This book began with a bottle of orange juice. A big bottle. Half a gallon of very nice orange juice. Organic, not from concentrate, no pulp.
The intended recipient of said juice was my son, but he no longer wanted it, preferring, I believe, hot chocolate instead.
This was about the fifth time he had changed his mind in the space of a minute or so.
So I did what every parent occasionally dreams of doing: I lifted the bottle—still sealed—high above my head, with both hands, and I smashed it into the kitchen floor with all my might.
The thing exploded.
My son was three years old at the time and so—by all signs and for all intents and purposes—was I.
It took quite some time to clean up the mess—the oak floor, the walls, the ceiling, the stove, the kitchen furniture were all soaked. From time to time we still find two cookbooks joined together by the sticky force of my stupidity.
As one of my favorite writers would say: “So it goes.”
As soon as the bottle left my hands, in the suspended moment of my own disbelief that I just did that, I of course grasped how very wrong this was, how utterly senseless, how needless, how selfish, how heedless.
As episodes of domestic violence go, this one was pretty tame. But still.
Standing there in the aftermath, with my wife and son gaping at dumbfounded me with his beard and glasses dripping with juice, something clicked.
I had just reacted to something that wasn’t true. I had had a flicker of a thought in my head, and I had followed it through. I had given a mere flicker of anger a set of black wings, as if I had no say in the matter, as if I had no freedom.
And, of course, in such moments of frustration, you have no freedom.
I realized two things.
One: I did want freedom. I didn’t want this—I was better than that, wasn’t I?
And two: I vaguely remembered actually being better that that.
So I promised myself to get back to that time. I promised myself to go back to meditation.
I was a Catholic monk for a while, between the ages of 17 and 19—exactly the age when a fruitless yet profound endeavor like that cuts the deepest. The vow of poverty notwithstanding, we lived in a rather magnificent 19th-century house (with a turret, no less) in one of the more quiet, woodsy, opulent outskirts of Brussels.
Part of our training was a 30-day retreat. The retreat was silent, and it involved all the usual accouterments of Catholic monastic life—morning chant, Mass, evening chant—plus four to five hours of meditation. And I loved every second of it. It felt like home. I loved the silence; I loved how it turned time sticky and sweet; I loved my lonely afternoon walks in the nearby forest that was just starting to awaken from its winter slumber. Most of all, I loved what the silence did to my mind—I loved that expansive, lazy concentration, that fluid, softly humming openness, that presence.
Then two things happened. One, I fell in love and, two, I started having serious doubts about this whole idea of an interventionist god. Neither of these two developments was very compatible with the monastic lifestyle, and so off I went, on to a degree in psychology.
In the meantime, I somehow forgot to meditate—this whole love thing, I suppose, and then a dissertation to work on, and in general a busy life, very different from the helpful monotony of the cloister.
I have no precise memory of how I stumbled into the contemplative mood again (a long trip to China was partially to blame); this time it took the form of Zen, which I first glossed from books and then, a little later (we’re in the mid-1990s now) practiced with a small group at the college where I landed my first job, in Syracuse, New York. Take it from me: Knowing how to sit still for long stretches of time is a great skill to possess in a city that is covered in snow for about eight months of the year.
Zen fitted me well; it felt like home all over again. But then life collapsed around me—my then-wife couldn’t bear the snow and her new life in the United States and went back to Belgium, and all other sorts of slow minor social calamities conspired to drop me down into depression. Meditation intensified my distress rather than still it. So I mostly quit the cushion and returned to it only sporadically.
Life is different now.
Since the orange juice incident, I have been meditating every single day (give or take a few). I took care to nurture my practice: I restarted slowly, building up my meditation sessions from 6 minutes a day to my current regimen of 30 to 40 minutes a day during the week and a 90-minute sit on Sundays. I have learned that it is helpful to have friends on this path.
Meditation has simply become a part of my life. It’s something I do, like walking the dog, exercising, cooking dinner, or giving our son his evening bath—a habit that roots me, an organic and natural part of the day, nothing special.
It also has, as I was hoping for, changed me for the better. Not spectacularly so: I am far from perfect—never was, chances are I will never be. My budding ability to be more present with whatever is presenting itself makes me just a little more patient, I find, a little more willing to listen, a bit more relaxed, and a little more prepared to insert that all-important half-second pause between thought and action.
