One of the classic definitions of mindfulness is that it helps us not cling to what is pleasant
and not condemn what is unpleasant. An example would be if you're driving in New York City
and someone cuts you off; that's unpleasant and one would instinctively have an angry
response. But that's happening all the time and if you have an angry response too often
then you become a nightmare yourself. So what mindfulness is teaching is that the stimulus,
which is someone cutting you off, is different, it's distinct from your emotional reaction
to that thing. So someone could cut you off, you could feel the anger but you don't have
to act on the anger. So instead of being driven by your reactions there's a little bit of
room where you can choose to be a different kind of person. So mindfulness basically helps
us tolerate the aspects of the external world and the internal world that otherwise are
hard to face.
There are basically two kinds of meditation, one, which is a concentration practice, you
focus your attention on a neutral sensation like the feeling of the breath coming in and
out of the nostrils or like the repetition of a sound or what's called a mantra. And
every time the mind wanders, whenever you notice that it's wondered , that might be
five minutes, ten minutes later when you're lost in thought, but at a certain point you
realize oh wait I'm not watching the breath anymore, then you bring your mind back to
the breath. That's called a concentration or a one pointed practice. And that's the
beginning level of mindfulness. When you really start practicing mindfulness, instead of bringing
the mind back every time to a central object, you let the attention go wherever the mind
goes. So instead of paying attention just to the breath or the mantra you pay attention
to sounds, you pay attention thoughts, you pay attention to the feeling, you pay attention
to memories, you pay attention to worries, to anxieties, to anger, to joy, you pay attention
to whatever passes through your mind moment to moment. And then what you start to see
is that oh everything is changing all the time and you learn to pay attention more to
process than to content.
It's really only in the past 50/60 years that the medical establishment has been exposed
at all to what mindfulness is. And for 20/30 of those years it was like just a new age
thing. It was on the periphery. And only through the work of a couple of people like John Kabat-Zinn
has mindfulness come into the medical establishment. There are a lot of studies that are being
done now that are showing the benefit of mindfulness for all kinds of conditions. And some old
colleagues of mine have done some very good work showing that the steady practice of mindfulness
light up areas of the brain that have to do with modulating emotional reactivity. So I
think there's beginning evidence that the brain is plastic, more plastic than we initially
thought and that what you feed into the brain actually changes the architecture of the brain
so that it's possible to promote, to develop the areas of the brain that are there for
kindness, you know, for altruistic feeling and for the regulation difficult emotions.