Search Inside Yourself: Increase Productivity, Creativity and Happiness [ePub edition]

Chapter Two (#ulink_961de04e-7000-5809-b496-fbf01d024900)

Breathing as if Your Life Depends on It (#ulink_961de04e-7000-5809-b496-fbf01d024900)

The Theory and Practice of Mindfulness Meditation

By non-doing, all doing becomes possible.

—Lao Zi

There is nothing mysterious about meditation. It’s really just mental training.

The scientific definition of meditation, as suggested by Julie Brefczynski-Lewis, is “a family of mental training practices that are designed to familiarize the practitioner with specific types of mental processes.”

Brain Boot Camp

Traditional definitions of meditation are very close to the modern scientific one above. The Tibetan word for meditation is Gom, which means “to familiarize or to habituate.” In Pali, the 2,600-year-old language of the earliest Buddhist texts, the word for meditation is Bhavana, which means “to cultivate,” as in planting crops. Even in ancient societies with long meditation traditions, meditation was not seen as something magical or mysterious—it was just mental training.

As the scientific definition of meditation above correctly suggests, there are many types of meditation designed to train different faculties of the mind. The specific type of meditation we are interested in for the purpose of developing emotional intelligence is mindfulness meditation, which was briefly introduced in the preceding chapter.

If meditation is about mental training, then what mental faculties does mindfulness train? Mindfulness trains two important faculties, attention and meta-attention. Attention is something we all understand. William James has a very nice definition for it: “taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form.”

Meta-attention is attention of attention, the ability to pay attention to attention itself. Huh? Simply put, meta-attention is the ability to know that your attention has wandered away. Let’s say you are paying attention to an object, and eventually your attention wanders away to something else. After a while, there is something in your mind that “clicks” to let you know, hey, your attention has wandered. That faculty is meta-attention.

Meta-attention is also the secret to concentration. The analogy is riding a bicycle. The way you keep a bicycle balanced is with a lot of micro-recoveries. When the bike tilts a little to the left, you recover by adjusting it slightly to the right, and when it tilts a little to the right, you adjust it slightly to the left. By performing micro-recoveries quickly and often, you create the effect of continuous upright balance. It is the same with attention. When your meta-attention becomes strong, you will be able to recover a wandering attention quickly and often, and if you recover attention quickly and often enough, you create the effect of continuous attention, which is concentration.

Relaxed and Alert at the Same Time

The big secret of meditation, at least at the beginning stage, is it gets you to a state where your mind is relaxed and alert at the same time.

When your attention and meta-attention both become strong, something interesting happens. Your mind becomes increasingly focused and stable, but in a way that is relaxing. It is like balancing a bicycle on easy terrain. With enough practice, it becomes almost effortless and you get the experience of moving forward and being relaxed at the same time. You get where you need to be, and you actually enjoy the experience of getting there because it is relaxing.

With enough practice, you may even become able to bring your mind to that state on demand and stay in it for a prolonged period of time. When the mind becomes highly relaxed and alert at the same time, three wonderful qualities of mind naturally emerge: calmness, clarity, and happiness.

Here is the analogy. Imagine you have a pot of water full of sediments, and imagine that pot is constantly shaken and agitated. The water appears cloudy. Imagine that you stop agitating the pot and just let it rest on the floor. The water will become calm and, after a while, all the sediments will settle and the water will appear clear. This is the classical analogy of the mind in the alert and relaxed state. In this state, we temporarily stop agitating the mind the same way we stop agitating the pot. Eventually, our mind becomes calm and clear, the same way the water appears calm and clear.

Happiness Is the Default State of Mind

There is an extremely important quality of mind in the calm and clear state that is not captured by the above analogy. That quality is happiness. When the mind is calm and clear at the same time, happiness spontaneously arises. The mind becomes spontaneously and naturally joyful!

But why? Even after I found myself able to access that mind on demand, it did not make a lot of sense to me. Why should a calm and clear mind automatically be happy? I put that question to my friend Alan Wallace, one of the Western world’s top experts in the practice of relaxed concentration (a practice known as shamatha).

Alan said the reason is very simple: happiness is the default state of mind. So when the mind becomes calm and clear, it returns to its default, and that default is happiness. That is it. There is no magic; we are simply returning the mind to its natural state.

Alan, in his deep wisdom, said that in his usual calm, joyful, and understated manner. But to me, that statement represents a simple yet deeply profound, life-changing insight. It implies that happiness is not something that you pursue; it is something you allow. Happiness is just being. That insight changed my life.

To me, the biggest joke is that after all that has been done in the history of the world in the pursuit of happiness, it turns out that sustainable happiness is achievable simply by bringing attention to one’s breath. Life is funny. At least my life is.

Meditation Is like Exercise

The traditional analogy of the pot of water filled with sediments is at least 2,600 years old. There is another analogy for meditation, which modern people may understand better, and that is the analogy of physical exercise. Meditation is exercise for the mind.

When you go to the gym, you are training your body so that it can gain more physical abilities. If you lift weights, you will eventually become stronger. If you regularly jog, your times will be faster and you will be able to run farther. In the same way, meditation is like training your mind so that it can gain more mental abilities. For example, if you do a lot of meditation exercises, your mind becomes calmer and more perceptive, you can focus your attention more strongly and for longer, and so on.

I joke that meditation is like sweating at the gym, minus the sweating, and the gym.

