Mainstreaming Mindfulness
The Emotional Life of Your Brain
by Richard Davidson
Hudson Street Press 2012; 304 pp., $25.95 (cloth)
A Mindful Nation
by Tim Ryan
Hay House 2012; 203 pp., $19.95 (cloth)
Search Inside Yourself
by Chade-Meng Tan
HarperOne 2012; 288 pp., $26.99 (cloth)
Reviewed by ED HALLIWELL
 A
story told by Mark Williams, director of the Oxford Mindfulness
Centre, illustrates the dim view of contemplative practice that was once
common in health care circles. During the early days of
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), the course he developed with
John Teasdale and Zindel Segal to help people prone to depression,
Williams recalls being accosted by a colleague at a psychology
conference. “Is it really true what I hear?” the colleague spluttered.
“That John Teasdale is meditating with his patients?” “It is true,” replied Mark, “and so am I.” The man, he says, was “clearly appalled.”
These
days, such a reaction would be highly unlikely in the medical
mainstream. Programs that teach mindfulness, like MBCT, have the weight
of scientific evidence on their side, and people who would once have
scoffed are eulogizing the healthgiving effects of meditation.
The
change arguably began when Jon Kabat-Zinn started teaching a stress
reduction course at the University of Massachusetts in 1979, bringing
his Buddhist training to a context where it seemed more skilful to teach
meditation in a distinctly secular way. Out went religious robes,
gurus, and shrines, and in came raisin-eating and randomized controlled
trials. As the approach spread, meditative practice shed some of its
hippie, New Age associations, and flourished, perhaps in its essence, as
a practical, testable method for the relief of suffering.
Scientific
studies of the courses, showing many benefits to well-being, started to
bring an impressive credibility to what had previously been seen by
many people as weird or flaky. Peer-reviewed literature on mindfulness
has been growing in volume for years, and this is now being matched by
mainstream publications. The pedigree of some book authors is
interesting, too. It’s not just meditation teachers, therapists, or even
celebrities like Goldie Hawn who are urging us to be mindful nowadays,
but politicians, corporate whiz kids, and professors of neuroscience.
The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect The Way You Think, Feel, and Live—And How You Can Change Them is
a career autobiography of Richard Davidson, the world’s preeminent
neuroscientist of meditation. His unfolding story offers a fascinating
marker of how times have changed over a working life. In one of the many
enchanting anecdotes that bring life to the book, Davidson recalls the
disapproving reaction of one professor to his first published study,
which revealed that experience in meditation was associated with less
anxiety and improved attention. “Richie,” he was informed sternly “if
you wish to have a successful career in science, this is not a very good
way to begin.”
Faced
with such resistance, Davidson parked his curiosity about the
mechanisms of meditation and turned to examining the brain signatures of
well-being and distress, hoping to find clues to a healthier, happier
existence. This quest formed the core of his early work, and he was able
to establish that people with an upbeat, engaged approach to life also
tend to show more activity in the left prefrontal cortex of the brain,
as measured by EEG readings. Meanwhile, those who are less sunny in
their manner, tending more toward anxiety, depression, and an avoidant
style, have less activity in the left prefrontal cortex and more on the
right side of the brain.
Contrary
to prevailing scientific orthodoxy, Davidson also found that these
markers of well-being were not set in stone. Whereas it had been thought
that mental disposition was basically fixed, and that people were more
or less stuck with the outlook they’re born with, Davidson’s research
suggested that emotional style is far more malleable, sometimes changing
greatly over the course of a lifetime. This was significant, because it
heralded the possibility that we can take conscious action to change
our temperament, a hypothesis that would have seemed barely credible to
scientists when Davidson began his work.
These
discoveries formed a platform from which he could return to the study
of meditation. By this time a respected professor at the University of
Wisconsin, and inspired by a growing wealth of research that showed
remarkable plasticity in the human brain (with functional and even
structural changes occurring in response to events), Davidson started
applying himself to the question of what kind of
activity might promote neural well-being. More specifically, as even
mental events— thoughts and emotions—had been found to change the brain
and its workings, could it be that mental exercise might help the mind
be happy? This, of course, is a claim traditionally made for meditation,
and since the early 1990s, Davidson has rigorously tested the
assertion.
The
results have helped transform meditation from scientific pariah to
darling of the day, simultaneously giving birth to the field of
contemplative neuroscience. From the study of expert meditators (those
happy yogis who have clocked more than 10,000 hours of practice) as well
as novices, Davidson’s lab has produced paper after paper suggesting
that training in mindfulness and compassion leads the brain toward
greater well-being, just as physical exercise trains the body to
fitness. Stressed workers who took an eight-week mindfulness course
showed a tripling in left-side brain activation, Tibetan monks in the
lab produced more gamma activity (a sign of neural synchrony) than ever
before reported in the literature, and compassion practice reduced
distress and increased meditators’ desire to help others.
