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yogamindandbody · 7 years

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The Healing Power of Meditation

The Dalai Lama is such a likeable man and here he enters into conversation with some of the best neuroscientists to discuss how meditation operates to improve mental health and help us to stay happy.

Here are a few noteworthy reviews

Review

The Mind s Own Physician is a journey of understanding, in which an integrative dialogue unfolds between the spiritual leaders of contemplative meditation and scientists at the forefront of mind-body medicine. This transformative conversation provides valuable insight into how meditative practices can balance the mind with effects on the body, as well as, potential benefits for human health. This blending of contemplative traditions with Western science opens a mindful awareness that has the empowering capacity to fully engage people in their health, and more broadly, in the well-being of our societies. Michael R. Irwin, MD, Cousins Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles

The Mind s Own Physician offers us a precious portal into the seminal conversations that gave birth to the nascent field of contemplative neuroscience. The issues digested, debated, and ignited in its pages will serve as a road map and inspiration for my students and their students over the coming decades. Amishi P. Jha, PhD, contemplative neuroscientist, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Miami

If you want to see how to build bridges between the deepest wisdom of the heart and the highest standards of contemporary neuroscience, look no further. This series of meetings between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Western scientists and meditation teachers will prove to be epoch-changing, and this book shows why. Here, you will find interior and exterior empiricism in exquisite dialogue. Drink it all in. The brilliance of the participants shines through on every page. Mark Williams, PhD, Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Oxford, Director, Oxford Mindfulness Centre

Can meditation improve your health? This question is just the starting point for a series of innovative exchanges across different ways of knowing among first-ranked clinicians, scientists, Buddhist teachers, and the Dalai Lama. Thoughtful, rigorous, and surprising by turns, this dialogue reminds all of us who care about the effects of the mind on health just how much more thinking remains to be done. Anne Harrington, PhD, Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University, author of The Cure Within

Our thoughts can seem too real, giving our imaginings about tomorrow the power to create chronic stress and unhealthy changes in our bodies. Our sense of self can seem too fixed, creating a cage where our habitual worries can run in depressing circles. In the moment that we recognize our thoughts as thoughts and our habits as habits, new and liberating possibilities emerge for the way we live our lives. Contemplative traditions such as Buddhism have long seen the transformative power of that simple moment of recognition, and more recently, clinicians in various domains have discovered the potential that this contemplative insight offers for the treatment of chronic stress, depression, and other especially modern maladies. Yet the potential of interventions based on contemplative approaches has only begun to emerge. The full realization of that potential requires a careful, critical, and honest dialogue among contemplatives and scientists so as to allow research and clinical practices to develop effectively. This remarkable book provides a fresh and clear record of such a dialogue. Informative and highly accessible, The Mind s Own Physician is a groundbreaking moment in the development of contemplative science. John D. Dunne, Associate Professor of Religion, Emory University

A must-read for anyone interested in understanding how Buddhist contemplative traditions and Western scientific traditions can work together to uncover the complexities of the human mind. Mind and Life has done it again: engaged a group of distinguished contemplative scholars, clinicians, and scientists in a lively, productive, and inspiring dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama that furthers our understanding of meditation and its potential to heal. Jeanne Tsai, Associate Professor of Psychology, Stanford University, Director, Stanford Culture and Emotion Laboratory

This book marks a milestone in the emerging field of contemplative sciences. Within its pages, you can relive a seminal 2005 Mind and Life conference that brought together world-famous neuroscientists, clinicians, and contemplative scholars in a dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This groundbreaking work explores the development of scientifically based tools and programs aimed at creating more balanced and healthy lives. How does stress evolve? What does it do to our minds and bodies? How can we use ancient mindfulness and meditative practices in our everyday, modern lives and also in clinical settings to reduce stress and cultivate healthier minds? This book is a must for everyone who is interested in making this world a more human place. Tania Singer, PhD, Director, Department of Social Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

Jon Kabat-Zinn and Richard Davidson bring together an internationally acclaimed cast of neuroscientists and scholars for a stimulating dialogue with the Dalai Lama. They weave a rich tapestry of information on how meditation can be useful for a wide variety of conditions, ranging from depression and stress to anxiety and psoriasis. In easy-to-understand, conversational style, the experts lay out how the mind s powerful healing effects can be harnessed in ways that are becoming increasingly illuminated by scientific discoveries. Stuart J. Eisendrath, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, Director of the UCSF Depression Center

It is most befitting that this wonderful book, composed from Mind and Life dialogues with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, would appear after the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 tragedy. Accompanied by greatly increasing psychophysiological stress, anxiety, and depression, the post-9/11 decade has yielded an auspicious upsurge of rigorous scientific and clinical research on mindfulness meditation and other systematic methods of mental training that may help transcend the pain and suffering caused by such harmful afflictions. The Mind s Own Physician highlights these exciting advances through a series of insightful discussions between His Holiness and a diverse group of stellar contemplative scholars, scientists, and physicians who are leaders in the field of integrative mind-body-brain medicine. Everyone who wishes to cultivate a sound body and sane, healthy mind in these turbulent times will welcome the publication of these inspiring conversations. David E. Meyer, PhD, Clyde H. Coombs, and J. E. Keith Smith Professor of Mathematical Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Michigan

The Mind s Own Physician brings you straight into the heart of a remarkable interchange between His Holiness the Dalai Lama, renowned contemplative teachers from Buddhist and Christian traditions, and world leaders in neuroscience, psychiatry, stress physiology, and clinical medicine. Jon Kabat-Zinn and Richard Davidson guide the reader through an authentic chronicle of a landmark meeting of extraordinary minds as it unfolds through a series of crystalline presentations and probing dialogues about the nature of mind, meditation, and brain function. These dialogues provide the foundation for discussion on the biological effects of chronic stress, treatment and relapse prevention in depression, and the historical and evolutionary roots of Western medicine s struggle to understand and care for the whole person. The highly accessible and rich treatment of each of these areas is fascinating to read. The constant presence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama s deeply engaged attention, teaching, and critical ear reverberates throughout. The participants common commitment to fostering the conditions necessary for human flourishing through intercultural and interdisciplinary inquiry is truly inspiring. In capturing this arc of information and intent, The Mind s Own Physician becomes an essential treatment of one of the most hopeful directions in thought alive today: the human capacity to ease our suffering through introspective insight and our growing scientific investigation into how this may occur. Clifford Saron, PhD, Associate Research Scientist, University of California, Davis Center for Mind and Brain

"The Mind's Own Physician is a journey of understanding, in which an integrative dialogue unfolds between the spiritual leaders of contemplative meditation and scientists at the forefront of mind-body medicine. This transformative conversation provides valuable insight into how meditative practices can balance the mind with effects on the body, as well as, potential benefits for human health. This blending of contemplative traditions with Western science opens a mindful awareness that has the empowering capacity to fully engage people in their health, and more broadly, in the well-being of our societies." --Michael R. Irwin, MD, Cousins Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles

"The Mind's Own Physician offers us a precious portal into the seminal conversations that gave birth to the nascent field of contemplative neuroscience. The issues digested, debated, and ignited in its pages will serve as a road map and inspiration for my students and their students over the coming decades." --Amishi P. Jha, PhD, contemplative neuroscientist, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Miami

"If you want to see how to build bridges between the deepest wisdom of the heart and the highest standards of contemporary neuroscience, look no further. This series of meetings between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Western scientists and meditation teachers will prove to be epoch-changing, and this book shows why. Here, you will find interior and exterior empiricism in exquisite dialogue. Drink it all in. The brilliance of the participants shines through on every page." --Mark Williams, PhD, Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Oxford, Director, Oxford Mindfulness Centre

"Can meditation improve your health? This question is just the starting point for a series of innovative exchanges across different ways of knowing among first-ranked clinicians, scientists, Buddhist teachers, and the Dalai Lama. Thoughtful, rigorous, and surprising by turns, this dialogue reminds all of us who care about the effects of the mind on health just how much more thinking remains to be done." --Anne Harrington, PhD, Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University, author of The Cure Within

"Our thoughts can seem too real, giving our imaginings about tomorrow the power to create chronic stress and unhealthy changes in our bodies. Our sense of self can seem too fixed, creating a cage where our habitual worries can run in depressing circles. In the moment that we recognize our thoughts as thoughts and our habits as habits, new and liberating possibilities emerge for the way we live our lives. Contemplative traditions such as Buddhism have long seen the transformative power of that simple moment of recognition, and more recently, clinicians in various domains have discovered the potential that this contemplative insight offers for the treatment of chronic stress, depression, and other especially modern maladies. Yet the potential of interventions based on contemplative approaches has only begun to emerge. The full realization of that potential requires a careful, critical, and honest dialogue among contemplatives and scientists so as to allow research and clinical practices to develop effectively. This remarkable book provides a fresh and clear record of such a dialogue. Informative and highly accessible, The Mind's Own Physician is a groundbreaking moment in the development of contemplative science." --John D. Dunne, Associate Professor of Religion, Emory University

"A must-read for anyone interested in understanding how Buddhist contemplative traditions and Western scientific traditions can work together to uncover the complexities of the human mind. Mind and Life has done it again: engaged a group of distinguished contemplative scholars, clinicians, and scientists in a lively, productive, and inspiring dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama that furthers our understanding of meditation and its potential to heal." --Jeanne Tsai, Associate Professor of Psychology, Stanford University, Director, Stanford Culture and Emotion Laboratory

"This book marks a milestone in the emerging field of contemplative sciences. Within its pages, you can relive a seminal 2005 Mind and Life conference that brought together world-famous neuroscientists, clinicians, and contemplative scholars in a dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This groundbreaking work explores the development of scientifically based tools and programs aimed at creating more balanced and healthy lives. How does stress evolve? What does it do to our minds and bodies? How can we use ancient mindfulness and meditative practices in our everyday, modern lives and also in clinical settings to reduce stress and cultivate healthier minds? This book is a must for everyone who is interested in making this world a more human place." --Tania Singer, PhD, Director, Department of Social Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

"Jon Kabat-Zinn and Richard Davidson bring together an internationally acclaimed cast of neuroscientists and scholars for a stimulating dialogue with the Dalai Lama. They weave a rich tapestry of information on how meditation can be useful for a wide variety of conditions, ranging from depression and stress to anxiety and psoriasis. In easy-to-understand, conversational style, the experts lay out how the mind's powerful healing effects can be harnessed in ways that are becoming increasingly illuminated by scientific discoveries." --Stuart J. Eisendrath, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, Director of the UCSF Depression Center

"It is most befitting that this wonderful book, composed from Mind and Life dialogues with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, would appear after the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 tragedy. Accompanied by greatly increasing psychophysiological stress, anxiety, and depression, the post-9/11 decade has yielded an auspicious upsurge of rigorous scientific and clinical research on mindfulness meditation and other systematic methods of mental training that may help transcend the pain and suffering caused by such harmful afflictions. The Mind's Own Physician highlights these exciting advances through a series of insightful discussions between His Holiness and a diverse group of stellar contemplative scholars, scientists, and physicians who are leaders in the field of integrative mind-body-brain medicine. Everyone who wishes to cultivate a sound body and sane, healthy mind in these turbulent times will welcome the publication of these inspiring conversations." --David E. Meyer, PhD, Clyde H. Coombs, and J. E. Keith Smith Professor of Mathematical Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Michigan

"The Mind's Own Physician brings you straight into the heart of a remarkable interchange between His Holiness the Dalai Lama, renowned contemplative teachers from Buddhist and Christian traditions, and world leaders in neuroscience, psychiatry, stress physiology, and clinical medicine. Jon Kabat-Zinn and Richard Davidson guide the reader through an authentic chronicle of a landmark meeting of extraordinary minds as it unfolds through a series of crystalline presentations and probing dialogues about the nature of mind, meditation, and brain function. These dialogues provide the foundation for discussion on the biological effects of chronic stress, treatment and relapse prevention in depression, and the historical and evolutionary roots of Western medicine's struggle to understand and care for the whole person. The highly accessible and rich treatment of each of these areas is fascinating to read. The constant presence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama's deeply engaged attention, teaching, and critical ear reverberates throughout. The participants' common commitment to fostering the conditions necessary for human flourishing through intercultural and interdisciplinary inquiry is truly inspiring. In capturing this arc of information and intent, The Mind's Own Physician becomes an essential treatment of one of the most hopeful directions in thought alive today: the human capacity to ease our suffering through introspective insight and our growing scientific investigation into how this may occur." --Clifford Saron, PhD, Associate Research Scientist, University of California, Davis Center for Mind and Brain

Book Description

The science behind how mindfulness meditation can heal the human mind.

#meditation #yoga #dalai lama

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years

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Isolated abroad during coronavirus outbreak, how some Indian students are dealing with the crisis

With universities across the globe shut down because of the coronavirus outbreak, a large number of Indian students continue to live away from family at a time they need an emotional anchor the most.

On 12 April, Indian National Congress spokesperson Jaiveer Shergill questioned the Centre why Indian students stranded abroad are not being evacuated, while the government is in "active mode" to help foreign nationals stuck in India. "The BJP (Bhartiya Janata Party) government is in 'active mode' for foreign nationals and is in 'sleep mode' for Indian students stranded abroad in this hour of global crisis," Shergill said in a statement.

Away but not 'stranded'

But a lot of the Indian students still in their dorms, private accommodations or at a relative's place, away from their immediate families, claim they are not feeling 'stranded' or 'stuck.' Some of them claim they are used to living by themselves for they left their parents' shelter years ago.

Certainly, during a global crisis like this, they admit they feel the need to be in constant touch with their parents but technology has bridged the gap. Apps like Facetime and WhatsApp video calling have allowed them and their parents to combat emotional distancing.

If given a choice, would they have taken the plunge and returned to India rather than stay away from family? Many were not in favour of doing so, at least under the circumstances they were in when they had a choice.

"I think it's much safer for everyone, including me, to stay put where they are. Going back would've put the safety of my parents, as well as (that of) potentially society, at risk, and definitely mine too. Moreover, I'm not facing any problems here so I don't see any reason for me to go back. It's just a matter of coping with living alone, and I think that's a small challenge compared to the risk I'll be putting everyone at if I went back," says Mayank Sehgal, currently pursuing MBA from HEC Paris.

Aditya Tank, who studies at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University in the United States, reasons that even if he braved the risk of infected airplanes and airports, it was too late for him to escape the state quarantine. "By the time I could travel, it was already 16 March, when India had made 14-day state quarantine compulsory for anyone coming from the US. So even after going through all the hassle, I'd have to spend two weeks away from family. My parents were obviously worried but they got my decision when I explained the above point to them. So as of now, we're looking forward to the time when there are no restrictions, and I can come back without having to stay in the state quarantine."

Another hurdle that is stopping the students abroad to return to their parents' comfort is the time difference between both the countries. Since a majority of the colleges across the globe have converted the classes online (through Zoom or similar conference video calling app), they will have to wake up at odd hours in order to 'attend' the classes. "My classes and assignments are still going on so I didn't want to go back to India only to operate on a 9.5-hour time difference. It didn't make sense," says Varun Natu, currently in Pittsburgh, who believes he would barely get the time to spend quality time with parents in that case.

