Meditation works. While it is not a panacea, science suggests it can help make you calmer, more focused, and less emotionally reactive.
Recent studies suggest meditation may decrease the risk of heart disease, boost the brain’s resilience in the face of suffering, and promote healthier aging.
If you can get past the cultural baggage, though, what you’ll find is that meditation is simply exercise for your brain. It’s a proven technique for preventing the voice in your head from leading you around by the nose.
As I sat on the couch in this cozy Upper East Side office, I insisted to the kindly, sweater-wearing shrink that I didn’t feel blue at all. He explained that it is entirely possible to be depressed without being conscious of it. When you’re cut off from your emotions, he said, they often manifest in your body.
I had read the research showing that regular churchgoers tended to be happier, in part because having a sense that the world is infused with meaning and that suffering happens for a reason helped them deal more successfully with life’s inevitable humiliations.
“Your demons may have been ejected from the building, but they’re out in the parking lot, doing push-ups.”)
Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present. We “live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation,” he wrote. We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during which we will certainly be fantasizing. But as Tolle pointed out, it is, quite literally, always Now. (He liked to capitalize the word.) The present moment is all we’ve got.
“When you have one foot in the future and the other in the past, you piss on the present.”
“You simply observe that it’s another thought. And by knowing that it’s another thought, you’re not totally identified with the thought.”
“Make the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment. And imagine living your whole life like that, where always this moment is never quite right, not good enough because you need to get to the next one. That is continuous stress.”
“Which is more exciting to you? Reality or memory?” I paused, considered it, and said, “I wish I could say reality, but it’s probably memory.”
“The fact that you exist is a highly statistically improbable event, and if you are not perpetually surprised by the fact that you exist you don’t deserve to be here.”
What I knew of Buddhism was limited to the following: it was from Asia somewhere; the Buddha was overweight; and his followers believed in things like karma, rebirth, and enlightenment. Epstein made clear, though, that you didn’t have to buy into any of the above to derive benefit from Buddhism. The Buddha himself didn’t claim to be a god or a prophet. He specifically told people not to adopt any of his teachings until they’d test-driven the material themselves. He wasn’t even trying to start a religion, per se.
According to the official story, the Buddha was born about five hundred years before Christ in northeast India, in what is now Nepal. As legend has it, his mother was spontaneously impregnated, in what sounded like the Buddhist version of the Immaculate Conception. She died seven days after the birth, leaving the boy, whose name was Siddhartha, to be raised by his father, a regional king.
As best I could understand it, the Buddha’s main thesis was that in a world where everything is constantly changing, we suffer because we cling to things that won’t last.
The route to true happiness, he argued, was to achieve a visceral understanding of impermanence, which would take you off the emotional roller coaster and allow you to see your dramas and desires through a wider lens. Waking up to the reality of our situation allows you to, as the Buddhists say, “let go,” to drop your “attachments.” As one Buddhist writer put it, the key is to recognize the “wisdom of insecurity.”
modern Buddhists, including Dr. Epstein, still believed—was that it was possible to achieve “the end of suffering,” to reach Nirvana.
My consumption of Buddhist books was paying off. Throughout the weekend, I made a deliberate effort to pause, look around, and savor things while they lasted.
It was a rigorous brain exercise: rep after rep of trying to tame the runaway train of the mind. The repeated attempt to bring the compulsive thought machine to heel was like holding a live fish in your hands. Wrestling your mind to the ground, repeatedly hauling your attention back to the breath in the face of the inner onslaught required genuine grit. This was a badass endeavor.
Now I started to see life’s in-between moments—sitting at a red light, waiting for my crew to get set up for an interview—as a chance to focus on my breath, or just take in my surroundings.
In a nutshell, mindfulness is the ability to recognize what is happening in your mind right now—anger, jealousy, sadness, the pain of a stubbed toe, whatever—without getting carried away by it.
The idea is that, once you’ve mastered things like itches, eventually you’ll be able to apply mindfulness to thoughts and emotions. This nonjudgmental noting—Oh, that’s a blast of self-pity . . . Oh, that’s me ruminating about work—is supposed to sap much of the power, the emotional charge, out of the contents of consciousness.
The Buddhists had a helpful analogy here. Picture the mind like a waterfall, they said: the water is the torrent of thoughts and emotions; mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall. Again, elegant theory—but, easier said than done.
“Mindfulness gives us a way to examine our self-hatred without trying to make it go away, without trying to love it particularly.” Just being mindful of it, he said, could be “tremendously liberating.” The idea of leaning into what bothered us struck me as radical, because our reflex is usually to flee, to go buy something, eat something, or get faded on polypharmacy. But, as the Buddhists say, “The only way out is through.” Another analogy: When a big wave is coming at you, the best way not to get pummeled is to dive right in.
She nailed the method for applying mindfulness in acute situations, albeit with a somewhat dopey acronym: RAIN. R: recognize A: allow I: investigate N: non-identification “Recognize” was self-explanatory. Using my David Westin example, in those moments after our—even in the best light—quite ambivalent meeting, job number one was simply to acknowledge my feelings. “It’s like agreeing to pause in the face of what’s here, and just acknowledge the actuality,” said Brach. The first step is admitting it. “Allow” is where you lean into it. The Buddhists were always talking about how you have to “let go,” but what they really meant is “let it be.” Or, as Brach put it in her inimitable way, “offer the inner whisper of ‘yes.’” The third step—“investigate”—is where things got truly practical. Sticking with the Westin example—after I’ve acknowledged my feelings and let them be, the next move would be to check out how they’re affecting my body. Is it making my face hot, my chest buzzy, my head throb? This strategy sounded intuitively correct to me, especially given that I was a guy whose undiagnosed postwar depression had manifest itself in flulike symptoms. The final step—“non-identification”—meant seeing that just because I was feeling angry or jealous or fearful, that did not render me a permanently angry or jealous person. These were just passing states of mind.