This, I find, is a very good recipe for peace and happiness in daily life.
These days, the fashionable term for the meditative experience and its aftermath is mindfulness—a sense of being present in the moment, of observing whatever is happening rather than getting caught up in it, and doing so with gentleness and a certain detachment; it is about approaching life with an openness to whatever arises, dropping all preconceptions.
This is aspirational, of course—it is nearly impossible to actually live a mindful life all of the time. It’s a near-unattainable ideal. As a consequence, part of the practice of living mindfully is to learn how to fail with grace: Fail, get yourself back to a state resembling mindfulness, fail again, get yourself on track again, and so on. The hope is that ultimately something will come from this perpetual gently guiding yourself back to where you need to be. (As we shall see later in this book, it does—this practice of repeated stumbling does lead to a more lasting habit of mindfulness.)
I discovered that, the more I meditated, the more I found the process itself fascinating—what is it that is actually happening when you sit down on the cushion and turn your attention to your breath entering and leaving your nostrils? I found it equally fascinating to discover what this process gives birth to: I observed an increasing mental clarity, a more positive outlook on life, an increased kindness, and, generally, the gradual awakening of a desire to awaken.
It is one thing to experience this from the inside or to see it happen in friends; it is another to ask the question what good meditation does in a more general sense. As an academic, I was naturally interested in what we can know objectively about this endeavor—what the intrepid researchers who have invited meditators into their psychological laboratories or inside their brain scanners have found. As I learned very quickly when probing PubMed, PsychInfo, and other search engines, there are an unwieldy number of papers on meditation and mindfulness, how they are implemented and imprinted in the brain and/or how they impact your mind and your psychological make-up. Some of that research—likely the studies that make the boldest claims or those with the strongest results—even make it into the popular press.
In my experience, this surfeit of findings leaves many practitioners of mindfulness a little perplexed. I vividly remember a discussion in one of the groups I meditate with, in which someone brought up, with a tangible sense of awe, that she had read that “meditation actually changes your brain!” (You could hear both the quotation marks and the exclamation point in her voice.) This didn’t exactly seem like news to me (where else would any repeated behavior leave its imprints but in the brain?), but it made me realize that it might be useful for people like her—meditators who are curious to find out what meditation does and how it works but aren’t necessarily able or willing, even if they had the requisite background, to devote a few hundred hours to finding and reading the key papers in the field—to have someone (maybe someone like me) plod through all that literature and make sense of it.
Part of the perplexity of some meditators who are confronted with the scientific literature stems from the simple fact that scientific articles aren’t aimed at providing the general public with the most transparent information. Instead, they are small parts of a highly specialized ongoing exchange between rarified experts, often couched in near-impenetrable language. Difficulty is added because a large part of the conversation—the broader background, the methodological minutiae, the foundational studies—is left unspoken because it is part of the common history of those rarified experts. Often, the conversation is also cast in adversarial tones—you are explaining to colleague Y and Z why your work is so much better than that of colleague X—which can be quite off-putting to outsiders. A number of excellent review papers and a few excellent meta-analyses (i.e., analyses of analyses; see Chapter 1) can be found, but those are still cast in specialist language, and they don’t command the attention in the popular press that a single spectacular study often can.
In sum, it seemed to me that what would help my friend and others like her would be a book aimed at a general audience that would translate all that scientific geek language into an accurate, up-to-date but less overwhelming overview. I should also confess that I very much wanted to read such a book myself.
The age-old advice to writers, of course, is to “ ‘write what you know.” If I had taken this advice seriously, I would never have written this book. This isn’t my field. Most of my scientific work focuses on attention and memory and how these are affected by the aging process; I have also done some work on creativity and the positive aspects of stubbornly thinking in circles.
Fortunately, I have never taken the “write what you know” mantra as an injunction against stepping outside your comfort zone. Rather, I see this piece of advice as an encouragement to go out in the world, explore, and actively figure out as much as you can about the thing you want or need to know, and then report back. (Maybe that is because this is what you do as an academic: You ask a question and then you set off and discover.)