One important similarity between exercise and meditation is that, in both cases, growth comes from overcoming resistance. For example, when you are weight training, every time you flex your biceps in resistance to the weight of dumbbells, your bicep muscles grow a little bit stronger. The same process happens during meditation. Every time your attention wanders away from your breath and you bring it back, it is like flexing your biceps—your “muscle” of attention grows a bit stronger.

The implication of this insight is that there is no such thing as a bad meditation. For many of us, when we meditate, we find our attention wanders away from our breath a lot, and we keep having to bring it back, and then we think we’re doing it all wrong. In fact, this is a good exercise because every time we bring a wandering attention back, we are giving our muscles of attention an opportunity for growth.

A second similarity between exercise and meditation is they can both significantly change the quality of your life. If you never exercise and you put yourself on a regular exercise regime, a few weeks or months later, you may find many significant changes in yourself. You will have more energy, you can get more stuff done, you get sick less often, you look better in the mirror, and you just feel great about yourself. The same is true for meditation. After a few weeks or months of starting a regular meditation regime, you have more energy; your mind becomes calmer, clearer, and more joyful; you get sick less; you smile more; your social life improves (because you smile more); and you feel great about yourself.

Practice of Mindfulness Meditation

The process of mindfulness meditation is quite simple, as illustrated in the following diagram.

The process starts with an intention. Start by creating an intention, a reason for wanting to abide in mindfulness. Perhaps it is to reduce stress. Perhaps it is to increase your own well-being. Maybe you want to cultivate your emotional intelligence for fun and profit. Or maybe you just want to create the conditions for world peace, or something.

In fact, if you are really lazy, or really busy, or really both, you can declare your meditation done right here. The act of creating good intentions is itself a form of meditation. Every time you create an intention, you are subtly forming or reinforcing a mental habit. If you create that same intention a lot, it eventually becomes a habit that will keep arising in your mind in varied situations to guide your behavior. For example, if many times a day you create the intention of caring for your own well-being, then after a while, in every situation you are in or with every decision you make, you may find yourself (perhaps unconsciously) biasing everything you do toward actions or decisions that increase well-being, and because of that, your well-being may actually improve.

This is even more powerful when your intention is toward the well-being of others. Just by forming that intention a lot, and not doing anything else, you may find yourself gradually (and, again, sometimes unconsciously) becoming kinder and nicer to other people. Pretty soon, many more people may like you and want to hang out with you, and you may not even know why—you may just think they are attracted to your good looks.

After creating the intention, the next thing to do is to follow your breath. Just bring a gentle attention to the process of breathing. That is all.

The classical analogy of this process is a guard standing at the city gates watching people go in and out of the city. He does not do anything; he only watches people go in and out with quiet vigilance. In the same way, you can think of your mind as a guard vigilantly watching your breath go in and out. You may pretend to have a big stick if it makes you feel cool. A really beautiful alternative analogy, suggested by my friend and fellow Search Inside Yourself teacher Yvonne Ginsberg, is a butterfly resting on the petal of a flower while the gentle breeze lifts and lowers it. Your attention is the butterfly and the petal is your breath.

At this point, your attention may gather. You may find yourself in a state where your mind is calm and concentrated. You may even be in the flow, just being with your breath. With enough practice, this state can last a long time, but for most people, this may go on for a few seconds. And then we fall into distraction.

In that state of distraction, we may start ruminating, worrying, or fantasizing. Sometimes, I even fantasize about not worrying. After a while, we realize our attention has wandered away. The default reaction of most people at this point is self-criticism. We start telling ourselves stories about how horrible we are as meditators and, by extension, not particularly good people either. Happily, there is a skillful way to deal with this.

The first thing to do is to simply regain attentional focus by bringing attention back to the process of breathing. The second thing to do is to remember an important insight we discussed earlier in this chapter—that this process of bringing a wandering attention back is like flexing your biceps during your gym workout. This is not failure; it is the process of growth and developing powerful mental “muscles.”

The third thing to do is to become aware of your attitude toward yourself. See how you treat yourself and how often you engage in nasty gossip about yourself. If possible, shift the attitude toward self-directed kindness and curiosity. This shift is, by itself, another meditation. Once again, it is about forming mental habits.

Every time we create an attitude of self-directed kindness, we deepen that habit a little bit more, and if we do it a lot, we may overcome a lot of our self-hatred and even become our own best friend.

One beautiful way of doing this is to create what the Zen folks call the “grandmother mind”: adopting the mind of a loving grandmother. To a loving grandmother, you are beautiful and perfect in every way. No matter how much mischief you cause, you are perfect and Grandma loves you just as you are. It does not mean Grandma is blind to your faults, nor does it mean she allows you to hurt yourself. Sometimes, she even intervenes sternly to stop you from getting yourself into big trouble. But no matter what, you are perfect to her and she loves you.

The practice is to see yourself in the eyes of a loving grandmother.

And finally, return to following your breath and, whenever it is helpful, remind yourself of your intention. Welcome back.

Posture and Stuff

You can really meditate in any posture you want. Traditional Buddhism, for example, defines four main meditation postures: sitting, standing, walking, and lying down, which seems to cover just about everything. Those Buddhists are greedy.

When choosing a meditation posture for yourself, there is only one thing to remember. Just one. The best meditation posture is one that helps you remain alert and relaxed at the same time for a long period of time. That means, for example, you probably do not want a posture where you slouch, since that is not conducive to alertness, and you also do not want a posture that requires you to stiffen your back, since that is not conducive to relaxation.

Happily for us, a sitting posture optimized for both alertness and relaxation has already been developed over the thousands of years that people have been meditating. This traditional posture is sometimes called the seven-point meditation posture. In brief, the seven are: