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

Wonderful.

(Short pause)

Thank you for your attention.

Dude, Where Is the Science?

Meditation has at least one important thing in common with science: its heavy emphasis on the spirit of inquiry. In meditation, there are two aspects to the spirit of inquiry. 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. Having a powerful attention is like having a powerful torchlight—it is fun to have, but its real purpose is to allow us to look inside the dark rooms of the mind and ourselves so that we can, well, search inside ourselves. And because it is ultimately about developing insight, the spirit of inquiry—at least of internal inquiry—has to be an essential component of one’s meditation practice.

The second aspect of this spirit of inquiry extends beyond the internal and into the external world. Because meditators are so used to inquiry, we have also become very comfortable with science and scientific inquiry into meditation itself. This is true even for classically trained practitioners within ancient meditative traditions, such as Buddhism. To many of my friends, the most stunning example of this comfort with science was when the Dalai Lama said, “If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”

With this in mind, let us take a quick glance at some of the peer-reviewed scientific literature surrounding meditation.

One of the most telling of all research studies on meditation was conducted by two pioneers in the field of contemplative neuroscience, Richard Davidson and Jon Kabat-Zinn.

The study was eye-opening for many reasons. It was the first major study conducted in a business setting, with employees of a biotechnology company as subjects. This makes it highly relevant for somebody like me who operates in the corporate world. The study showed that after just eight weeks of mindfulness training, the anxiety level of the subjects was measurably lower, which is nice but not surprising, since the name of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s training program is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.

More surprisingly, when the electrical activity of the subjects’ brains was measured, those in the meditation group showed significantly increased activity in the parts of their brains associated with positive emotions. The most fascinating finding had to do with their immune function. Near the end of the study, subjects were given flu shots, and those in the meditation group developed more antibodies to the influenza vaccine. In other words, after just eight weeks of mindfulness meditation, subjects were measurably happier (as measured in their brains) and showed a marked increase in developing immunity. Remember that this study was not conducted on bald guys wearing robes living in a monastery, but on ordinary people with real lives and real high-stress jobs in corporate America.

A later study conducted by Heleen Slagter, Antoine Lutz, Richard Davidson, et al., focused on attention.

Specifically, it explored meditation in relation to an interesting phenomenon known as “attentional-blink” deficit. There is a very simple way to explain attentional blink. Let’s say you are shown a series of characters (either numbers or letters of the alphabet) on a computer screen one at a time, in quick succession (with about fifty milliseconds of delay between letters, which is half of one-tenth of a second). Let’s say the entire series is made up of letters, except for two numbers. For example, let’s say the series is P, U, H, 3, W, N, 9, T, Y. There are two numbers within the series of letters. Your task is to identify the two numbers.

Attentional Blink Task

Here is the interesting part: if the two numbers are presented within half a second of each other, the second one is often not detected. This phenomenon is known as attentional blink. Somehow, after the first salient target is detected, mental attention “blinks,” and it takes a while before the brain can detect the next one.

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.

This study is a fascinating glimpse into the possibility of upgrading the operating efficiency of our brains with mindfulness meditation. So if your job depends on your ability to pay attention to information for a prolonged period of time, maybe this meditation thing can help you get a raise.

There are many more interesting scientific studies of meditation. We’ll just point out a few more salient ones.

Antoine Lutz showed that adept Buddhist meditators are able to generate high-amplitude gamma brain waves, which are often associated with high effectiveness in memory, learning, and perception.

Better still, these adepts exhibit higher gamma-band activity even at baseline, when they are not meditating, suggesting that meditation training can change your brain at rest. If you pump iron a lot, you will have bulging muscles even when you are not working out in the gym. Similarly, when you do a lot of meditation training, you will have strong mental “muscles” of calmness, clarity, and joy even when you are just hanging out.

One early study in this field by Jon Kabat-Zinn revealed that mindfulness can greatly accelerate the healing of a skin condition known as psoriasis.

The methodology was simple. All participants were given the usual treatments, but for half of them, tapes of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s meditation instructions were played to the participants during the treatment, and just playing the tapes significantly accelerated the healing process. While I find the results fascinating, what is compelling about this study is that psoriasis is something tangible and visible—a skin disease characterized by red spots that grow larger as they get worse. So when you talk about how meditation can help you heal in this context, it’s not just woo-woo talk by some New Age person; it is something so tangible, you can see it and actually measure it with a ruler.

Finally, there is a study that suggests meditation can thicken your neocortex. This study, conducted by Sara Lazar, took MRI snapshots of mindfulness meditators and non-meditators, and showed that meditators have a thicker cortex in brain regions associated with attention and sensory processing.

Of course, these measurements show correlation, not causation, which means it is entirely possible that people with a thicker cortex in those brain regions just happen to be meditators. However, the study also showed that the longer the meditation subjects have been practicing meditation, the thicker those parts of their brains are, which suggests that meditation practice is causing those observed changes in the brain.

