BY: Andy Fraser (editor) (NOTE: Each chapter is written by a different expert)
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4 Thoughts
1. What Meditation Is & Its Overall Goal
“Broadly speaking, the many different schools of meditation share two components. The first is shamatha (sometimes, samatha), which can be translated as tranquillity, peace, or inner calm, either mental or physical. The second component of most meditation practices is vipassana (or vipashyana). In the ancient language of Pali, vipassana means penetrating insight, but we can also give it a more modern translation: mindfulness, observing things as they are, not as we would—or would not—like them to be.” - Dr. Frédéric Rosenfeld
So across all schools of meditation, two general themes emerge: tranquility and mindfulness.
Aside from these general themes, it is critical to note that “there is no single way of meditating. Meditation should really be written in the plural, because there are so many meditations—different approaches, perspectives, and practices.” It is for this reason that I consider all “breathwork” to be a subset of meditation…but that’s just me 😊
(Interestingly, they note that for shamatha—which brings about tranquility—the breath is common to all spiritual traditions…but I digress…).
Regardless of the methods we use to meditate, the end goal is the same: to tame the mind. As Sogyal Rinpoche puts it, “The mind follows past habits, anticipates the future, and in the present gets entangled and lost in whatever thoughts and emotions happen to arise. Left to its own devices, it can lead us into intense suffering. However, if we can tame or conquer our minds, then nothing can frighten or upset us. The Buddha explained that anxiety, fear, and suffering only arise in minds that are in the grip of delusion and distraction. In other words, there is nothing to fear except our own untamed mind.”
And once we begin using meditation to tame our minds, it can lead to some pretty remarkable healing, which we’ll cover next.
2. Well-Being, Telomerase, and Adaptive Functioning
One chapter of the book described “The Shamatha Project,” one of the most extensive studies on meditation. It assessed people taking part in an extensive three-month meditation retreat. There were many interesting findings, but there were three that stood out:
1. Meditation Gradually Improved Well-being
“First, our results demonstrated that retreatants’ daily reports of mood and psychological traits are consistent with improved well-being.” – Clifford Saron, Ph.D.
This wasn’t simply because they were on a retreat. Quite the contrary, their analysis indicated that the participants were gradually learning to accept the conditions of their minds through meditation practice.
2. Meditation Increased Telomerase
“…measured telomerase levels and found that the control group had 30 percent less telomerase than the retreat group at the end of the first three-month retreat … these telomerase levels were related to individual differences in psychological change over the course of the retreat, providing a strong link between biological changes and psychological function.” – Clifford Saron, Ph.D.
Because telomerase plays a crucial role in keeping cells alive, these results also hint at meditation’s ability to keep us young.
3. Meditation Improved Adaptive Functioning
“An increase in adaptive functioning means there has been an increase in well-being, mindfulness, empathy, and ego resiliency and a decrease in depression, anxiety, neuroticism, and difficulties in emotion regulation.” – Clifford Saron, Ph.D.
That sounds pretty amazing to me. Crucially, researchers also found that these changes were associated with changes in “response inhibition,” which measures our ability to resist immediate emotional reactions and, instead, speak and act from a grounded position.
Overall, these results indicate that meditation is indeed helping to tame the mind.
3. The Emotional Benefits of Meditation
“Thus, meditation can make a huge difference for emotions in several ways. One is this aspect of calming down, and the other is mindfulness, because it can play a role right from the very beginning in how you encounter events, in how you might typically respond to certain situations. Rather than having an automatic, quick appraisal, maybe you can slow that down and see that the situation is not threatening.” – Erika Rosenberg, Ph.D. (all below quotes too)
Because the goal of meditation is taming the mind, it is perhaps no surprise that some of the biggest benefits are for our emotional health. As stated above, it seems to help in two ways.
First, it calms us. “If you are calm, if the mind is clear, and if you have cultivated mindfulness, you can make more choices about what you can do once this emotion has arisen.” (This is essentially the response inhibition and adaptive functioning we learned in the last thought.)
Second, being mindful allows us to respond thoughtfully and appropriately to emotions. That is, rather than have emotions about emotions, we can slow down and distinguish real threats from trivial ones that we’ve created in our minds.
Thus, it’s not about removing negative emotions entirely; it’s about seeing our emotions calmly and clearly and acting from the right place. Stated differently, meditation gives us choice:
“If I had to say in one or two sentences what the benefits of meditation were for your whole life—for your emotional life in particular—it is that meditative practice helps introduce the element of choice. … We cannot necessarily control what the outside world offers us, but we can control how we respond to it. That is the element of choice, and choice creates freedom.”