State intervention

Besides these technical and logical reasons, many also have the administration, either the government or the college, to blame for not acting well within time. "You know how lax the US has been about their response to the pandemic. When my parents had asked me to fly back, at that point, my university had declared the online class setting till only 6 April," says Aditya Tank. Even after the change was made subsequently to extend the online classes till the end of the semester, it was already too late to travel.

Pranati Sharma, pursuing MBA in Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, recalls the college administration initially took drastic steps to curb the spread of coronavirus, which resulted in complete chaos among the students. "We got a mail from college on the night of 15 March, giving us three days to vacate all the student accommodations under Trinity, even the private ones. However, the college sent a clarification mail a day later, allowing students to stay. This created a lot of chaos, and 90 percent of the people, including Indians, booked flights on 15 March itself for the very next day to return to India."

While Pranati chose not to travel even after the college's rather knee-jerk approach, Amishi Agrawal, studying at the University of Tokyo in Japan, has a different story to tell. "We haven't had a lockdown yet. A state of emergency was declared a few days ago but there are no rules in place. Most places are open, and you can go out if you want to. The greater challenge here is to ensure you're safe since the government isn't doing much on that front, and also the linguistic barrier. For now, we're just reading up more, and pushing for stricter rules within our dormitories."

ALSO READ: Under lockdown in Europe, Indian students go online to protest inequalities back home, keep up with academics

She explains how the lack of awareness by the state can make the pandemic even worse, if not for the information coming in from other countries. "I thought at the start that Japan was handling it very well. It turned out that was a lie as Japan was trying to conceal information because they wanted to host the Olympics (which was later pushed tentatively to 2021). Had I known the situation in Japan was so grave, I'd have definitely gone back to India then."

Even Sweden seems to be not taking the crisis as seriously despite rising cases in the country. Sarthak Prakash, currently pursuing a Master's degree in Biomedical Technology from Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden, says the lockdown is not as stringent as the one in India despite similar graphs in coronavirus infections in both the countries. "There are no restrictions at all. All the pubs and restaurants are open. The only change I'm facing is online classes and virtual group meetings. People are advised to maintain social distancing. The population of Sweden is about 10 million, and they have 10,000 cases now (by the time his input was taken). It's mostly concentrated in Stockholm so the rest of the economy is open. They (government) fear bad repercussions if the restrictions are imposed for an extended time."

Mayank, however, is grateful to the French government for its transparency in dealing with the crisis. "They're communicating with us very clearly what's happening and what's going to happen (as far as they know). The confinement has been extended till 11 May, after which things will gradually open up again. Even alcohol and cigarettes are available. We're allowed to go for a walk within 1 km radius of our residence."

Daily chores, increasing constraints

Besides the occasional long queues outside grocery stores in Paris and ordering grocery for a week in advance in Pittsburgh, regular supplies has not been the primary issue for most of the students abroad. But Taruna Venkat, currently pursuing a Master's in Science Degree (Tropical Biology and Conservation) from James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, says constant delay in the lifting of lockdown will only worsen the situation for students monetarily. "I'm concerned about stretching out my savings, and avoiding asking family for money given they also require to save up. I'm also concerned about them, since they're aged and live in Mumbai, which is rapidly becoming a hotspot of the coronavirus spread."

Tasheev Bagga, enrolled in a Master's course in Fashion and Entrepreneurship at RMIT University in Melborune, Australia, still gets chills thinking about the day he realised the graveness of the epidemic. "I remember I went to a supermarket to get grocery but there was absolutely nothing there because of panic buying. All the racks you think will never be seen empty were like that. It's the basic requirement, and it wasn't available. That hit me hard when I went back home. Things are much better now."

Apart from the daily chores of cooking, clean, and buying grocery, what is keeping all the students busy are the online classes by the university and work from home for any internship or training they were employed in beside the college. Naman Jain, working as a Master's student at Max Planck Institute of Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, explains why despite the lockdown period being "an introvert-heaven," the lack of interpersonal contact is getting to his nerves now. "Research groups are incredibly important for reasons more than just academic discussions. It's getting limited because of the 'indirect-ness' over mails or video calls. The productivity isn't as much if one doesn't discuss or collaborate," he says.

He adds he did not contemplate going back since he had only two months of training left after working there for over nine months. "My parents have spent most of the time mulling I should've come back when I could. But I get their concern. They don't know it's safe around here, groceries and medical help are easily available, people are cooperative, and there aren't as less number of people on the streets as I'd expected."

Life-altering events stand altered

It is certainly not easy to withdraw when one is so close to the finishing line. Both Purushartha Singh (BSc in Computer Science from Pennsylvania State University) and Aditya Tank were days away from their respective convocation ceremonies. "My parents were scheduled to come here from India, and then we had a little tour planned. But obviously now, all that has gone for a toss. After online classes, home assignments, and online exams, the university is even planning an online convocation," says Purushartha.

As strange as online convocation sounds, Aditya is hopeful his university will have a flesh-and-blood ceremony whenever the situation is completely normal. "But my visa is expiring soon so I'm planning to go back to India at the end of May, hopefully."

Representational image. Reuters

As some are busy getting to the end, others starting their journey have their own issues to deal with. Arunima Gitai, studying Counselling and Psychotherapy at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, details her struggles to find accommodation. "I landed in Perth on 29 February, and the lockdown started here in the first week of March. Everyone was already on the edge about the virus. Most of the people were wary to give rented accommodation to people, especially who had arrived in the country recently. Everyone whom I spoke to would ask me when I landed, ask me to show my travel documents, ask if I got tested, or if I had a connecting flight from China."

She adds a "sweet man" empathised with her situation and asked him to move into a rented accommodation immediately. But she confesses she had a terrible time putting up at a temporary accommodation for a week. "It was very hostile to live among aggressive people who would ask me, sometimes even in every couple of hours, when I'd move out, or who told me I should go back to India. The epidemic was bringing out the worst in people. Humans are mean, aggressive, and self-preserving by nature, and the circumstances just happen to bring that out more openly."

Logistical issues like these only tend to add to the mental and emotional toll a young person goes through, particularly in the absence of a familiar environment. But all students across the globe that this writer talked to were on the same page of not returning to India especially because of the risks in travel involved. They would end up making their 'new home' more inhabitable, and are determined to get through with the crutch of technology, creative pursuits, and by just observing nature heal itself.

Naman's hopeful words give many like him hope that the spring is not far behind. "Nature was incredibly beautiful since I came here. Nothing has changed (on that front). It's just that spring has come around, so it's more pretty out here, but nothing else."

(Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak)

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jumperlink2-blog · 5 years

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Announcing Spanx, John Richmond, Dai and Amishi London

LONDON, United Kingdom — This week, we are pleased to introduce four new partners on BoF Careers.

Spanx was launched in 2000. Since then, the brand has expanded to offer bras, underwear, leggings, activewear and more. Its founder, Sara Blakely, was named in 2012 the world's youngest self-made female billionaire by Forbes and one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People. Headquartered in Atlanta with shops across the US, Spanx can now be found in more than 50 countries. Spanx seeks a vice president of brand strategy, an events manager and a senior manager in talent acquisition in Atlanta, among other roles.

In 1987, John Richmond launched his eponymous label and opened his first shop in Soho, London. In 1990, he added a street style and sport-inspired line. In the late 90s, production moved to Italy, with the design office stayed in London. In early 2000s, the brand expanded into children’s wear, shoes, bags, underwear and perfume. The brand is looking for a junior womenswear designer in London.