The above was just a snapshot of some of the research in the last twenty-five years. It is remarkable that mindfulness helps improve everything from attention and brain function to immunity and skin disease. Mindfulness feels almost like MacGyver’s Swiss Army knife—it is useful in every situation.

Remember, if Meng can sit, so can you.

Chapter Three (#ulink_61209846-bc63-571d-8851-058285e80115)

Mindfulness Without Butt on Cushion (#ulink_61209846-bc63-571d-8851-058285e80115)

Extending the Benefits of Mindfulness beyond Sitting

Mindfulness, I declare, is useful everywhere.

—Buddha

Mindfulness may be one of the most important things you can ever learn in your life. But don’t take it from me. Here’s what William James, the father of modern psychology, had to say:

And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.

(emphasis by original author)

There you have it. Mindfulness is the skill that gives you the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again, and as William James said, it is “the education par excellence,” the best thing you can learn. I hope that makes you feel better about spending money on this book.

In the previous chapter, we learned that mindfulness meditation is a key tool in developing emotional intelligence. In this chapter we will learn ways to extend mindfulness into every aspect of our daily lives. The mind of calmness and clarity you experience while sitting in mindfulness meditation is very nice, but it only becomes life changing when you can bring up that mind on demand, in day-to-day life. This chapter shows you how.

In General, Generalize Mindfulness

One of the most important things a mindfulness meditator needs to do is extend the benefits of mindfulness beyond sitting into every part of life. During sitting meditation, you may experience some degree of calmness, clarity, and happiness, and the challenge is to generalize that mind into life situations outside formal sitting meditation.

The good news is the benefits of mindfulness training are already naturally generalizable or, put another way, easily incorporated into all areas of our lives. For example, your attention naturally gravitates toward things that are either very pleasant or very unpleasant, so if you can train yourself to keep your attention on something as neutral as your breath, then you can keep your attention on anything else. Your breath is like New York City for your attention—if your attention can make it here, it can make it anywhere. Hence, if you become very good at settling attention on breathing, you may find yourself able to pay much better attention in class or at meetings. Renowned meditation teacher Shaila Catherine told me that after she learned to meditate intensely during college, she never received any grade below an A.

That is the good news. The better news is there are things you can do to make your mindfulness training even more applicable to other areas of life.

There are two areas in which you can naturally and immediately start to integrate mindfulness. The first is to extend from mindfulness at rest to mindfulness during activity. The second is to extend from self-directed mindfulness to other-directed mindfulness. If you like, you can think of it as extending, or generalizing, mindfulness along two dimensions: one from rest to activity and the other from self to others. In the following few sections, I will suggest exercises for each.

Mindfulness in Activity

The best place to practice mindfulness is in daily life. Once you are able to bring mindfulness into every moment of daily life, your quality of life may change dramatically. Thich Nhat Hanh illustrates this beautifully with his description of the simple experience of walking:

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

When in mindfulness, even the simple experience of walking on earth can be a beautiful miracle.

In my own experience, mindfulness can increase my happiness without changing anything else. We take for granted many of the neutral things in life, such as not being in pain, having three meals a day, and being able to walk from point A to point B. In mindfulness, these become causes of joy because we no longer take them for granted. In addition, pleasant experiences become even more pleasant because our attention is there to fully experience them. For example, a delicious meal when consumed in mindfulness becomes more enjoyable simply because you put your full attention into enjoying the meal. When living in mindfulness, neutral experiences tend to become pleasant, and pleasant experiences become more pleasant.

Once, when I was quite young, my father took the family to an expensive Chinese restaurant and ordered some of the signature dishes. During the meal, I caught myself giving the experience my full attention, partly because the meal was indeed very tasty, partly because it was so expensive, and partly because I considered it a fairly rare experience. It wasn’t every day that we splurged on food. Because of all that, I found myself deep in mindfulness during the meal. And then it occurred to me, why did I have to be this mindful only during expensive meals? What if I pretended that every meal was rare and expensive, and gave it as much attention as I could? I call it the Expensive Food Meditation. I have been practicing it at most meals ever since, which is kind of ironic since I eat most of my meals at Google and food at Google is free.

If you have no other practice but sitting, the mindfulness will eventually grow into daily life and give you a no-cost, zero-down-payment happiness boost. However, you can accelerate this generalization process by purposefully bringing mindfulness to activity. 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 just like sitting meditation, except the object of meditation is the task at hand rather than the breath. That is all.

For those who prefer a more formal practice, the best such practice I know of is walking meditation. The nice thing about formal walking meditation is that it has the dignity, focus, and rigor of sitting meditation, but it is done in motion and necessarily with eyes opened (otherwise, it will become bumping-into-people-and-things meditation), so it is highly conducive to bringing the mental calmness of sitting meditation into activity. In fact, this is such a useful practice that in many formal meditation trainings, students are asked to alternate between sitting and walking meditation.

Walking meditation is really as simple as it sounds. When walking, bring full moment-to-moment attention to every movement and sensation in the body, and every time attention wanders away, just gently bring it back.

WALKING MEDITATION