Meditation and mindfulness practice

“Each of us needs periods in which our minds can focus inwardly. Solitude is an essential experience for the mind to organize its own processes and create an internal state of resonance. In such a state, the self is able to alter its constraints by directly reducing the input from interactions with others. (p. 235)” Dan J. Siegel

“Mindfulness is a form of mental activity that trains the mind to become aware of awareness itself and to pay attention to one’s own intention.” Dan J. Siegel,

“In mindfulness, one is not only restful and happy, but alert and awake. Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.” Thich Nhat Hanh

“We live in forgetfulness.” Thich Nhat Hanh

Today’s longish post centers on meditation and mindfulness practices. In some sense it is a continuation of the two previous posts on compassion because compassion is an integral part of many meditation practices. It also includes a couple of new ink drawings, as well as, an older painting. I need to say that I am not a meditation teacher or expert on these topics and that this post is the outcome of my engaging with these practices on a daily basis over the last nine years, and whatever knowledge and understanding I have managed to acquire along the way. Also, I will be referring to only some of the people, whose work has in one way or another clarified questions for me or / and supported this journey. Finally, I have included research findings and people from different fields and with different backgrounds and perspectives. One reason for this is that I think meditation and mindfulness meditation, in particular, can be beneficial for and practiced by anyone irrespectively of their religion or lack of it, political views or lifestyle, as long as they feel attracted to these technologies and are open to learning and change. Sam Harris, PhD [philosopher, neuroscientist and author] claims that from a secular point of view one of the great strengths of mindfulness meditation is that it doesn’t require us to adopt any cultural affectations or unjustified beliefs and simply demands that we pay close attention to the flow of experience in each moment.

My own first encounter with mindfulness practices and meditation happened through reading about it in books while studying psychology. I experimented with it, but it wasn’t a sustained practice at the time. Then during 2009 and 2010 while going to a yoga class it became more salient for me and I started sitting more regularly at home. However, talking about it invited some resistance in my environment. And then one evening someone I used to go to yoga class with brought me a pamphlet, supposedly issued from local religious authorities, against the practice of meditation. I more or less laughed it off and did not take it seriously, over estimating the levels of contextual freedom and democracy. I had more or less experienced a similar pushback over my decision to study psychology, and so I just swept it aside. Eventually, I dropped the yoga class and only returned to meditation in 2014 while doing online courses on trauma, where I heard about the Wheel of Awareness during one of the modules by Dr Dan Siegel [bio information: https://drdansiegel.com/biography/]. I engaged with the practice twice a day for several years. I won’t write about the practice today because I have written about it in older posts. Fortunately, I have sustained a daily mediation practice since and I can now say that meditation has been a significant learning experience and has become something as natural as eating, walking and showering. I have experienced it as a slow homecoming of sorts.

To begin with, meditation is a tool, a kind of skills training to cultivate or strengthen certain capacities and increase our awareness of our human nature and reality more broadly. It can help us gain clarity, deeper knowing and more control over our experience and choices. It can increase our self awareness, soften our sense of ego, and facilitate our sense of connectedness and capacity for compassion. It allows us to expand our view of the bigger picture both in our own micro contexts and at a broad societal level. It can foster resilience and liberate creativity. It can heal. However, even though it is a powerful tool, it’s not a panacea and might not be for everyone or rather its beneficial qualities depend on where people are in their lives, what is coming up for them in the stillness and whether they have relevant support or guidance. When we get quiet and turn inwards anything and everything can bubble up from the real “train crashes” in our lives to the ones we’ve watched at the movies. So, sometimes some level of healing or therapy might need to come first before one takes on meditation.

There is a variety of meditations. There are practices that focus on expanding our awareness, calming our mind and experiencing more inner peace, increasing our emotional balance and resilience, opening our heart, and so on. Some examples are breath awareness meditation, loving kindness meditation, visualization meditation, guided meditations, compassion for others and self-compassion meditations, and so on.  In his book Neurodharma, Dr Rick Hanson [bio information: https://www.rickhanson.net/get-started/] discusses three types of meditation— focused attention and paying attention to attention [an aspect of meta-cognition], open awareness, and abiding as awareness, which form a natural sequence. He also distinguishes several qualities we can develop through meditation like steadiness, through focusing on a word or object for instance, lovingness through focusing on an emotion or resting in gratitude and love, fullness through focusing on enoughness and gratitude, wholeness through focusing throughout the body as we breathe, nowness through focusing on the present moment, allness through focusing on interbeing with everything around us.  He claims that through repeated experiences we weave these qualities into our own nervous system.