Dai, launched in 2017, is a London-based womenswear start-up focused on performance wear for professional women, combining smart, technical fabrics and tailoring. The brand is committed to sustainability and positive social impact that empowers women. Dai sells direct-to-consumer, primarily online, and ships globally. Dai is looking for a customer experience executive, a stylist and showroom executive, and a freelance graphic designer in London.

British luxury accessory brand, Amishi London, was launched in 2010 by its creative director and founder, Amishi Dhanuka. The brand creates handbags, jewellery and scarves. Amishi London has its flagship store and a boutique in London, and its stockists include Fenwick and Harvey Nichols. The company is seeking a social media manager and a marketing manager, both based in London.

See all of our jobs and career-related content on BoF Careers, the global marketplace for fashion talent.

Source: https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/careers/announcing-spanx-john-richmond-dai-and-amishi-london

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chocolate-brownies · 6 years

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Jannelle MacAulay was doing something that her father only dreamed for her when she was a child — working as a military leader and pilot, a job not open to women in the ’80s. In this TEDx talk, she describes how powerful that experience was — becoming a military leader, commander, academic, and wife — but also how she struggled to stay at the peak of her game and remain perfect in every role. The drive to succeed and avoid failure at all costs caused her to burn out.

Here are four takeaways from her talk:

1) Drive alone does not equip you for sustained success. Sacrificing health and relationships to maintain or accelerate success is a recipe for burnout. “My drive took me to the point where I was giving to everything and everybody […] and that almost destroyed me,” says MacAulay.

MacAulay ended up arriving at mindfulness.

“It’s about being in the present moment, instead of wasting our time succumbing to the mind wandering and the distractions, and ultimately the unrealistic expectations we put on ourselves with our own inner dialogue,” she says. “And that’s extremely hard to do on our own, especially under stress.”

2) Put on your oxygen mask first. MacAulay attributes her professional success to using a tool that’s accessible to everyone: the breath.

“We can use the power of our breath to live more in the present moment, increasing our productivity and our efficiency, and actually giving ourselves time back,” MacAulay says. “Time we can use to harmonize our hard work and our labor with the joys in life.”

When life gets stressful, MacAulay says mindfulness reminds her to slow down—and to forgive herself on days when she isn’t able to do so.

She describes practicing mindfulness as an exercise, like doing push-ups for the brain.

“And the more you practice it, the more it is available to us, under stress,” she says

3) Win back time by focusing on the good. Along with battling stress, MacAulay was finding it difficult to focus on the present moment. She realized there were times when she would miss special moments with her children, due to worrying about things at work.

“The interesting thing about mind wandering is when we do it, we think of unpleasant thoughts. We might have this fabulous vacation coming up, but instead of thinking about our toes in the sand, we mind-wander about all the things we have to do before we leave,” MacAulay says.

MacAulay refers to her colleague, Amishi Jha, who uses the example of the brain as an iPod: we spend a lot of time in fast forward worrying about the future, and in rewind ruminating on the past, but we rarely press play and live in the present.

“Mindfulness can actually strengthen our muscle of attention and help us make better decisions. It also decreases the amount of time we spend mind wandering or judging ourselves, and setting unrealistic expectations,” MacAulay explains.

4) Give connection before you give direction. MacAulay found ways to introduce mindfulness to her unit, including practicing yoga and doing a mindful minute before leadership meetings. She says mindfulness helped created a culture of trust and connection, which nurtured an environment of “failing forward” where people “used self-compassion to get back up and try again.”

“I’ve been asked many times how I got a military unit to buy in to mindfulness,” MacAulay says. “I started with trust by being a mindful leader myself, and creating opportunities for connection.”

MacAulay describes how starting with small initiatives, like no-email Friday, helped her build trust by being more available to make in-person connections with her team.

“Mindfulness created a culture of trust, care, love, and connection… where people weren’t afraid to fail,” MacAulay says. “Mindfulness created an environment where everyone can succeed.”

Being with Stressful Moments Rather Than Avoiding Them

The Magnificent, Mysterious, Wild, Connected and Interconnected Brain

The post Four Lessons on Burnout from a Fighter Pilot appeared first on Mindful.

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

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cscoaching · 7 years

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Leadership and three types of mindfulness: benefits, limitations and brain science

Mindfulness is just one type of meditation. It is generally used in three forms, which I’ll outline here; it can be useful for all of us and can offer benefits to those in positions of leadership. I would argue that we are all in positions of leadership to varying degrees, whether we’re a leader for our children, in our home, for our family, our community, in our voluntary work and in our paid work.

Some people have dismissed mindfulness as a fad or a trend. It’s true there has been considerable hype with some poor research published about it. I’m not a mindfulness expert – this article is intended to demystify how it works, and what it can and can’t do for you. Dr Amishi Jha at the University of Miami has researched the brain, attention, working memory, and mindfulness-based training. She has found that where we direct our attention biases the processing of the rest of the brain. She notes that different networks in the brain cannot be activated at the same time.

In short, there is no such thing as multitasking: if you are focusing, your mind cannot be wandering and vice versa. She has looked at high stress and how mindfulness might reduce the impact of stress on the ability to retain information and focus. She has found that practising mindfulness seems to improve resilience to stress in those on active service in the military and their spouses, in workplace contexts and in students.

1. Improve your focus

The type of mindfulness that can help you improve your focus and reduce your mind wandering is quite simple:

Sit in a quiet space with no distractions you bring your attention to your breathing and keep it there.

When you notice that your mind has wandered you simply bring your attention back to your breathing. This works and strengthens the focus ‘muscle’.

Regular practice of even just 10 minutes a day has been shown to increase your ability to maintain concentration and improve test scores, for example.

This increased effectiveness is great but it won’t improve your leadership abilities.

Brain science

There are two areas of the brain that are key to the next type of mindfulness – the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. The prefrontal cortex deals with what’s known as ‘executive function’, differentiating among conflicting thoughts, good and bad, better and best, same and different, consequences of actions, and social control: suppressing urges that could lead to socially unacceptable outcomes.

The amygdala, on the other hand, allows an instantaneous, unthinking reaction in the face of a threat; an evolutionary survival response that has us fight, take flight or freeze. High stress, poor mood and threat mean our brain won’t function the way we want it to in precisely the circumstances when we most want it to (unless you’re being attacked by a bear): the amygdala will hijack the prefrontal cortex unless we step in to stop it. In a work situation, this can be career damaging – co-workers tend to remember these negative incidents, feel demoralised and negative towards people who behave like this.

2. Develop better control over thoughts, emotions & reactions

When you are triggered by someone or something, you suddenly ‘snap’. The type of mindfulness that can help us strengthen our ability to prevent this hijack in moments of stress involves using concentration to create a ‘platform’ in the mind where you notice thoughts and feelings without being swept away by them or being attached to them.

You start with type one (above) and then move into noticing what you notice as thoughts come up: ‘Oh yes there’s that thought again’, and then just letting it go - like noticing clouds in the sky that float past.

This type of mindfulness shifts the brain’s energy from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex where you can choose how to react.

It strengthens your ability to resist getting caught up in feelings and see them as just thoughts and emotions. It can help you change habits. With practice, you become more adaptable and present to people.

This can support your leadership – as a leader people are looking to you to see what appropriate response they should have.

3. Stress reduction: understand your stress

The third type of mindfulness that I’m going to cover is mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). This is an eight-week programme, popularised and developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn; it is used in hospitals and as part of cognitive behaviour therapy and pain therapy. It has undergone rigorous clinical trials. Jon Kabat-Zinn says: ‘Between stimulus and response there's a space, in that space lies our power to choose our response, in our response lies our growth and our freedom’.