In some ways, I feel that my status as an outsider might even have some advantages. First, I am not a part of the ongoing conversation, and that allows me, I hope, to listen to all parties without prejudice. Second, in order to be able to follow the conversation, I needed to figure out what the unspoken background knowledge is, what the main threads of the discussion are, and how these threads interconnect. I hope that this effort helped me in translating the work done in the psychologists’ and neuroscientists’ labs to the pages of this book to, ultimately, your mind.
Of course, I do have my own biases and preconceptions, and I should be clear about those. I am probably positively biased toward this body of research, first because I am a meditator myself, and, second, because, as a card-carrying Buddhist, I have been indoctrinated into the idea that meditation and its consequences are an essential part of a fulfilled life. After writing this book, I am convinced that it would be very hard to argue that meditation is not a good thing for those who find it an enjoyable practice; it is, however, clearly not a cure-all or a magic bullet.
I have another bias as well: Like many scientists, I am, philosophically speaking, a materialist. That is, I see the mind, as most psychologists and neuroscientists do, not as an entity separate from the body but rather as an event, a dynamic experience that springs from the brain. As we often say: The mind is what the brain does. Many meditators, Buddhist meditators included,1 are, or behave like, substance dualists: There is mind and there is body; they interact, but they are fundamentally different things.
For me personally, scientific materialist explanations do not detract from the mystery or the grandeur of things. For instance, noticing how the stories that I weave about myself drop away as I sink into the relaxation of open monitoring meditation isn’t any less wonderful now that I know that this is my posterior cingulate cortex shutting down (we’ll get to that in Chapter 3), just like witnessing a moon eclipse isn’t any less beautiful or awe-inspiring knowing that it is just our planet’s satellite passing through our Earth’s shadow. In many ways, I find the scientific worldview inspiring, even in a spiritual context. There is great motivation in the realization that the full extent of my experience originates in those 1,350 or so grams of brain tissue that connect me to the rest of the world—that it is me and no one else who is responsible for my actions and their consequences; that it is me and no one else who will make or break my flourishing as a human being; that it is me and no one else who is the father of my son, the spouse of my wife, the friend of my friends; that it is me and only me that is my interface with the world. For me, the dawning realization that, as a Zen invocation states it, all living beings are one seamless body, moving swiftly from dark to dark, has given some welcome urgency to how I lead my life.
That said, the objectivity of the type of studies that I describe in this book has its drawbacks. The experience of meditating—first-hand—can never be fully recovered in the research about meditating, which by necessity operates from a third-person perspective. Reading about meditation is never going to replace the actual practice.
It is customary to use a book’s preface to offer a few guidelines to potential readers. Here are mine.
First, this book is not a book on how to meditate. Plenty of excellent books on the subject exist. Check them out.
Second, this book is not a book on why to meditate. I review the kinds of effects meditation leads to, but those aren’t the real reasons, I bet, people meditate. Those reasons, as I have experienced and described already, can change substantially over a meditator’s lifetime. And sometimes it turns out that the real reason was something entirely different from what you thought it was.
In his book Search Inside Yourself, Google’s mindfulness guru Chade-Meng Tan (he goes by Meng) expresses the hope that one day meditation and mindfulness might be as self-evident and nonremarkable as exercise is now. I share Meng’s dream, and, as I mentioned, meditation certainly has that place in my life. But it would also be silly to meditate just because research shows that it might improve your well-being and mental health. That motivation seems hardly sustainable to me. (The exercise analogy works well here. I like to run, and I notice an increase in the number of fellow joggers in the streets over the first two weeks of January and then the inevitable decrease to late December levels as motivation runs thin and the reality of muscle ache sets in.) For meditation to really fit with your life, you have to find some pleasure, some fun (or joy, if you’re looking for a more spiritual term) in it. If you have given it a fair chance and it doesn’t agree with you, maybe you shouldn’t torture yourself but find another way to destress that fits you better. I do see this book as a gentle encouragement, in case you need it. The literature is there, showing modest effects from this practice on a wide variety of aspects of the human experience that do matter. That is heartening.
Third, given that this book is on the scientific study of meditation, it isn’t going to be an easy read. I will do my best to explain concepts in as plain an English as I can muster, but it might demand a little effort—I will cover a lot of terrain, and in quite some detail. Note that although I see a particular order in the chapters, you should feel free to skip, or to skip around.