Meditation is a practice or technology, through which one can develop different qualities, including mindfulness. Mindfulness can be practiced formally during meditation and informally, at any time and place. In mindfulness meditation, we pay attention to our thoughts, sensations, emotions and whatever else comes up.  We don’t judge them or become involved with them, but simply observe them. In her most recent book Marsha Linehan, PhD, writes: “Mindfulness practice is the repeated effort of bringing the mind back to awareness of the present moment; it includes the repeated effort of letting go of judgments and letting go of attachment to current thoughts, emotions, sensations, activities, events, or life situations.”  Dr Jon Kabat Zinn [bio information:  https://www.mindfulnesscds.com/pages/about-the-author], supports that mindfulness is “a whole repertoire of formal meditative practices aimed at cultivating moment-to-moment nonjudgmental awareness. And nonjudgmental, by the way, does not mean that you won’t have any likes or dislikes or that you’ll be completely neutral about everything. Nonjudgmental really means that you’ll become aware of how judgmental you are and then not judge that and see if you can let go, for a few moments at least, the restraining order that filters everything through our likes and dislikes or wants or aversion. So that’s already quite an exercise, quite an undertaking to cultivate that kind of attention and that kind of awareness and learn how to reside inside it.” Zinn’s work has contributed to a growing movement of mindfulness into mainstream institutions in our society such as medicine, health care and hospitals, schools, higher education, corporations, prisons, the legal profession, and professional sports. In 1979 he introduced his Mindfulness-Based-Stress-Reduction Programme and opened the Stress Reduction Clinic.

Mindfulness more broadly is the act of paying attention and noticing and being fully present in whatever we’re thinking, feeling or doing with all of our senses. In that sense we can practice mindfulness throughout our day. We mostly go about our lives with our minds wandering from the actual activity that we are engaging with to other thoughts, desires, fears or wishes, stories, the past or the future, our next meal, and so on. A study by Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University found that people spend about 47% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they are doing. Sam Harris, writes: “As every meditator soon discovers, distraction is the normal condition of our minds” and that the enemy of ….. mindfulness or of any meditative practice “is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts. The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking. In fact, thoughts of all kinds can be perfectly good objects of mindfulness.”

In the book mentioned above Rick Hanson writes that concentration, which is one of the three pillars of practice [virtue, wisdom and concentration], stabilizes attention and brings it to a laser-like focus that fosters liberating insight. However this is not necessarily easy because there is a natural variation in human temperament. He writes: “At one end of this range, there are focused and cautious “turtles,” and at the other end are distractible and spirited “jackrabbits,” with lots of tweeners in the middle. As our human and hominid ancestors lived in small hunter-gatherer bands for several million years, these groups needed a full range of temperaments to deal with changing conditions and compete with other bands for food and shelter….. Temperaments are normal and not a disorder— but it can be tough to be a jackrabbitty kid getting schooled in a curriculum designed for turtles, or to be a jackrabbitty meditator trying to use methods developed by turtles in monastic turtle pens to develop turtleness.” In other words one size does not fit all.

In an interview I read a while ago, Sharon Salzberg, meditation teacher and writer, talked about how mindfulness is a kind of skills training, a tool, that helps us cultivate a greater ability to be centered in the midst of thoughts, feelings, impressions, stress and events. The point is not to ignore everything or deny the presence of uncomfortable experience, but to acquire some space from it. Space is actually one of the things we acquire over time through meditation practices, more freedom and space to exist within our self, more space from events, a bigger vista of reality within and without. Salzberg also refers to rest as part of the sense of centering. With meditation we don’t try to change our experience or ban unpleasant thoughts or feelings. We sit with them without judgment and without clinging to them. We allow experience to pass through awareness and this creates a sense of rest, amidst all of our experience, because being mindful is cultivating an ability to be with everything that arises, pleasant, neutral and painful.

In her book Start Where You Are Pema Chödrön, Buddhist nun, meditation teacher and author, writes: “Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment”, which means “we could relate compassionately with that which we prefer to push away, and we could learn to give away and share that which we hold most dear….. We begin to let opposites coexist, not trying to get rid of anything, but just training and opening our eyes, ears, nostrils, taste buds, hearts, and minds wider and wider, nurturing the habit of opening to whatever is occurring, including our shutting down.” In order to illustrate this point Chodron refers to old stories and / or metaphors that include a lesson or teaching, and three of them have found their way in the third drawing. One is of an empty boat that crashes into a boat owned by a man, who is enjoying himself on a river at dusk. The second metaphor is about a peacock and the third has to do with Milarepa, who on returning to his cave found it filled with “demons”. Even though he did have the sense that they were just a projection of his own mind, all the unwanted parts of himself, the repressed material and fears, initially he tried to resist them and fight them off, but only after he accepted that they were there and decided to embrace the experience did they disappear.