This includes type one and two above and includes a mental ‘body scan’ where you notice the sensations you are feeling in your body.

Leading on from noticing and letting go of any passing thoughts, you are invited to pick one of the thoughts and focus on it mindfully. This supports you to become more aware of your habitual reactions and responses and consider alternative responses: you create your own ‘learning plan’. Many people support this by working with a coach.

MBSR has been shown to change brain function in highly stressed employees over several weeks.

Limitations

Mindfulness can support leaders in their work and life but there are many key leadership skills that it doesn’t help with, such as:

Relationship management: conflict, teamwork, inspiring others.

Organisational awareness and systems management.

Skill building.

Motivation.

Influence.

These and many other leadership qualities involve developing self-awareness and emotional intelligence, which need to be worked on specifically, and there is no evidence that 'mindfulness' can develop these.

carolinestagg.co.uk #leadership #mindfulness #stress #focus

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thoi2020 · 4 years

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give you the silence that only comes when two people understand each other

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thoi2020 · 4 years

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✨ i read that it’s unhealthy to not talk about whatever’s on your mind, so i created this new void to scream into✨

(this is an intro post. kinda. sorta.)

hi! i’m amishi, a 16 year old girl from india. i’m here to mostly make friends, and after that, if there’s time (jk), reblog and— occasionally— create stuff that sparks joy or thought in me.

(more under the cut!)

the content on my blog will be very varied, about several topics including (but not limited to):

important general knowledge and issues: (politics, culture, current world news, etc.)

studyblr stuff: (i’m a student, so i like to keep some motivational content around)

books+writings i have read: (little women, harry potter, riordanverse, the hunger games, etc.)

movies+tv shows i watch: (b99, friends, supernatural, never have i ever, i am not okay with this, etc.)

music i listen to: (taylor swift, lorde, grace vanderwaal, harry styles, 5sos, bastille, troye sivan, one direction, etc.)

aesthetics i’m inspired from:

famous people i follow: (taylor swift, lorde, grace vanderwaal, harry styles, teen celebs, etc)

anything i feel like other people should see

i am not yet sure at what times i will be online, but i’m gonna try to maintain a queue. on that note, feel free to tag me using # starflowers320 and i will be very happy to reblog your post! on that note, please feel free to send me an ask or a dm about anything you want to talk about!

also, i’m not new to tumblr; but this is a new account. for people who knew of me before this account:

i went by “amanda” and my url was @space-nougat

in anonymous asks, i went by “unicorn anon”, because i would sign off my asks with a 🦄 emoji!

note: i will be tagging posts as “#<trigger name> tw” that contain potentially triggering stuff, but in case i miss something, or you would want something else tagged, please shoot me an ask or message about it!

okay i think i’ve gone on for quite long lmao, and if you’ve read this far, mad respect and thank you! 💕

#amishi speaks #text*#tagging some people:#userthelasttime #userananyab #nessa007 #userbeck #tuserbutterfly #usermulaney

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chocolate-brownies · 6 years

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For some time at Mindful we’ve been concerned that discussions of the brain—particularly in the context of mindfulness and meditation—have become simplified to the point of distorting the truth. They often present the brain as a set of building blocks or Lincoln Logs, each with its own function. The goal of meditation in this model is to strengthen certain parts and suppress others. When we asked neuroscientists doing actual research about these notions, the answer ranged from “that’s very, very simplistic” to “that’s nonsense.”

We are in the middle of an epidemic spread of BS about the brain. Something new comes up just about every week that grossly oversimplifies both what science currently knows about the brain and how the brain might actually work. Trainers and coaches and keynote speakers frequently make extravagant claims about “brain change,” “growing the brain,” or “adding gray matter.” Forbes recently published “6 Brain-Based Leadership Game-Changers for 2018,” by an author who writes about “leveraging neuroscience to create remarkable leadership.” The first diagram illustrates the reptilian brain, the mammalian brain, and the supposed newest part of the brain, the neocortex, where “meaning is made.” A quick internet search will let you know that this hypothesis, known as the Triune Brain, “is no longer espoused by the majority of comparative neuroscientists in the post-2000 era.” It’s been debunked for almost two decades.

A newsstand publication called Mindfulness Made Simple contains a two-page spread on “How Mindfulness Physically Changes Your Brain” that points to mindfulness causing growth in the presumed good parts of the brain and shrinkage in the bad parts. It takes some preliminary research out of all context and states it pretty much as fact. Any honest neuroscientist will tell you that we simply do not know this much about how the brain is affected by mindfulness, since we don’t even have a single definition of what mindfulness means. And what we feel we know today will be eclipsed by findings after our lifetime. Humbleness is the watchword when it comes to assertions about how the brain and the mind work.

A book from a major publisher sells itself as “Mind-Hacker’s Guide to Shifting into Brain 3.0.” It promises that you can use science to rewire your brain. Among its claims: You can “overcome PTSD without medication by strengthening neural circuits in Brain 3.0, making your emotional immune system stronger.”

Let’s be clear. This is not science. It is snake oil.

The problem, scientists and science educators point out, is not that people are being coached and coaxed to “use their brains better.” The problem is using pseudo-science as evidence for the effectiveness of a practice or to present outmoded models of the brain and mental experience. These models are often taught to children in school, who go home and tell mommy and daddy that the amygdala is bad and the prefrontal cortex is good. Is it fair to reduce something so wondrous as the brain to a couple of parts—even if this mythology helps children to notice their reactivity and calm down?

To delve into the state of the brain science surrounding meditation, we invited two neuroscientists to join in conversation with Mindful about how to effectively talk about the brain when presenting mindfulness and meditation.

Amishi Jha, PhD, is associate professor of psychology and the founder and head of the Jha Lab at the University of Miami. Her pioneering work, much of it funded by the Department of Defense and carried out with the military, students, and athletes, shows how mindfulness can protect attention and working memory. The lab is also working on how to scale up mindfulness for larger populations and make its effects long-lasting. She is working to find accessible training that can be broadly adopted by high-performance and high-demand groups, including first responders, police, and fire fighters.

Cliff Saron, PhD, is a researcher at the Center for Mind and Brain and director of the Saron Lab at the University of California, Davis. He is known for directing the Shamatha Project, a multiyear investigation of long-term intensive meditation. Findings so far indicate that the practice sharpens and sustains attention, enhances well-being and empathy, and improves physiological markers of health. Saron is interested in not just what the brain is doing when attending to a task, but what’s happening on a moment-by-moment basis as we construct reality.

While Saron and Jha are separated by a continent and different research goals, they see eye-to-eye on the need to be cautious in making assertions about long-term alterations to the brain. They collaborated with a few others on an important paper that provided a preliminary model for distinguishing a variety of mental factors involved in a range of meditation practices.

Our several conversations lasted many hours and ranged far and wide. Here are some of the highlights of our exploration of brain and mind.

Barry Boyce: Many mindfulness teachers like to use a model of the brain that pits the so-called emotional center deep inside the brain, the amgydala, against the reasoning center of the brain up front, the prefrontal cortex, which carries out our “executive function.” In the battle between these two, mindfulness is on the side of the executive function, coming in to help when the amygdala is out of control. How do you feel about this characterization?

Amishi Jha: I understand the good intentions of smart and kind-hearted people when they use overly simple models of the brain in an attempt to make brain functions broadly accessible, even to small children. They’re trying to help people understand something about problems they’re encountering with their emotions or their attention. I’m trying to do the same thing when I work with first responders or soldiers. No one wants to make costly mistakes.

However, we can do better than using a misleading model that implies that a part of the brain, the amygdala, misbehaves or “goes bad,” causing us to freak out, and that to control this reactivity—fear, anxiety, inappropriate behavior—we need to use the “good” part of the brain up front that comes in and tamps down the bad guy.