4. Brain Changes from Meditation
“To summarize, our research on meditators has revealed structural changes in regions of the brain that are important for emotion regulation, empathy, and self-referential processing. Furthermore, changes in stress levels correlated with changes in amygdala gray matter density. These data provide important information on how meditation works, and lend considerable evidence to the claims of meditators that practice improves their mood, their emotion regulation capacity, and, in particular, their ability to handle stressful situations.” – Sara Lazar, Ph.D. (all below quotes too)
I probably don’t need to add anything to this section besides that perfect paragraph, but here are a few more neat details.
Gray matter is where neurons in the brain communicate. Lazar and colleagues discovered that, in the brains of meditators, there is more gray matter in the insula, a part of the brain “involved in the integration of senses, emotions, and thoughts.” That sounds pretty useful : )
Gray matter was also thicker in the prefrontal cortex. This has significant implications for aging: “Interestingly, when we plotted each person’s cortical thickness in this region against their age, the graph suggested that meditation may help to slow down or even prevent this normal age-related decline in thickness.” This again hints at meditation’s ability to keep us young.
Lastly, perhaps most significantly, they found that changes weren’t just occurring in long-term meditators. People who took part in an 8-week MBSR course showed decreased gray matter thickness in their amygdala (which correlated with less perceived stress) and increased gray matter in their hippocampus and insula.
Altogether, it doesn’t take long to make meaningful changes to our brains with meditation.
1 Life-Changing Idea
How to End a Breathing, Meditation, Reading, or Really Any Contemplative Practice
“[E]ven if I have been distracted, and even if I have retained just a fraction of what I have read here, is there something that has moved me, and that I would like to keep? Is there something that I would like to take with me and use to nourish myself?” – Dr. Cathy Blanc
It says “of what I have read here” because it was presented at the end of the chapter. But it can be: “a fraction of what I have practiced here” or “a fraction of what I contemplated here” or “a fraction of the calm mind I have” or “a fraction of the peace I obtained,” and on and on.
Then, silently wish to yourself that you can put whatever resonated with you into practice so you can bring more peace, humanity, and love to the world.
Do this right now with the information you’ve read here. Even if you skimmed or got distracted, is there something that moved? Can any ideas in this 411 nourish you physically, mentally, or spiritually? We’ll start ending all our 411s like this 👏
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P.S. If the above passage didn’t move you, here’s another beautiful way to end a session: “Now take a moment to check in with yourself. How does it feel to be like this? Does it feel natural? Is this a way you would want to continue to be in your life?” – Rosamund Oliver
1 Stack of Memorable Quotes
“To know that the mind is the root of everything is to realize that we are ultimately responsible for both our own happiness and our own suffering. It is in our hands.” – Sogyal Rinpoche
“Sometimes, it is true, genuinely dramatic, traumatic things happen in our lives. But a lot of the suffering that creates the physiological effects of stress that have a negative impact on our mental and physical health is just about grasping at and revisiting trivial unpleasant events.” – Erika Rosenberg, Ph.D.
“This is actually very common in the Tibetan tradition, to welcome emotions as opportunities for transformation and growth. ‘Emotions show us where to direct our attention. Rather than obscure the path, they can clarify and sharpen it.’” – Erika Rosenberg, Ph.D.
“We are what we think, all that we are arises with our thoughts, with our thoughts we make the world. Speak or act with a pure mind, and happiness will follow you as your shadow, unshakable.” — Buddha
“The poet Milton summed this up in Paradise Lost:
‘The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’”
“Water, if you don’t stir it, will become clear;
The mind, left unaltered, will find its own natural peace, well-being, happiness, and bliss.” – Tibetan Saying
“What is truly extraordinary is that not altering our mind brings about in us the greatest change of all.” – Sogyal Rinpoche
“This is a common experience for those coming to meditation and meditation practices. They begin practice looking for stress reduction, or to increase their brain size, or to bring some other tangible benefit to their life. But they start to realize that these practices do much more, that they enrich their lives in inexplicable ways and help them in ways that they didn’t even know they needed to be helped.” – Sara Lazar, Ph.D.
“What if learning how to inhabit silence and stillness and awareness—especially when you do so with kindness, with patience, and with self-compassion—is itself healing?” – Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.
“It is not even logical, but it seems that when the human mind is open, compassion is the most natural thing to arise, and I think that is a key part of what we call mindfulness training.” – Dr. Edel Maex
“For example, when Varela put on an EEG cap, which uses electrodes to measure electrical activity in the brain, monks from the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala laughed and said, “How could we be measuring anything to do with the mind by putting a cap on the head? The mind is here!”—pointing to their hearts.” – Clifford Saron, Ph.D.