Written with journalist Sharon Begley, The Emotional Life of Your Brain presents
sometimes dense material with verve, and the interweaving of Davidson’s
personal narrative lends a welcome structure to proceedings. If it
sometimes feels that the identification of six distinct emotional styles
is a distraction from the main story (albeit an empirically
demonstrable one), then the short self-help section at the end brings
things neatly into harmony (the advice, in summary, is: “Meditate, it’s
good for you”). We’re still near the beginning of a scientific journey
to understand what’s going on in the brain when we train in these
practices, but whatever happens next, Davidson’s shoulders will be ones
that future researchers stand on.
Without scientific work like Davidson’s, it’s difficult to imagine Congressman Tim Ryan’s A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit getting
written. It’s quite the remarkable document: a sitting member of the
United States Congress comes out as a meditator, and puts a passionate
case for placing mindfulness at the heart of public life. A Mindful Nation begins
with a personal account of Ryan’s own journey into meditation, and
expands to advocate ardently for its adoption into fields as widespread
as health care, education, the military, economics, and the environment.
Ryan’s
argument is strongly grounded in research, and that’s what may make it
persuasive in a culture where this could be dismissed as off-the-wall,
soft, or even un-American. Ryan doesn’t mince his words, stating that if
mindfulness brings the benefits that science suggests, it would be a
dereliction of his duty not to shout about it from the political
rooftops, using his position to enlist the support of government.
“Although it may seem like an unusual way to approach serious practical
problems,” he writes, “I am convinced that our capacity to be mindful is
the natural pathway to addressing so many of the difficulties we face.”
Taking
a tour of some of the settings where the “heroes” and “pioneers” of
mindfulness are at work, Ryan describes how their efforts are
transforming lives. He visits research laboratories to learn how stress
affects the brain and body, and finds that meditation can bring our
nervous systems into balance. He explores its impact on health, by
reducing inflammation and a range of stress-related illness, and sees
huge possibilities for easing the strain on the American health care
system. He attends schools where the practice and brain science of
mindfulness is taught to first-graders (as well as their teachers), and
reveals how “mindfitness” is being introduced to the Marines to help
them cope better with the intense stress of being deployed in hellish
war zones. He makes a strong and earnest plea for mindfulness as a way
to bring more compassion and community into economic and social life,
and to slow the rampant and unwitting destruction of our environment.
Ryan
identifies mindfulness as a key for letting go of unskillful habit
patterns, and rediscovering the wisdom and bravery that could help us
build a kinder, more resilient world. At its heart, his message is that
mindfulness is a simple and effective trainable skill, and there’s no
good reason for not realizing its potential to foster the values of
connectedness, caring, and courage that ought to define America. These
are values that Ryan himself models in risking such a stand from the
vulnerable position of public office. That this now seems possible for
an elected politician to do, without it being an act of career harakiri,
signals another milestone on meditation’s journey to respectability.
It’s
less surprising, perhaps, to find search engine giant Google ahead of
the game, having already planted mindfulness at the center of the
company’s people development scheme. The spur for this comes from
engineer-turned-executive (and now meditation teacher) Chade-Meng Tan,
whose official job title as Google’s “Jolly Good Fellow” seems only a
half-joke. Google is famous for its “20 percent time,” in which staff
are encouraged to spend up to a day a week on projects outside their
usual remit, as a way of enabling out-of-the-box creativity. Meng used
some of his 20 percent time to work up Search Inside Yourself, a
mindfulness-based emotional intelligence course.
Inspired
by the power of meditation, Meng’s not-so-small intention is to “create
the conditions for world peace,” first by developing and refining the
SIY curriculum internally at Google, and then offering it out to the
wider world with the Google stamp of approval. He’s reached readiness
for phase two, so here comes the training manual, Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Profits, Happiness (and World Peace).
With
Meng’s self-deprecating humor, a peppering of off-the-wall cartoons,
practices with names like “The Siberian North Railroad,” and tips on
topics such as “Being Effective and Loved At the Same Time,” “How Not To
Strangle Your Mother-In Law,” and “Mindful Emailing,” Search Inside Yourself makes for a ripping read.
But
don’t be fooled—the occasionally slapstick tone shouldn’t detract from
what is actually a first-rate (as well as fun) meditation training. The
practice sections are innovative, easy to navigate, and clear, and
they’re backed up by plenty of crunchy data for the rationally minded.
And whereas the “B word” doesn’t get mentioned in A Mindful Nation, Meng has no issue with combining traditional Buddhist presentations and practices (such as tonglen)
with twenty-first-century understandings of the brain, all served up
with the kind of irreverence, dynamism, and freshness you might expect
from one of Google’s early pioneers. It might be tempting to raise an
eyebrow at his unrepressed enthusiasm for changing the world, but given
that Meng has already played a role in engineering major habit shifts
among a large percentage of the planet’s population, who’s to say he
(and Google) can’t do it again?
Meng’s
model for the widespread adoption of meditation is physical exercise,
the health-inducing benefits of which were firmly established in the
twentieth century and now lie unquestioned. “I want to create a world
where meditation is widely treated like exercise for the mind,”
concludes Meng. In the company of eminent scientists such as Richard
Davidson, daring politicians like Tim Ryan, plus a little Google gold
dust, the fulfillment of that goal may not be so far away.
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