Cliff Saron: The “good brain, bad brain” idea gets things off on the wrong foot completely. You can err on the side of complexity or simplicity. If you’re trying to simplify things, you want to do it in such a way that you’re still on the side of accuracy. Amishi is exemplary at getting to the essence while still being truthful, using a model that scales up to something that represents a better understanding. Locating all emotion in the amgydala belies what we know about the powerful interconnectedness of the brain. Pictures of the anatomical connections of the amygdala to other parts of the brain, even from 25 years ago, show an incredibly dense level of interconnectivity with almost all parts of the cortex. Huge amounts of the brain are involved in even the simplest of tasks.

Barry Boyce: These models are meant to provide children with a way to think about emotionality as a natural brain process—to help them depersonalize it and and calm and composure. Is it such a problem if it’s a cartoon-like oversimplification?

Jha: It’s an open question whether using a model of brain function actually helps them calm down. These kinds of models are not limited to presentations to children. I’ve heard Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction teachers talk about the reptilian brain needing to be overcome by the modern-day frontal lobes. That’s the “triune brain hypothesis”—a 1960s era story of a battle between the older and newer brain not widely accepted in neuroscience today. It’s not part of the curriculum for MBSR, but it’s a kind of freelancing that people do.

We don’t really have any evidence that you would get any less benefit if you didn’t use a model of the brain in teaching people meditation. Why mislead if you don’t need to? The modular view of the brain—with a specific function separately housed within a particular chunk of the cortex—is like a holdover from phrenology, when people thought brain functions were tied to bumps on the skull—a bumpy forehead meant someone was more intelligent. We can do better than this.

Barry Boyce: Why does it matter if we’re using notions of the brain that make it easier for us to understand what this thing inside of us is doing?

Saron: As someone who tries to think and teach carefully about the brain, one of the things I grapple with is the difference between feeling like you understand something and having the experience that something is beyond one’s grasp. Fully understanding the human brain falls into the latter category. To think otherwise is a caricature of what neuroscience is about.

I’ve developed a six-day workshop called “The Buddha, the Brain, and Bach” with senior meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein and my wife, Barbara Bogatin, a cellist with the San Francisco Symphony. We explore the intersection of contemplative practice, neuroscience, and musical creativity. We touch upon fundamentals of brain structure and function as well as complex dynamical aspects. It’s a curriculum designed to use the deep awareness cultivated in contemplative practice to foster a sense of knowing and wonder, showing that it doesn’t make sense to rely on narratives that tie things up neatly.

Jha: I agree with that, but in my work I also find it helpful to orient people to what’s happening with their attention when they get off task and bad things result. Naturally, one of the first things we think of in trying to keep something simple is how would you explain that to a child?

Coincidentally, that occurred for me with my daughter. She was seven at the time. She jumped up on my lap while I was working on my computer. She ended up picking up a model brain I had sitting around. Not surprisingly she took the whole thing apart. She lifted up one piece after another and asked, “What does this do?”

With the occipital lobe, I said something like “it helps you to see”; for the temporal lobe, it helps you hear; for the cerebellum, it helps you coordinate what’s coming from all your senses, and so on. I was just giving her simple answers, because I was trying to work. At some point, though, I said, “No, let’s not do it this way. Let’s talk about how this actually happens.”

Then, I talked to her about how all of these parts never work alone. They always work together, but they work in specific ways together. As an analogy, I asked her to think about what body parts she would use to do a cartwheel. She said, “I need my hand, and that’s connected to my arm, and that’s connected to the rest of my body.” As I coaxed her through this investigation, she realized she needed all those parts and more, and she needed them to move together in a pattern that results in a cartwheel.

That’s a pretty good way to think about how the brain works. All of these different parts talk to each other and they need to act together for us to accomplish something we’re trying to do. She seemed to get that you can’t just think of the parts in isolation; you always have to think of how they work together with other parts and with the whole. So I think you can be simple and accessible and also correct, without introducing a lot of distortion.

Barry Boyce: I appreciate that, since science is supposed to be an honest exploration of what’s going on, not simply a way to find easy explanations for things that are hard to understand. In that regard, let’s talk about “executive function.”

As discussed above, strengthening this function—the inhibition, problem solving, decision making, reasoning activities identified as the work of the “upper brain,” the central lobes—is an attribute often ascribed to mindfulness. Is that a fully accurate story?

Jha: You get into trouble when you imply that what some people call the “upstairs brain”—referring to executive function—does all this beneficial regulating and balancing. Treating the frontal lobes almost like a character in a story—the good guy, the white knight—can lead to the view that everything that flows from strong executive control is beneficial. The reality is that someone with high working memory capacity and very good executive control could do some very bad things. Just because a particular brain network can do “good things” doesn’t mean that what it does is always for the good.

Saron: I would like to drill down a little deeper and ask what’s implied by “executive function.” We need to foster a critical perspective and always pay close attention to the narratives that emerge from the words we use. In the history of science, when there is no integrated theory, someone comes up with a term that simplifies understanding. That’s how a phrase like “executive function” is born and comes to mean our capacity to maintain behaviors in line with a goal. It becomes a convenient construct in institutionalized education, which began with an agenda of an individualist society needing workers. You wind up with this fuzzy warm feeling about accomplishing goals and being productive. And what’s the important thing we need to teach kids? To do what they’re told! To attain goals someone else sets! Contemplating, examining—those may go by the wayside.

Barry Boyce: So, when we choose to call this brain activity “executive function,” it’s loaded with all sorts of assumptions that go beyond what’s going on in the brain.

Saron: Yes. “Executive function” is not a fixed thing. It could be called by many names that would take your imagination to different places. It’s fractal. Labels and handles can sometimes obscure as much as elucidate. Science is a human social activity that undergoes changes based on the zeitgeist of the time. And the less and less we know about something, the more room people have to fantasize.

Barry Boyce: But don’t models also have a role to play?

Jha: I understand what Cliff is getting at, and I agree that as scientists we need that kind of awareness of the big picture and a humble acceptance of the limitations of what we’re embarking on, but I also want to be clear about why I think it’s useful to describe the brain to people at all.

My attempts are not an abstract educational exercise. They’re always meant to help people address the way they’re suffering right now. I recently met with a military leader who was trying to understand what was going on with his own mind wandering. He had a clear and present need, because the wandering was causing problems.

My interest in attention speaks to when people hold goals in their mind. How does the brain create goals and hold those goals? We can start by saying that the brain has an attention system because there’s far more in the environment than the brain can fully process. Evolution resulted in attention as a solution to the brain’s problem of information overload. It constrains what we deal with so we can more fully process it.

Evolution resulted in attention as a solution to the brain’s problem of information overload. Given that, how do you best utilize this resource and what do you do when it’s being hijacked by rumination, mind wandering, or distraction?

Given that, how do you best utilize this resource and what do you do when it’s being hijacked by rumination, mind wandering, or distraction? When we talk about the brain networks involved in being on- or off-task, we’re leaning on findings from my home field of cognitive neuroscience. Many studies have found that the brain organizes itself into functional networks that vary in their activity and in their interactions over time.

For example, we have the central executive network, which has to do with the ability to harness our resources to control what we’re processing more fully. The salience network involves being aware of what’s happening, internally and in the environment. The default mode network we think of as what the brain defaults to when you’re not attending to a task.

These three networks—and specific networks within these networks, and other networks as well—are part of the landscape we’re going to have to deal with when we consider how our brain’s information-processing resources are utilized for the task at hand—and what might be going on when someone experiences rumination, worry, or flashbacks due to PTSD. It’s not about good guys and bad guys. It’s about the dynamic, interactive ways various networks function in relation to each other as we experience and navigate the present moment.

