disturbance.
Yeah.
So how do we remedy the internal
sense of deficit or disturbance,
especially for people who have every
reason in the world to not experience
an underlying sense of deficit or
disturbance, typically people in the
more advantaged populations of the world?
This time, you know, at this day and
age, certainly two thirds of the world's
population is, if not 5/6th of it, really
do have the object of conditions in their
everyday life to feel fundamentally safe,
fundamentally satisfied, and fundamentally
connected, our three fundamental needs
loosely related to the inner lizard, mouse
and monkey of the reptilian brainstem,
mammalian subcortex, primate human cortex.
Okay.
So it's not enough to just have
the object of conditions outside us
that address our fundamental needs.
People have to actually experience
deep in their bones again and again
and again that their core needs
are taken care of because otherwise
the brain goes into its red zone.
I don't care how mindful it is
or how morally committed it is.
It tips into the red zone in which
it starts feeling threatened and
fearful and angry in terms of safety.
Or, you know, driven or frustrated or
disappointed in terms of satisfaction.
Or, the brain tips into a sense
of hurt, shame, loneliness and the
resentment, tribalistic aggressiveness
towards them to protect us, whatever.
So mindfulness alone I think
is not enough certainly.
Even compassion and benevolence
alone is not enough.
We need to respect the power of
the caveman brain, the cavewoman
brain, the Stone Age brain.
And realize that this brain that
we have is extremely vulnerable
to tipping into the second noble
truth, in which there's an internal
sense of deficit and disturbance.
That's why it's so important, 10,000
times, 10 seconds at a time to
register the core sense of safety,
satisfaction and connection, the
sense of peace, contentment and love.
So that as when one does that over
time, one is able to deal with the
challenges of life from the green zone.
You know, in other words, on the
basis of an internal sense of peace,
contentment and love, rather than
fear, frustration and heartache.
And my own view and hope like yours, which
is one reason why I was very motivated to
do this program with you is that if we can
just get a critical mass of human brains,
you know, you said a billion or two
billion, I think that's the tipping point.
It doesn't take a majority, but it
does take a critical mass of brains
that spend most minutes of most
days in the green zone, drawing on
mindfulness as an extraordinarily
useful resource for doing that.
But I think mindfulness is a necessary
resource to help our planet, you know,
come to a softer landing than the one it's
headed toward by the end of the century.
Mindfulness is a necessary condition
for that, but it's not a sufficient one.
We need to also add moral commitments and
a process of really, really experiencing
core needs met to take fuel away
from those ancient fires or craving.
Yeah.
Beautiful.
Thank you so much, Rick.
Well, thank you.
That was really sweet.
It's great to talk with you, Melli.
Yeah, it's been lovely to connect.
And I highly highly recommend
that you checkout Rick's books.
They're really amazing.
And they're really well-written
and really, really easy to read.
So jam packed with really,
really useful stuff for practical
stuff for everyday people.
And Rick, before we go, do you
want to share a little bit with
us about your online program,
the foundations of well-being?
I know there's probably some people
are going to want to check that out.
Oh, thank you.
Basically, I wanted to put into one
online accessible program most of
what I know about transformation,
happiness, healing, effectiveness
in relationships and so forth.
So that's what I've done.
It's jam packed with transformational,
inspirational tools that are
grounded in science, in the science
of positive neuroplasticity.
You can go through at
it any pace you want.
You can just focus on one thing in it.
It's got amazing interviews with lots of
people like Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield.
I just did an interview earlier with
John Ratey earlier today about exercise
and going wild, getting out into nature.
And the fundamental idea is that, you
know, I was just thinking, you know,
for the price of one or two sessions
with your therapist, you could have
an incredibly rich collection of
tools to transform your life with.
And that's what that program is about.
And if people are in financial need,
we give scholarships to people.
We hope that you're telling the
truth that you're actually in need
and you can't afford less than a
dollar a day, you know, for a year.
But we really want to make this
available to people worldwide.
So that's what that program is.
Thanks for asking me about it.
Yeah, no worries.
So go on and check that out.
And is there anything else that you'd
like to share before we close, Rick?
I have a quote from the Buddha
that seems very relevant here
and I'd like to offer it.
It's brief.
He said, "Think not lightly of good
saying, it will not come to me.
Drop by drop is the water pot filled.
Likewise, the wise one, gathering it
little by little fills oneself with good."
Beautiful.
It's a lovely note to end on.
Thank you so much for watching.
And Rick, thank you so much.
Go well, my friend and
keep up the great work.
Thank you very much.
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