So, as long as we are alive painful feelings and thoughts, physical sensations and discomfort will arise, but over time we build this capacity to not push experiences down or distract our selves or get too overwhelmed, but be with them. And when we do feel overwhelmed or scared or in deep pain we have the choice to stay with and observe the experience, which might lead to deeper insight or release of tension or pain. We also have the choice to get up and take care of our self and return to the practice later. This is especially relevant for people who are dealing with post traumatic symptoms or have a lot of unexamined and unprocessed trauma. But irrespectively, of whether we carry a lot of unprocessed trauma or not, simply sitting still in meditation will initially bring up a lot we would all probably prefer not to look at, as well as, early messages and social conditioning and even pre verbal memories. It requires determination and courage to sit through all that arises. Stephen Batchelor writes: “The unflinching light of mindful awareness reveals the extent to which we are tossed along in the stream of past conditioning and habit. The moment we decide to stop and look at what is going on (like a swimmer suddenly changing course to swim upstream instead of downstream), we find ourselves battered by powerful currents we had never even suspected – precisely because until that moment we were largely living at their command.”

Our traumas and wounds are embedded in physical memory and to uncover this material takes effort and courage. Mindfulness is not necessarily adequate on its own to deal with post traumatic symptoms or other conditions. Furthermore, mindfulness meditation may exacerbate symptoms or cause re-traumatization.  One helpful book to read on the relationship between trauma and mindfulness meditation is David Treleaven’s book: Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing, in which he discusses how mindfulness meditation when practiced without an awareness of trauma can exacerbate symptoms of traumatic stress. In the book he provides a review of the histories of mindfulness and trauma and the way neuroscience is shaping our understanding of both, and he also illustrates the ways mindfulness can both help and hinder trauma  recovery. He then goes on to present five principles for trauma-sensitive mindfulness. He covers the role of attention, arousal, relationship, dissociation, and social context within trauma-informed practice.

Rick Hanson also writes that when we open to the immediacy of this moment of experience, sometimes painful thoughts and feelings can arise, and that as our meditative practice deepens and our edges soften we might initially feel disoriented. He writes: “The more intense and far-reaching the territory you’re exploring, the more important it is to be grounded and resourced internally. It’s fine to slow down, step back, and focus on whatever feels stable, comforting, and nurturing….. Mindfulness, meditation, and the other practices are not appropriate for everyone, not a treatment for any disorder, and not a substitute for professional care. There is a process here, and you can take your time with it. Let it work on you in natural ways … let it work with you, and lift you and carry you along. Awakening proceeds with its own rhythms: sometimes slow growth, sometimes a plateau, sometimes sliding downhill, sometimes a breakthrough. And all the while there is the deep true nature of each one of us, whether it is gradually uncovered or suddenly revealed: aware, wise, loving, and pure. This is your true home, and you can trust it.”

So, slowly and painstakingly we cultivate or increase our capacity to feel what we feel without flinching or judging too much, and also, to know when to let go of the practice and take care of our self or simply take a break. Salzberg calls mindfulness a place in the middle, where on the one hand, we cultivate our capacity to be present and to not fight against or push our emotions down, but on the other hand, we don’t want to be overcome by them. Over time practising mindfulness and / or other mediations practices allows us a more balanced relationship to our emotions, more time to pause before reacting. We also repress and shove down less material, which protects us from explosive reactions and acting out. So, that space in the middle, is the place where we can recognize what’s going on for us inside, but with a more spacious sense, and in that space there is a little more choice, a little more agency and capacity for boundary setting.

Research Findings

At this point I’d like to refer to some of the many research findings pointing to the benefits of meditation and mindfulness meditation. Rick Hanson explains that meditation practice could change areas of our brain involved with attention, body awareness, emotional regulation and sense of self, and that sustained long-term practice can alter the brain markedly, and these changes of brain foster changes of mind, bringing greater resilience and well-being. In his book, One Blade of Grass, Henry Shukman, English writer. poet and meditation teacher, also refers to the potential benefits of meditation. He writes “Neuroscientific research keeps yielding new evidence for its positive effects on brain function, suggesting that it can indeed lead us out of stress, anxiety, and self-absorption, toward peace, creativity, and compassion, as its adherents have claimed for millennia….. In the early twenty-first century. MRI and EEG scans, blood tests, ECGs and EKGs, and decades of fast-growing neurological research have put it beyond question: pursued diligently, meditation can make us calmer, more attentive, happier, and kinder. Simply to sit still for forty minutes each day— it helps. And there’s science to prove it.”