This book, in sum, is primarily aimed at the curious meditator, seasoned or beginner. If you’ve ever wondered what actually happens in your brain as you sit down and focus on the breath flowing in and out of your nostrils, this is the book for you; if you’ve wondered what kind of psychological aftereffects you might expect from quieting down for half an hour a day, this is the book for you; if you’ve ever wondered if your meditation experiences fit with other people’s experiences, this is the book for you as well.
Finally, prefaces often end with acknowledgments and thank-yous.
The first, largest, and biggest thank-you goes to all those researchers who did the actual studies described here. There are hundreds of them, and many of them toiled in very lonely circumstances way before the concept of mindfulness became fashionable. I am merely a translator of their work, and I bow deeply to their ingenuity and tenacity. Four anonymous reviewers read early drafts very carefully and made many useful suggestions. I bow in deep gratitude to their help, their dedication, and their thoroughness. All remaining mistakes are entirely my own. Big thanks to my editor at Oxford University Press, Joan Bossert, and her assistants, Louis Gulino and Lynnee Argabright, for believing in this project and guiding me along so expertly and elegantly.
In Zen, it is customary to thank your “ancestors”—the countless women and men, “centuries of enlightened women and men” who have spent their time “in the still halls.” I would like to name a few of my own recent ancestors. Mark Rotsaert was my first meditation teacher; Terry Keenan my first anchor in Zen; Andrew Quernmore introduced me to Vipassanā meditation. I was lucky enough to receive the precepts from Thích Nhầt Hạnh in Plum Village in January 2013; I feel very fortunate to have him as my root teacher. I arrived at his monastery through some chance encounters, first with Marilyn Hartman, who kindly showed me the way, and then with Pat Tun, who sternly insisted I go find a community. This book wouldn’t have existed without Thay Phap Luu’s encouragement to start teaching mindfulness. I thank Al Lingo and the Breathing Heart Sangha for deepening my insights into the true nature of my aspirations. I thank the Insight Meditation Group in Sandy Springs for being such a strong, solid haven, a true group of seekers in the dhamma; in particular, I thank Joel Groover for being such an honest, down-to-earth, and generous non-teacher in wisdom. Thanks go to everyone at Red Clay Sangha for making Zen such a democratic, real, and unrobed experience. A retreat with Stephen Batchelor taught me that the dhamma can be lived in the fullness of the mind as well as the heart. Thanks also to my amazing teachers at the master’s program in Buddhist Studies at the University of South-Wales—Nick Swann, Warren Todd, and Sarah Shaw.
A vast amount of thanks go to Monica Halka, who somehow roped me into teaching mindfulness classes to honors students at Georgia Tech—the most fulfilling teaching experience I have ever had. Teaching mindfulness is not sexy (unlike teaching general psychology, with all its flashy demos), not cool (if anything, it seems to have a decidedly nerdy and/or New Age-ish aroma to it), and not particularly fashionable either (to our engineering students, it doesn’t quite have the cachet that, say, the concept of sustainability has), but it is truly and utterly real. It is probably fair to state that colleges tend to place little value on quietness and well-being, and they don’t see an eye toward the collective good as an important value—instead, we typically reward ego and brashness, put a macho spin on the stress of the rat race, and push our students to combative competitiveness. It has been heart-warming to observe the opposite in my classes: to see young minds (and often hearts too) open up over the course of a semester, to feel a sense of community emerge, and to watch a spirit of freedom develop. My first mindfulness seminar in 2013, including my fruitless search for a good textbook, was exactly the impetus I needed to start the actual work on this book. Many thanks too to all my students, who have been incredibly supportive of each other’s practice. Big thanks also to Holly Rogers and Libby Webb from the Center for Koru Mindfulness for shaping my mindfulness teaching into something much more competent.
Finally, great big thanks go to Shelley Aikman, my partner in life and meditation, my ultimate sounding board and my ever-present life coach. I bow deeply to her kindness and wisdom, which I can’t believe I am fortunate enough to bask in on a daily basis.
Big thanks to you, reader, as well. Your purported existence was a driving force behind writing this book. I wish you all the best in your endeavors, meditative and otherwise.