Seeing a problem clearly does not prevent you from taking action, he explained. Acceptance is not passivity. Sometimes we are justifiably displeased. What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, “respond” rather than simply “react.” In the Buddhist view, you can’t control what comes up in your head; it all arises out of a mysterious void. We spend a lot of time judging ourselves harshly for feelings that we had no role in summoning. The only thing you can control is how you handle it.
Once you’ve built up enough concentration, they say, you can drop your obsessive focus on the breath and just “open up” to whatever is there. And that’s what’s happening right now. Each “object” that “arises” in my mind, I focus on with what feels like total ease and clarity until it’s replaced by something else. I’m not trying; it’s just happening.
The Buddha’s signature pronouncement—“Life is suffering”—is the source of a major misunderstanding, and by extension, a major PR problem. It makes Buddhism seem supremely dour. Turns out, though, it’s all the result of a translation error. The Pali word dukkha doesn’t actually mean “suffering.” There’s no perfect word in English, but it’s closer to “unsatisfying” or “stressful.” When the Buddha coined his famous phrase, he wasn’t saying that all of life is like being chained to a rock and having crows peck out your innards. What he really meant was something like, “Everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won’t last.”
How many times have we heard from people who got rich or famous and it wasn’t enough? Rock stars with drug problems. Lottery winners who kill themselves. There’s actually a term for this—“hedonic adaptation.” When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations, and yet the primordial void goes unfilled.
“Is this useful?” It’s a simple, elegant corrective to my “price of security” motto. It’s okay to worry, plot, and plan, he’s saying—but only until it’s not useful anymore.
“It’s amazing,” I said, “because everything we experience in this world goes through one filter—our minds—and we spend very little time bothering to see how it works.”
We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these “if only” thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.
The old conventional wisdom was that once we reached adulthood, our brain stopped changing. This orthodoxy was now replaced with a new paradigm, called neuroplasticity. The brain, it turns out, is constantly changing in response to experience. It’s possible to sculpt your brain through meditation just as you build and tone your body through exercise—to grow your gray matter the way doing curls grows your bicep.
In fact, I looked into it and found there was science to suggest that pausing could be a key ingredient in creativity and innovation. Studies showed that the best way to engineer an epiphany was to work hard, focus, research, and think about a problem—and then let go. Do something else. That didn’t necessarily mean meditate, but do something that relaxes and distracts you; let your unconscious mind go to work, making connections from disparate parts of the brain.
Most Americans didn’t brush their teeth, for example, until after World War II, when soldiers were ordered to maintain dental hygiene. Exercise didn’t become popular until the latter half of the twentieth century, after science had clearly showed its benefits. In the 1950s, if you had told people you were going running, they would have asked who was chasing you. The difference with meditation was that if it actually took hold, the impact would go far beyond improving muscle tone or fighting tooth decay. Mindfulness, I had come to believe, could, in fact, change the world.
In other words, practicing compassion appeared to be helping their bodies handle stress in a better way. This was consequential because frequent or persistent release of cortisol can lead to heart disease, diabetes, dementia, cancer, and depression.
Acknowledging other people’s basic humanity is a remarkably effective way of shooing away the swarm of self-referential thoughts that buzz like gnats around our heads.
“When faced with something like this,” she said, “often it’s not the unknown that scares us, it’s that we think we know what’s going to happen—and that it’s going to be bad. But the truth is, we really don’t know.”
Striving is fine, as long as it’s tempered by the realization that, in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control. If you don’t waste your energy on variables you cannot influence, you can focus much more effectively on those you can. When you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed, but you are not attached to the outcome—so that if you fail, you will be maximally resilient, able to get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fray. That, to use a loaded term, is enlightened self-interest.
Even the much-maligned “comparing mind” can be useful. I compared myself to Joseph, Mark, and Sharon, and it made me happier. I compared myself to Bianca and it made me nicer. I compared myself to Bill Weir, David Muir, Chris Cuomo, David Wright, et al., and it upped my game.
the price of security is insecurity—that
You will get better at not being carried away by your passing emotional squalls; you will learn—maybe 10% of the time, maybe more—to respond, not react. We now know that happiness, resilience, and compassion are skills, susceptible to training. You don’t have to resign yourself to your current level of well-being, or wait for your life circumstances to change; you can take the reins yourself.
“Noting,” as it’s called, can also be useful when something strong—such as itches, pain, worries, or hunger—comes along and drags your attention away from the breath. The act of applying a label—“planning,” “throbbing,” “fantasizing”—can objectify whatever’s going on, making it much less concrete and monolithic. (Don’t get too caught up in thumbing through your internal thesaurus for the right word. Make a note and move on.)
Here are some books I like: On meditation Real Happiness, Sharon Salzberg Insight Meditation, Joseph Goldstein On Buddhism and mindfulness in general Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, Dr. Mark Epstein Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor
Normally, for example, when someone cuts you off in traffic or on line at Starbucks, you automatically think, I’m pissed. Instantaneously, you actually become pissed. Mindfulness allows you to slow that process down. Sometimes, of course, you’re right to be pissed. The question is whether you are going to react mindlessly to that anger or respond thoughtfully. Mindfulness provides space between impulse and action,
“Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel.” It’s amazing how many times I can hear this message and yet forget it when I sit down to meditate. You don’t need to achieve some special state; you just need to be as aware as possible of whatever’s happening right now. This is what the Buddhists mean by “letting go”—better translated as “letting be.”