Specifically, in relation to the brain-changing effects of mindfulness and meditation Rick Hanson writes that only after three days of training, prefrontal regions exert more top-down control over the posterior cingulate cortex, which means less habitual mind wandering and less preoccupation with oneself.  People in trainings that span a couple of months, such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), develop greater top-down control over the amygdale, which reacts like an alarm bell to anything that’s painful or threatening and triggers the neural/ hormonal stress response. They also grow more tissue in their hippocampus that helps us learn from our experiences. Activity in the hippocampus can calm down the amygdala, and reduce the secretion of the stress hormone cortisol.

Mindfulness meditators with years of daily practice, have thicker layers of neural tissue in their prefrontal cortex, which supports their executive functions, such as planning and self-control. They also have more tissue in their insula, which is involved with self-awareness and empathy for the feelings of others. Their anterior (frontal) cingulate cortex, which helps us pay attention and stay on track with our goals is also strengthened. And their corpus callosum, which connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain also adds tissue, suggesting a greater integration of words and images, logic and intuition.

And then there are meditators with maybe more than twenty thousand hours. They demonstrate a remarkable calm before receiving a pain they know is coming, and unusually rapid recovery afterward. They also possess extraordinarily high levels of gamma-range brain-wave activity associated with enhanced learning. Overall, there’s a gradual shift from deliberate self-regulation toward an increasingly natural sense of presence and ease during both meditation and daily life. Also, compassion-focused meditation stimulates specific parts of the brain involved with the sense of connection, positive emotion and reward, The neurochemical oxytocin, is released by the hypothalamus when we’re feeling loving or close to others, which can calm down our amygdala, and flows of oxytocin can reduce the sense of anxiety, which enables a greater stability of attention. Long-term practitioners of loving-kindness meditation develop similar neurological reactions to seeing the faces of strangers and their own faces and they build neural tissue in key parts of the hippocampus that support feelings of empathy toward others.

In terms of the benefits of meditation or mindfulness practices Henry Shukman also notes that “unprecedented numbers are turning to the practice of meditation, which can not only steer us toward kinder, wiser ways of living, but also happens to be more or less as free as the air we breathe.” He writes that Western science is working on how to extract the most useful parts of the contemplative traditions and their transformative insights into what it means to be human and adapt them to modern needs. in relation to the insights from these old contemplative traditions in his book Waking Up Sam Harris, writes that “Leaving aside the metaphysics, mythology, and sectarian dogma, what contemplatives throughout history have discovered is that there is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves; there is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that pops into consciousness. And glimpsing this alternative dispels the conventional illusion of the self…… Meditation is a technique for waking up. The goal is to come out of the trance of discursive thinking and to stop reflexively grasping at the pleasant and recoiling from the unpleasant, so that we can enjoy a mind undisturbed by worry, merely open like the sky, and effortlessly aware of the flow of experience in the present.”

He notes that there is now a large literature on the psychological benefits of meditation and claims that even though the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they confirm some well-established truths about the human mind. Like the fact that our conventional sense of self is a kind of illusion, that emotions, such as, compassion and patience, are teachable skills, and that the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.  He writes: “It is quite possible to lose one’s sense of being a separate self and to experience a kind of boundless, open awareness— to feel, in other words, at one with the cosmos. This says a lot about the possibilities of human consciousness, but it says nothing about the universe at large.” He adds that the phenomenon of self-transcending love, is so well attested and so readily achieved by those who devote themselves to specific practices, that there is very little controversy that it exists. He refers to the French monk, Matthieu Ricard, who describes such happiness as “a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind….” Harris writes recognizing through meditation that we already have such a mind can help us to cease doing the things that produce needless confusion and suffering for ourself and others, and to have an increasingly healthy mind— that is, to be moving one’s mind in the right direction

I will end this post with my musings on the relationship between mindfulness  meditation and politics. There isn’t much relevant literature and research on the topic, but I think we can speculate that the cultivation of mindfulness across the planet can bring about some positive shifts for humanity in many areas. A recent essay paper I was skimming through suggested what I would have expected, which is that the cultivation of mindfulness leads to significant gains in perspective-taking and pro-social behaviour, heightens environmental awareness and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors intensify. As mindfulness increases age and “race” related prejudice and out-group biases are reduced. Perhaps mindfulness, personal healing and self awareness alone may not bring about dramatic global political changes, but these experiences could incline more and more people to re-think inequality, poverty, oppression, violence and environmental issues, and to speak up, vote differently and act differently. Focusing on personal change and healing does not have to exclude the critical questioning of current socioeconomic and cultural conditions. Additionally, mindfulness meditation can be conducive to shedding unhelpful conditioning and biases, to awakening us to truths about our human nature and reality, and to an increased connection with our self and inherent sense of worth. One could suggest that the less distracted and unaware and the more present and awake the masses are the higher the possibilities for a safer and kinder world, the more personal agency and understanding that people have of our interdependence, the higher the likelihood of personal well-being, pro-social behaviours and wiser choices and political actions.