Saron: That’s very clear, and I can see how that can be helpful. It’s several notches closer to reality than what you hear so often in popular depictions. What I think we can add to that picture, though, is that a very large proportion of the information processing we are doing is unconscious yet intelligent. It’s awe-inspiring to appreciate that we function with most all of our processing of the world below the level of conscious awareness. We open our eyes and we just see, without having to consciously construct what we see.

Barry Boyce: What’s your view on using brain measurement equipment to assess meditation, to detect when we’re in a good meditation zone?

Saron: These attempts present big problems for me. There was a plan for a program in Taiwan whose mission was to find brain signatures for com- passion and then measure how well participants in a contemplative training program were achieving that. To rely on neuroimaging to assess what is essentially our humanity is preposterous and scarily misguided.

I also find research using scans to assess meditation quality similarly suspect. Who decides exactly what is impermissible in meditation? How do we know which forms of mental activity in an individual are deleterious and which are not?

Let’s say the machine determines you’re having self-referential thoughts. If that is true, perhaps you internalized many different representational stances toward reality— ways you think about yourself to yourself —and because there’s nothing to do as you sit on your meditation cushion, these thought patterns start bubbling up into awareness. All the ways you’ve avoided psychological issues in your life start to emerge in consciousness. You have a memory, and that memory causes associations. Do we now label that bad meditation? Or is it merely a part of the introspective terrain being traversed in that sitting session?

When you give yourself over to the full depth of the intention behind your meditation practice—what motivated you to do it in the first place—it’s not likely about scoring points for being on your breath. A rich view of the “present moment” encompasses the ways we work with the temporal and spatial aspects of experience: times and places that are not in our immediate sensory eld but are nonetheless very significant for our sense of well-being and connection to the world.

The investigation has only just begun, and the tools we have—while advanced compared to decades ago—are still too primitive to serve as definitive measuring sticks for achievement in mind training.

Jha: We’re nowhere near to understanding the many facets of the suite of practices we are all introducing to people. The investigation has only just begun, and the tools we have—while advanced compared to decades ago—are still too primitive to serve as definitive measuring sticks for achievement in mind training. Furthermore, we don’t have any way of positing a “mindful brain.” We don’t have brain signatures for something called “mindfulness.” There are just too many processes at play to have one simplistic label.

That doesn’t mean we can’t use current neuroscience to help people get some insight into processes in the brain that may be problematic for them. The goal is not to see what a mindful brain looks like but to determine how information processing (e.g., within systems like attention) may be altered and perhaps improved by training in mindfulness exercises over days, weeks, or years.

Saron: Why do we need empirical validation for meditative experience, anyway? When it comes to the benefits of stopping and pausing, why can’t common sense prevail? Do you really need brain imaging to tell you that if you stop and smell the roses, you may su er less? Brain imaging results are loosely coupled to individuals’ actual experience. They can’t be used as a promise for what outcomes will result from practice. My 44 years of exposure to meditation teachings and practices has been essential to my understanding of myself, the ways I connect with others and engage in research. And that didn’t require any scientific data.

Barry Boyce: We commonly hear that “mindfulness changes the brain.” Don’t lots of things change the brain, since neurons that “fire together, wire together”?

Saron: That’s the fundamental law of neuroplasticity: Repeated activity makes it easy for the same activity to happen again. You could say the brain only works by changing. So if you repeatedly do something crappy, you get better at that, too!

Jha: If you keep ruminating about your worst experience, your brain will be very efficient at calling to mind that episode. Throughout the history of neuroscience, we’ve known brains alter and transform. The seminal studies of brain damage tell us the brain changes when you destroy parts of it through stroke or injury. These patients recover in some cases, meaning reorganization enables brain function to adapt in a better direction. What’s novel and innovative about brain training in general—and in particular for us, mindfulness meditation—is that beneficial changes don’t always have to be in response to some insult or injury. You may actually be able to engage in training to help optimize certain abilities.

Barry Boyce: How is training your attention with meditation different from an off-the-shelf brain training program designed to help you pay better attention? Or from engaging in a psychotherapy program to help you with your emotion regulation, such as anger management?

Jha: Right now there are no established brain training programs that have been able to overcome a really big problem: generalizability. You play a “brain-training” video game over and over again to improve memory, right? What seems to happen is people just get better at that game, but no one has shown that it increases general memory capacity, for example.

You don’t meditate to become an Olympian breath follower, so we hope to find out whether there is something about focusing on the breath that may generalize to being able to focus better on things other than the breath.

Meditation seems to be categorically different in that the brain-changing and performance bene ts do seem to generalize. We give people an attention test after they’ve completed a mindfulness training program and they perform better than people who got some other type of program. Perhaps mindfulness training promotes alterations in how specific brain networks are engaged and how these networks interact with each other.

Saron: It’s also possible that a person could get to similar places practicing some other skill with tremendous dedication to achieve a high degree of mastery. Think about the years of intense physical and mental training for an Olympic-level skier or a world- class violin soloist. The line between formal meditation practice and other focused activities blurs, but meditation can certainly be a complementary component. My wife says her cello practice and meditation practice are like two sides of the same coin. We have much more to learn about that. I also think there are styles of practice that may be more prone to fixation. There are many stories of people coming out of retreats unable to attend to daily living effectively. Neuroplasticity is a two-way street, and you can maladaptively reorganize so that daily life actually becomes more complex.

Jha: That’s why when we’re developing programs, we need to think in terms of a suite of practices. How do you set a program up so that it doesn’t cause people to hyper-fixate on certain practices that may become problematic for them? Jon Kabat-Zinn did a really good job in developing MBSR. He didn’t just put in concentration practices. He has open monitoring practices in there. He’s got not just breath awareness and sitting, but body scan, and the sequence it’s offered in may correct against fixating tendencies. In my lab, we take a very similar approach. Since the networks themselves are complex and their inter-relationships are equally complex, it seems unlikely that a single kind of training would be the silver bullet.

Saron: I advocate a balanced perspective on practice goals: There’s a whole spectrum from getting a little more focus and control of myself to achieving altered states of consciousness such as we read about in the autobiographies of great practitioners. Different goals yield different regimens, and different kinds of attention will need to be paid to those who take part.

Barry Boyce: In training people, it seems very important to keep ambitions in check. If we have a program trying to help the average person take mindful pauses in daily life, we don’t say this is suddenly going to lead to astounding life changes. Modest goals are fine. The more you elevate the promise, the more attention must be given to the protocols, because you don’t get the benefits of training for nothing. Results are in proportion to time and effort.

Saron: That’s a principle that should become widespread.

Barry Boyce: Some people say mind wandering is our biggest problem; others say it’s just our mind at play.

Jha: We need to be careful with the terminology. When I refer to mind wandering, I mean having off-task thoughts during an ongoing task. That can certainly have deleterious effects. The other version is when you’re not trying to complete a particular task at hand, but rather you are allowing the free ow of conscious experience. That can look an awful lot like what I just referred to, but there is a critical difference: It’s consciously engaged and doesn’t have the kind of negative outcomes that can occur when you’re asleep at the switch.

That’s mind wandering with awareness. You value the content that emerges along the way—discovering things you didn’t know you were looking for.

Saron: This is where creativity comes in. You’re allowing for the emergence of that unconscious intelligence I referred to earlier. You don’t cut off access to it. That’s mind wandering with awareness. You value the content that emerges along the way—discovering things you didn’t know you were looking for. It gets back to the awe I was talking about earlier. I encourage everyone to look at something National Geographic did with the work of Je Leichtman and his lab at Harvard. It’s very high-resolution 3-D images of teeny tiny portions of mouse visual cortex. It’s breathtaking to look at all that’s going on there in a 4-minute video narrated by Jeff. He talks about coming to a point where you relax and say “OK. I don’t get it!”

When Leichtman asked his students to consider if knowing everything possible about the brain is a mile, how far have we traveled? Their answers tended to range from a quarter-mile to three-quarters of a mile. His answer: 3 inches. Our mandate in life as scientists is to be drenched in noncomprehension and to be suspicious of when we really think we know how things work.

That points to the irony of conforming mindfulness training to a tinker toy version of reality, instead of something that could suggest the possibility of motivating people to investigate the vastness of their own mind. As Francisco Varela suggested, that is where science and contemplative practice can meet: as complementary paths of deep inquiry.

Vinod Menon once said to me at a UC Davis MIND Institute talk in Sacramento that “as our methods improve, our models will completely change, and our current models will look infantile.” Having been part of right brain/left brain dogma 40 years ago, I can attest to that.

Jha: My son, who is a big physics kid and appreciates all that we’ve learned in the long history of physics, asked whether I think we’ll know everything there is to know about the brain in 200 years. If I tell him “no,” his response is something like “Why are you bothering?” And yet, we do bother, because it’s like a practice: You hold in mind those open questions all the time, as you continue to focus on learning what you can as it presents itself to you now.

Not So Fast: Misleading Brain “Facts”

We only use 10% of our brains. Amishi Jha says she still hears this all the time. Yet it is entirely made up and has, in fact, never been espoused by any scientist.

I must be “right-brained” since I have a creative personality. While lateralized brain regions are involved in specific processes such as aspects of language, and it is well known that certain brain structures differ in size in the right and left sides of our brain, the idea that creativity vs. rationality in one’s personality is driven by a “right-brained” or “left-brained” dominance remains unsupported. The brain’s hemispheres are highly interconnected and work together for complex processing.

Crossword puzzles will keep my brain from aging. Crossword puzzles may be fun (for some, anyway), but doing them is not protective for the brain. This is because the puzzles engage only a specific set of processes. While doing crosswords may make you better at them, there is no evidence that there will be broader benefits to other processes, such as memory or problem solving.

The brain develops into adulthood, and then your brain cells just die out. More than 100 years of neuroscience failed to find brain cell birth and growth in adult humans. Then in 1998 the discovery was made that new brain cells do form in specific brain structures within the adult brain, such as the hippocampus, a structure involved in storing memories. Thus, it seems that at least some parts of the brain can regenerate cells through-out the lifespan.

Neuorplasticitiy only occurs with meditation. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to reorganize its neural connections and functions. This can occur in response to physical injury to the brain, such as trauma, tumor, stroke, or disease, as connections between cells change to compensate for missing or compromised brain regions. Neuroplasticity also occurs in response to new experiences or situations, such as learning a new skill.

FMRI images present picture of how the brain works. Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a breakthrough technology that has allowed more precise anatomical pictures for use in medicine; functional MRI is imaging that moves through time and has been used extensively in brain activity research. While the images it puts out are ashier than more direct methods, such as measuring electrical activity, the data is extremely tricky to interpret, requiring a lot of complex statistics. It also opens the door to a trap in thinking called “reverse inference”: looking at apparent brain activity shown by the fMRI in a particular region and making an assumption about what is going on there based on what other research has shown about that region. It’s an educated guess, but it does not qualify as conclusive evidence of a particular kind of brain activity. In short, fMRI must be interpreted cautiously. What you see is not what you get.

How it Works: Networks vs. Machine Parts

We often hear people say that one sub-organ of the brain is responsible for x function and another for y. However, observations of brain activity have shown that this idea that different parts of the brain work independently to perform a given function—the modular paradigm—is inaccurate. The story we frequently hear that the amygdala is the emotion center and the prefrontal cortex performs executive functions unfairly depicts the brain almost as a collection of machine parts. It may have some usefulness as a metaphor for how different types of brain function might interrelate, but it presents a very limited mechanical view of the brain—which misses the dynamic quality of brain activity and is not good science education.

A metaphor that’s more prevalent among neuroscientists today is the network view of the brain: “dynamic interconnected sets of systems (subsystems, and neural nodes) that work together to carry out certain kinds of activity,” in Amishi Jha’s words.

The networks consist of relationships between an array of brain regions formed through repeated communication among the parts as we navigate through life. Three large-scale brain networks are talked about in the literature today as they relate to meditation:

Salience Network (SN). The SN has been likened to an air traffic controller. Our nervous system is bombarded with a massive volume of sensory inputs. The SN l filters and sorts the input, operating at two levels. The first, described as “fast, automatic, bottom-up,” processes features of our environment we’ve learned or instinctively know are important (i.e., salient). For example, quickly noticing ice on a sidewalk that might cause us to fall down. At the second level, the salience network allows us to focus our attention in order to achieve a goal.

Central-Executive Network (CEN). The CEN’s role has to do with higher-order cognition and attentional control. It’s what’s at work when we make decisions about focusing and sustaining attention, what we choose to place in working memory (what we need to hold in mind to stay on task), and problem solving. When we say we’re “thinking hard” about something, there is major involvement from this network.

Default Mode Network (DMN). Perhaps the trickiest of the networks to describe and understand, the DMN is often talked about as what the brain “defaults” to when it doesn’t have a task at hand. It processes self-monitoring, autobiographical information, and social cognition (roughly speaking, determining relations with others). Spontaneous mind wandering and self-talk are associated with the DMN. The fact that the DMN includes internal dialogue and mind wandering has caused it to be described as both a font of creativity and the locus of problematic rumination.

Beyond the Brain: Where is My Mind?

While the study of thought and thinking has been dominated by neuroscience in recent decades, in a talk at TED 2017, Anil Seth, professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, talked about how the study of human experience crosses many disciplines, including “neuro- science, physics, virtual reality, mathematics, psychology, psychiatry, neurology, cognitive science, and philosophy,” to name a few.

When we range beyond the pure study of “the brain,” we enter the realm of the mind and consciousness. While the brain and the nervous system are part of anatomy, the mind cannot be found. How it is that we are conscious— that we experience and know—is not something we will ever find in a brain scan. Also, as Anil Seth points out in his TED Talk, we are not passive recipients of a world that is being shown to us like a movie; instead we “actively generate the world.” The simplest study of optical illusions easily demonstrates that we are making up the world as we go along.

Cliff Saron emphasizes that when we are talking about the brain and the mind, it helps to not limit our thinking to activity that takes place in an organ in our skull. Mental activity joins us together with the world and its inhabitants in a vast web of connections. As Anil Seth says, when we study how minds and brains work, we quickly see that we are “part of, not apart from” the world around us. Therefore, in contemporary philosophy of mind, many people like to emphasize cognition as something that doesn’t simply reside in one organ in our head. And they shift the emphasis using a schema known as 4-E Cognition:

Embodied. The brain operates within and throughout our body.

Embedded. That bodily system is embedded in, connected to, and part of an environment.

Extended. That environment extends through time and space, meaning it doesn’t have fixed boundaries and it keeps changing.

Enactive. We are not passive cognitive processors of a predetermined reality; we “enact” reality through the actions we perform.

In very simple terms, the reality you experience and create in different settings—in a meditation room, a busy airport, a forest, an office building—will be very different. The brain shapes and is shaped by our bodies and our surroundings. Therefore it does not make sense to talk about your brain apart from the environment it is intimately part of and the ways we interact.

This article appeared in the June 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

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